Cole Allen, the Caltech graduate who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, acted on a manifesto fueled by left-wing permission structures for violence. The host argues that figures like Hakeem Jeffries and Hassan Piker normalize extreme rhetoric, while QAnon conspiracies falsely label Trump a pedophile and traitor. Data indicates liberals are more likely to justify political violence than conservatives, creating a toxic environment where grief over Charlie Kirk's death is mocked rather than respected. Ultimately, this soul sickness stems from prioritizing feelings over truth, suggesting the attack reflects systemic ideological failures rather than isolated extremism. [Automatically generated summary]
On Saturday night, somebody tried to murder Donald Trump again for the third time in two years.
We'll talk about the security shortcomings that led a gun wielding maniac once again within audio distance of the President of the United States.
But today, we're really going to talk about something more the permission structures for violence that have been created by the left.
This stuff is not going to stop.
It's not going to stop because the left has decided to mainstream it.
You cannot hug Luigi Mangione and pretend you hate political violence.
You cannot celebrate.
And hug Hassan Piker and claim to oppose political violence.
You can't spread wild, evidence free conspiracy theories about the president of the United States, calling him a pedophile, the Antichrist, a child killer, Hitler, and then pretend that you're kind of shocked when someone picks up a gun and tries to kill him for the third time.
We'll get to all of it.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All right, so I'm going to start with the timeline according to the Wall Street Journal.
What exactly happened on Saturday night?
I came off of Sabbath.
And already this news had begun to break.
Basically, 8 p.m. Eastern, the White House Correspondents Association dinner had begun.
It began a little bit after 8.
And a lot of the cabinet was there.
The president of the United States was there.
The vice president was there.
The secretary of defense was there.
The White House press secretary, Catherine Caroline Levitt, was there.
First Lady Melania Trump was there.
They were all on the dais.
About 8 30 p.m., as guests were taking their first bites of their meals in the ballroom, Outside the ballroom in the lobby, it's kind of the lobby area.
It's not really kind of the main lobby.
A man runs right by a Secret Service checkpoint.
He sprints across, shooting as he goes.
Here is the security footage of the shooter.
It's kind of grainy.
You can see the Secret Service agents who are standing outside.
And then you see from the far left of the screen, you'll see a man charge through.
In just a moment, there he comes.
He charges through.
And he appears to take a shot at somebody, and then the Secret Service agents draw their weapons and begin firing back.
Well, moments after this happened, while this was happening, actually, guests inside the ballroom heard the shots.
The event host, mentalist Oz Perlman, has been a guest on the program, was entertaining Melania on stage.
The president was quickly pulled off the stage by law enforcement.
So was JD Vance.
So was Melania.
Obviously, here is some footage of how it went down in the actual ballroom.
You can see Oz Perlman, who is showing the president a card with some numbers on it.
Same thing with Melania.
Everybody's amazed by the trick.
And then you see everybody react.
You can see Melania immediately picks up on what's happening.
And people start realizing that that isn't a drop tray, that's more than one shot.
People start getting down under their tables.
And the president and Melania are rushed from the room.
Secret Service does a good job of getting them out of there.
Here's a better angle of the vice president and the president being evacuated.
You can see Vance is pulled from by Secret Service.
President Trump is similarly pulled off stage.
They first covered him up to make sure that he wasn't a target, as opposed to getting him up and running him out.
You can see from this particular angle, President Trump getting evacuated a little bit better.
Here he is in the center of the dais.
The shots go down.
You see people immediately start ducking, getting under.
Secret Service sort of stands in front of the president.
And you can see him pulled off the stage.
Journalists in the attendance, they were hiding under the tables.
Obviously, we had some journalists in attendance at this White House correspondence dinner, and people were immediately diving to the ground, getting under the tables.
Here's some of that footage as well.
Everybody getting down under the tables and all the rest.
A very good piece, The Free Press, by Barry Weiss, talking about the reaction of people in the room.
She points out that the natural reaction of the men was to immediately defend and protect the women, which, of course, is the right reaction.
Well, security and law enforcement responded inside the lobby.
Here is what that looked like.
So you can see there's security and law enforcement with guns drawn approaching the suspect.
Trying to clear the area right outside the ballroom.
And then, of course, you see armed members of law enforcement and military who are moving through the hallways to ensure that everything is clear.
We had Wired in Live that was going on live at this time, and we were able to cover this in real time.
Our reporter, our editor in chief, Brent Schur, over at Daily Wire News, he was able to report for us directly from the scene.
That's one of the reasons we need your subscriptions, to be able to report this kind of stuff and be there.
In real time.
So shortly before 9 p.m., the White House Correspondents Association president, a person named Wai Zha Zhang, appeared on stage to tell the crowd that the event would actually resume.
Trump wanted to resume the event.
At 9 17, President Trump went on Truth Social and he posted quite an evening in DC.
Secret Service and law enforcement did a fantastic job.
They acted quickly and bravely.
The shooter has been apprehended.
I have recommended that we let the show go on, but we'll be entirely guided by law enforcement.
They will make a decision shortly.
Regardless of that decision, the evening will be much different than planned and we'll just plain have to do it again.
President Trump.
And a few minutes later, the president of the White House Correspondents Association got on stage and announced the event was canceled.
About 10 30 p.m., the president posted a photo on social media of the alleged shooter face down on the hotel carpet.
The shooter, as we'll discuss in a moment, shirtless, face to the ground.
The president then put out another statement on Truth Social saying law enforcement has requested we leave the premises consistent with protocol, which we'll do immediately.
I'll be giving a press conference in 30 minutes from the White House press room.
And then at about 10 33, the president came out and did a news conference at the White House where he said that a man charged a security checkpoint armed with multiple weapons.
Here's the president on Saturday night.
Again, a lot of the members of the White House press pool were at the association.
So everybody's dressed in their Saturday night finest.
I mean, the president's in a tux.
Members of the press are in gowns and tuxes themselves.
Here's the president saying that we need to put political violence aside, obviously.
Okay, so the president also went on to joke that he was ready to rip into the press at the White House Correspondence Dinner, which is basically a comedy dinner, but he would have to save it.
Again, the dinner itself has been rescheduled for about a month from now.
Well, apparently, according to the New York Post, a White House Correspondence Dinner volunteer said the suspected gunman appeared to assemble a long weapon.
In a lightly monitored area near the terrace level entrance before opening fire and rushing toward the ballroom.
The witness described there was a makeshift room apparently near the entrance where bar carts were being stored and where there was no security at the time.
Apparently he was in the room.
He grabbed it out of a bag or something.
It turns out that the attacker was staying at the hotel, had basically known that the event was going to happen, got a room at the hotel.
That's how the weapons got into the hotel.
And as we'll discuss in a moment, when it comes to security, very light security in terms of people staying at the hotel or people who are entering through the lobby.
Security got a lot heavier around the actual ballroom, around the place where everybody was.
That's where you had the magnetometers, that's where you had all of the security.
The Washington Post apparently estimates, and they created an entire schematic, that the shooter sprinted 60 feet through security before officers fired on him from behind, at which point he fell face first at the top of the stairs.
Eyewitnesses originally thought that he'd been shot because he didn't move after he fell, but apparently he was not shot.
And this is a sort of rendering of the shooter's path through the hotel.
You can see him, you know, in this image, moving again toward these stairs, running through security.
And then he stopped at the top of the stairs.
According to the interim DC police chief, Jeffrey Carroll, apparently the shooter was carrying a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives.
Here is some video of the alleged shooter handcuffed on the ground with U.S. Secret Service.
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The big question, of course, whenever something like this occurs was what's the background of the shooter?
What was the shooter trying to do?
Because Not that every movement is responsible for every shooter.
Not that every ideology is responsible for every nut.
But we obviously have seen a wild uptick in violence.
That violence, political violence, is largely oriented at the right by the left or at the moderates by the left.
Not entirely, but largely.
And this appears to be yet another case of this.
So the shooter's name is Cole Allen.
Apparently, he graduated Caltech in 2017 with a 3.0 GPA and a BS in mechanical engineering.
And then he graduated.
Later, with a master's in computer science.
Apparently, he worked a few months for a 3D printing company.
He did some engineering, and then he did seven years of self employment as an indie game developer.
And he was a teacher in California as well.
Apparently, he was labeled a teacher of the month where he was teaching in California.
But what were his actual political views?
So, again, it is very likely whenever you see somebody try to commit an act of assassination that there's a screw loose.
That is very, very common.
Unless they're a member of an actual honest to God terror group, it is very, very common.
That these people are, are, something has broken in them.
Here is a video of the shooter.
This is some years ago at an engineering conference talking about engineering.
unidentified
Tala student Cole Allen developed a prototype for a wheelchair emergency brake.
The wheelchair brakes tend to lock the wheels, but don't actually lock the chair to the ground.
The idea with this is to prevent it from moving at all.
Recent aging into the Future conference held by St. Barnabas Senior Services and the Eisner Foundation offered a test run on products that have the potential to enrich the lives of seniors.
Now, again, seems like a normal engineering student.
Something probably went wrong.
Okay, but what we do know are the politics of the shooter.
So the shooter had a bunch of social media posts, and it is precisely what you would think.
First of all, he had a manifesto, which we'll get to in a minute, but you probably could have predicted his manifesto if you had seen his social media.
He was very active.
On a left wing version of X called Blue Sky, which is filled with nut jobs, filled with radicals.
So, on Blue Sky, for example, he had posted just a few days ago, he had reposted a person saying, Every single one of these effing charlatans would support the Antichrist himself if he spouted enough anti immigrants and anti trans bleep as he rode through town.
And then he tweeted himself, he put out a statement delete would, delete everything after himself, and add an S directly after support.
So, again, the idea is that the president is the Antichrist, essentially.
And that all these people support, all of his supporters support the Antichrist.
He also suggested on Blue Sky quote, from the Epstein files that have been released, it's public knowledge that he is likely is basically a sociopathic mob boss.
Like that's just literally who he is.
People got to stop treating him like someone who honors agreements.
He also called the president on Blue Sky a known traitor quote, we put a known traitor in office who explicitly ran on revenge, who effed up the COVID response with known connections to murderous effort in the Kremlin.
I'm mostly surprised by this administration's incompetence in fascism.
I was expecting actual fighting to have started much earlier.
Now, he did donate about 25 bucks to Kamala Harris back in October 2024.
So, again, this is a very, very left wing person, a left wing radical who believes deeply, apparently, in conspiracy theories involving the president.
Jeffrey Epstein is into the calling of the president the Antichrist.
You may notice some language similarities to lots of members of the Grievance Party, most left, some right.
Well, his manifesto, which was sent out 10 minutes before the attack, Is worth perusing because again, it shows the well, the stew of trash from which people can imbibe, and if they have a screw loose, may activate them to do violence.
So he starts by apologizing to his family, friends, students, and colleagues for lying to them about where he has been, as well as everyone who was abused and/or murdered before this, to all those who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure.
And he writes: Onto why I did any of this.
I am a citizen of the United States of America.
What my representatives do reflects on me, and I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.
Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I've had to do something about it.
Okay, so notice the language there pedophile, rapist, and traitor.
There is no evidence that the president is a pedophile or a rapist or a traitor.
The pedophile accusation comes from the extraordinary stupidity and venality of people claiming that the president is in fact engaged in a pedophilic cover up with regard to Jeffrey Epstein.
Again, that is a conspiracy theory promoted very widely on the left and fairly widely on the grievance party right.
The suggestion that he is a rapist, again, unevidenced.
The suggestion that he is a traitor, that of course is the kind of language that is frequently used by all sorts of people on the Democratic right and in the grievance, on the Democratic party left and on the grievance party right.
The shooter then went over his rules of engagement, which was basically to kill everyone except for Kash Patel.
He says, administration officials, not including Mr. Patel, they are targets prioritized from highest ranking to low.
Again, ask yourself why he was trying to leave out Patel.
And the answer is because if you are an Epstein conspiracy theorist, then you might think that Kash Patel is the person trying to uncover all the secrets about Epstein.
So the Epstein conspiracy theorizing has very real world consequences, just as Pizzagate had very real world consequences.
When you spread baseless trash about people trafficking in children, nutjobs might go and do something about it.
He then suggested Secret Service, their targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non lethally if possible.
AKA, I hope they're wearing body armor because sensor masks with shotguns messes up people who aren't.
And then he specified that hotel security, Capitol Police, National Guard, hotel employees, guests are not targets, if at all possible, unless they shoot at me, but that he would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary, on the basis that most people chose to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor again, that language and are thus complicit.
But I really hope it doesn't come to that.
He then goes through in this little manifesto, and you know, at least it's brief because it's incoherent.
He goes through a series of objections.
One, as a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.
Quote, Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed.
I'm not the person raped in a detention camp.
I'm not sure what he's talking about there.
I'm not the fisherman executed without trial.
I assume he is referring here to the suggestion that the president was authorizing the blowing up of fishermen, not Venezuelan drug dealers in the Caribbean.
I'm not a school kid blown up.
I assume that is a reference to the lie that the president authorized knowingly an attack on an Iranian girls' school, or a child starved, or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.
Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior.
I need whoever thinks this way to take a couple minutes and realize the world isn't about them.
Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on by because it would be inconvenient for people who aren't the victim?
This was the best timing and chance of success I could come up with.
Objection three, you didn't get them all.
Rebuttal.
Gotta start somewhere.
Objection four, as a half black, half white person, you shouldn't be the one doing this.
The United States of America are ruled by law, not by any one or several people.
Insofar as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.
And then he thanked his friends, family, students, and signed off cold force friendly federal assassin Allen.
And then apparently he added a PS, and this PS has to do with the security at the hotel, which again, this person has a screw loose, obviously.
But having a screw loose doesn't explain.
Why we are seeing increasing frequency of political violence in the United States and why that political violence seems largely relegated to the radical left.
So he has an entire postscript here that is dedicated to the idea that the secret service is incompetent.
Says, sorry, got a rant a bit here and drop the formal tone.
Like I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo.
What I got, who knows, maybe they're pranking me is nothing.
No damn security, not in transport, not in the hotel, not in the event.
Like the one thing I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance.
I walk in with multiple weapons.
Not a single person there considers the possibility I could be a threat.
By the way, sort of amusing side note amid a dark situation, for all the people who claim that law enforcement is racially profiling, I mean, clearly not.
So the security at the event is all outside, focused on protesters and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.
Like, this level of incompetence is insane.
I very sincerely hope it's corrected by the time this country actually gets competent leadership again.
Like, if I was an Iranian agent instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damned maddoos in here and no one would have noticed bleep.
Actually, insane.
Oh, and if anyone is curious how doing something like this feels, it's awful.
I want to throw up.
I want to cry for all the things I wanted to do and never will, for all the people whose trust this betrays.
I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done.
Can't really recommend it.
Stay in school, kids.
I mean, this person obviously is sad and pathetic.
But we need to talk about something broader than this person.
We need to talk about the things this person is saying because let us be very, very clear about this.
The permission structures for violence have been set up.
In just a second, we're going to get to the ideological environment that is creating all of this because it really is.
If you think of American politics as sort of a bubbling pot, the temperature is being steadily raised and then it's boiling over a lot more often.
We'll get into why.
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So let's talk about the factors, the common factors here first.
Ideologies and ideas that lead to violence share typically an evidence free conspiratorial view of the universe, in which shadowy forces of powerful people are responsible for all of your failures and shortcomings, and in which the things they say aren't arguments but actual facades for power.
So there's a group of people that are victimizing you, they're shadowy and they are nefarious, conspiratorial, and able to get away with true horrific crimes.
Second, ideologies and ideas that lead to violence share a belief.
That you, your group, people that you care about are being targeted for destruction by this shadowy cabal.
And if that's true, then number three, violence is actually a form of self defense.
So, just to take a couple of examples when Charlie Kirk was shot, it was pretty obvious right away, right away, that the ideology that was driving the shooting was a left wing radical trans ideology.
Because there's an ideology that says that if I argue a man is not a woman, that is a form of trans genocide, of trans erasure.
If you believe a shadowy group of people are trying to destroy you and kill you and your family, you're likely to justify violence in response.
And that is why somebody went and shot Charlie Kirk, because they believed in that bag of nonsense.
There's another ideology that is quite prominent in the United States, and it argues that President Trump is responsible for the collapse of America, not because his policies are things you disagree with, but actually involved in crimes, pedophilia, starving children, blowing kids up, and that if you don't stop him, no one will, that he tyrannically controls all aspects of media, that he tyrannically controls all aspects of government, and that the only answer is a form of violence.
Now, that's the same sort of ideology that leads to the shooting.
Of the United Healthcare CEO.
The idea, as Hassan Piker put it in an interview with the New York Times five days ago, that this United Healthcare CEO is engaged in social violence.
He was part of a predatory group of people who are literally killing people for profit.
And so you can understand why somebody might want to shoot him.
Well, we don't, but you can understand.
I mean, it's totally understandable.
That is a permission structure for violence.
That is a permission structure for violence.
So when it comes to President Trump, it is one thing to oppose his policies.
I've opposed many of President Trump's policies.
But ain't nobody shooting the president over his tariff policy.
It's another thing to say that he is a pedophile, that he is the Antichrist, that he is a child murderer, that he is Hitler.
These are not the same sorts of things.
These are not the same sorts of things.
And again, the sort of language that has been routine on the left, truly routine, is a permission structure for violence.
Representative Hakeem Jeffries, for example, he says that Republican policies do violence to the American people.
It's not just that Republican policies are wrong, they are malign.
They're designed to be malign.
And this sort of approach to politics has consequences.
The permission structure for violence for the congressional baseball shooting about a decade ago was the Bernie Sanders line that people who disagreed with him about Obamacare or nationalized health care want.
50,000 people to die, that they are literally killing grandma because of their policy, and they want grandma to die.
That sort of approach to politics is a dangerous approach to politics.
What politics is about in the United States is ironing out our differences, not always agreeing, but understanding that the person on the other side of the aisle doesn't want you or people like you to die.
They disagree with you.
That is not the same thing.
That is not the same thing.
And now, the most obvious iteration of the left's full scale embrace of violent.
Structures, permission structures for violence is the left's full scale embrace of Hassan Piker.
Again, just because it's the most obvious, because it's been happening so clearly and openly, and we've been talking about this for months at this point, but it came to its sort of apex last week when Hassan Piker was given the royal treatment by the New York Times to discuss why, in fact, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, even if Hassan Piker didn't want him to get, maybe soared a little bit, had it coming.
Here is Hassan Piker with Taylor Lorenz, who used to be a reporter for the Washington Post.
Talking about the somebody's got to do it meme about the assassination of President Trump a while back.
And you actually wrote about this, and it was a great video where you talked about, you know, someone has to do it.
See, when I say that, everyone knows exactly what I mean.
Which is, I think that shows that there is a lot of anger, a lot of resentment, and untapped potential, untapped revolutionary potential, as a matter of fact.
See, again, that's the permission structure for violence.
When people are pushing the somebody got to do it, somebody's got to kill Trump meme, when somebody pushes that, that is a potential for revolutionary activity.
That is not an immoral thing to do.
It is a potential to build a movement and fuel your movement with that sort of violent rhetoric and idea.
And again, here is Hassan Piker over and over and over and over endorsing violence, endorsing terrorism, endorsing murder.
Here he is over and over and over doing this.
And this guy is embraced by the Democratic mainstream.
You have people who are supposed moderates, like Ezra Klein, pushing Hassan Piker as a legit voice inside the Democratic Party.
You can't do this and then pretend you hate political violence.
As a mainstream political figure, he's the bro whisperer to the left.
They're fine with this.
Again, I don't have to play more, it's every time he talks, every time he does an interview.
I'm just using him as an example 1A of the left's embrace of this sort of stuff.
Now, the left is trying to then claim that actually political violence is mainly springing from the right.
So, Matt Walsh pointed out leftists have tried to kill the president three times now.
They killed Charlie.
They've shot up churches and Christian schools and rioted in the streets.
They're the party of terrorism.
Political violence comes from one side.
This led Mehdi Hassan, the Qatari mouthpiece, to then put out a statement.
Melissa Hortman was killed by a Trump supporter.
Melissa Hortman was a Minnesota state legislator who was shot by a person who, shall we say, had some strange melange of views.
He had been apparently appointed and then unappointed by Tim Walz to a particular political position.
He identified as a Trump supporter.
Okay, so he says the first person to allegedly take a shot at Trump was a registered Republican.
Okay, first of all, the idea that the Butler assassin was some sort of Right wing Trump lover is un evidenced, shall we say.
Every study, he says, shows more political violence from the right than the left.
But sure, other than that great tweet, totally factual and not cynical BS.
Okay, so you want to talk about cynical BS?
These studies that suggest that right wing political violence outnumbers left wing political violence, in order to achieve those false numbers, you have to say, as Wilfred Riley points out, that all killings by white prison gangs are racially motivated and therefore right wing.
But if minority gangs kill somebody who's white, that is not left wing.
As Wilfred points out, this is how you get the data.
The mere fact that probably 40% of all murders annually are committed by black members of organized gangs and organizations ought to call it into question.
Guy Benson over at Fox News has a non complete list of leftist political violence over the course of the last few years.
He points out the attempt to kill GOP Congress members, ending nearly in the death of Steve Scalise, the leftist who was arrested in an assassination plot to kill Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court Justice, the murder of Charlie Kirk.
He leftist who was arrested in an assassination plot against the White House budget director, Russ Vaught.
Three separate assassination attempts against the president.
A man who murdered the Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota.
That's the one that Mehdi Hassan is talking about.
As Guy points out, the suspect has some right wing beliefs, but was also a former Democratic appointee and said the Democratic governor told him to do it.
The man who set the Pennsylvania governor mansion ablaze that would be Josh Shapiro.
That person was a globalized the Intifada terrorism anti Semite fan.
And of course, you have the litany of trans shooters over the course of the last couple of years, including Tumblridge in Canada, the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis last August, Covenant School in Nashville.
There are good studies on this.
We don't have to speculate.
Network Contagion Research Institute actually did a study on the kinds of public support justifying, for example, the murder of Elon Musk or Donald Trump.
And what it found is that 38.5% of respondents overall said that murdering President Trump would be partially justified or more.
Of that 38.5%, 56% was left of center, only 20% was right of center.
How about justification for the murder of a political leader, just overall, not named, Democrats versus Republicans?
So on this chart, a score of one means political violence is never justified.
59% of Democrats and 71% of Republicans say political violence is never justified.
A score of two to seven, some violence is justified.
Okay, the chart shows that again, Democrats outnumber Republicans all the way through.
All the way through.
So if you believe that violence is justified in political life, you are significantly more likely to be a Democrat than you are to be a Republican.
And this is backed by other studies.
So, for example, YouGov poll.
Shows that younger, more liberal Americans disagree that political violence is never justified.
Okay, 72% of Americans say violence is never justified.
But 11% of Americans say violence can be justified, and 12% say they're not sure.
If you break that down by political ideology, what you find is that very liberal Americans, a quarter of them say that violence can be justified.
Only 55% say no.
Like a bare majority say that violence in politics can't be justified among very liberal people.
Among liberal people, 17% say violence can be justified, 68% say no.
Among conservatives, only 6% say political violence can be justified, compared to 83% who say no.
Okay, those are shocking numbers or should be shocking numbers to you.
Because what they find, again, is that if you are very liberal, you are four times as likely as if you are a conservative to say that violence can be justified in politics.
And by age, the numbers are bad as well.
People who are aged 18 to 29, almost 20% say that violence can be justified.
Ages 45 to 64, 8% say violence can be justified.
So, Again, the permission structures for violence that have been created here are skewing young.
One of the reasons they're skewing young is because everyone in the younger age group is extraordinarily online.
The online incentive structure to be passionate, to be crazy, the echo chamber that facilitates violent language.
Again, charged language tends to draw higher numbers, period.
This is always true.
Not every word is created equal.
When people curse, it goes directly to your limbic system.
Like it has a different effect on your brain than it does if I use the word trash versus if I use the word sh.
That has a different impact on your brain.
And the same thing is true.
If I use passionate language, if Hassan Piker says, cut their guts out, let them writhe on stage, that is a very different.
Appeal, then I disagree with that person, and I'll tell you why I think his policies are wrong.
And when it comes to the sort of virality that can be achieved online, the former will generally do better than the latter.
Because invocations of passion tend to hit harder, particularly in short clips when they're fed to you over and over and over and over.
So if you're 18 through 29 and you're just imbibing from that well over and over and over, and if mainstream political parties trying to channel that passion into votes start justifying that sort of stuff, you should not be surprised when political violence becomes more common.
And this is not just true in the United States, it's true everywhere.
Every violent radical revolution begins with young people.
It always begins with young people who start acting violently and speaking violently.
And then there is always a group of moderates who decide that they need to work with the young people, the young violent people, in order to use their rage and channel it toward political change.
And that's how political violence becomes incredibly common.
That's how street battles happen.
And we are playing with fire here as a society if we continue to pretend that all ideologies and permission structures are created the same.
They are not.
Conspiracism is bad.
It is not just bad in terms of utilitarian.
It is wrong.
It is evil.
Conspiracism, unbacked by evidence, generates violence.
It generates mental illness.
It generates stupidity.
And it wrecks our politics and our civilization as a whole.
That is why there's a difference between saying, I disagree with President Trump on tariffs, or I think what he did on January 6th is quite awful and wrong, and saying the president is a pedophile and a rapist and a traitor who should be destroyed because he's blowing up little girls.
It's the latter that's being humored by the Democratic Party these days.
I mean, right outside, literally right outside this event, there were Code Pink protesters who were holding up signs saying, Death to Tyrants.
I have no personal problem with Donald Trump at all.
I mean, I talk about the policies of this administration, the authoritarianism like we saw on display in Minneapolis, where two of our citizens were gunned down in the streets simply for exercising their First Amendment rights.
He put out a tweet saying, quote, Although we don't yet have the details about the motives behind last night's shooting at the White House Correspondence Dinner, it's incumbent upon all of us to reject the idea that violence has any place in our democracy.
Okay, well, again, Bernie Sanders did the same thing.
Five seconds ago, he was hanging out with Hassan Piker.
Barack Obama was hanging out with Zoran Momdani one second ago.
The same Zoran Momdani who was justifying the Holy Land Five.
You can't play this game.
And by the way, you want to know what kind of rhetoric?
I don't know.
If a shooter claims that the president is a pedophile, a rapist, and a traitor, Maybe the rhetoric that is helping to spur that would be people falsely calling him a pedophile, a rapist, and a traitor.
I'm just going to put that out there.
Like, say, for example, James Tallarico.
Remember, James Tallarico is supposed to be your kind, friendly, good hearted, liberal Christian neighbor.
I mean, here he is saying that Trump is at the middle of a secret pedophile ring.
They thought Donald Trump was the one to take down this secret pedophile ring.
When he is mentioned 38,000 times in the Epstein files, he flew repeatedly on Epstein's private jet and then lied about it.
He sent Epstein a happy birthday card with a picture of a naked woman talking about their quote, wonderful secret.
So the fact that QAnon thought that guy was going to take down the secret pedophile ring when he's right in the middle of it, I think was clearly wrong.
She's certainly allowed to say that the president is a serial pedophile rapist.
It also makes her a liar and kind of a terrible person.
You should not actually put out lies about other people, like full scale lies about other people that lead toward a conspiratorial view of that person, as you know, a person who rapes children, for example.
J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, going out there and saying that America is becoming Nazi Germany under Trump.
That's not even remotely true.
I'm over here being a little Jewish.
I'm pretty sure that the United States is not becoming Nazi Germany under Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, this party.
Is getting ready to elect to high office people who openly sympathize with Hamas and Hezbollah, the closest thing to Nazis on planet Earth these days.
You know, you shouldn't have to walk around with papers the way that they did in the early days of Nazi Germany to prove that you belong and that you're not one of them.
And that is essentially the kind of country that we're becoming.
Obviously, John Favreau, who is a speechwriter for Barack Obama, part of the PodSafe group, who five seconds ago was having Hassan Piker on his program and hugging him while he literally said that he supports Hamas like a thousand times over Israel, like an actual terrorist group.
Now he is saying that Trump is the problem.
Quote Are we really going to go through another cycle where MAGA folks point out incendiary rhetoric on the left without ever acknowledging that some of the most violent and incendiary rhetoric in America comes from the president and his supporters?
Do you not think the rest of the country has eyes and ears?
So, first of all, we should point out that were this an act of political violence by a right wing person against the left, obviously there would be conversations about the level of political rhetoric on the right.
This has happened before and will happen again.
He says it's truly awful that President Trump has been the target of political violence.
It's also truly awful how he's frequently talked about political opponents, accusing them of treason, amplifying calls for their execution, publicly celebrating their death, calling them scum, garbage, vermin, animals.
It was like three weeks ago he threatened the annihilation of an entire civilization.
First of all, that tweet about Iran.
No one thinks that he was threatening to nuke Iran.
That's silly.
But obviously, I think that what the president said about Rob Reiner was terrible, which would be the publicly celebrating their death kind of stuff.
That was terrible.
It was immoral and it was wrong.
The question is to the kind of permission structures for violence on the right.
There are some, they're not nearly as robust as the permission structures for violence on the left.
And I'm not going to listen to that crap from Jon Favreau, who a second ago was providing a sensual massage to Hassan Piker on his show as he waxed poetic about terrorist groups.
Well, the president of the United States was asked on 60 Minutes about the accusations, the pedophile, racist, traitor stuff in the manifesto.
So, again, he is right that these sorts of lies being told over and over and over are a problem, obviously, and people granting them legitimacy is also a problem.
Now, one of the ways that you can tell that an entire conspiratorial worldview has been spun out here is the fact that the number one trend on X, the minute this happened, was staged.
There's no evidence whatsoever this was staged, there's no evidence Butler was staged.
There's no evidence Charlie Kirk's murder was staged or manipulated by the widow or any of that crap.
Conspiratorial worldviews are disgusting.
They are not just fun and games.
They are disgusting because they are claiming things that are evidence free about other people that lead people to believe that they are part of some coterie of evil people manipulating behind the scenes.
The president was asked about the claims that this was staged.
Okay, he is, again, not wrong about this either, obviously.
But it doesn't matter, because again, there are people out there who will give credence to this.
Like Cenk Uygur, who is Hassan's uncle, and Hassan Piker is his nephew.
He put out a statement It's a sign of the times that as soon as you heard there was a shooting at the White House Correspondence Dinner, you heard speculation it might be staged.
We know they lie to cover up the crimes of the powerful.
We don't trust anything anymore.
Rightly so.
Where is the permission structure for violence right there?
We know they lie to cover up the crimes.
We don't trust anything they say.
So probably even though it's totally specious and bullshit, Probably we should pretend that actually it's fine what they're doing.
Rightly so.
We're right when we promote conspiracy theories about the people we hate.
We're right to do it because it's not our obligation to speak on behalf of truth.
It's our obligation to speak on behalf of the way people feel.
That's the most important thing.
People feel that there's something bad going on.
Therefore, it's not our obligation to tell the truth about what's actually happening.
See, and this is one of the reasons why, right, left, or center, I've been saying for literally years, decades at this point, The most important obligation that we in my industry have to you is to tell you the truth.
That is our most important obligation, not to justify your feelings, not to pretend that your feelings of being victimized are somehow justified by a conspiracy that we can't quite manage.
We have to follow the truth.
We have to follow the evidence.
Here, Cenk is saying precisely the opposite.
Nowhere in here does he say, by the way, it wasn't staged.
Nowhere in there, right?
He says, you heard speculation, it might be staged.
Well, why were people speculating?
Well, because people lie to you all the time and we don't trust anything, rightly so.
Yeah, at some point you might want to say, guys, it wasn't staged.
There's no evidence it was staged.
At some point you might want to do that.
But again, we have moved beyond the realm of facts into the realm of narrative.
Once you move from facts to narrative, it is very easy to move from narrative to conspiracism.
And of course, Anna Navarro said exactly the same thing.
Again, apparently conspiracy theories and nonsense are totally justified so long as you hate Trump enough.
It's odd to me that in a place that is teeming with Secret Service, with Washington, D.C. police, with all sorts of law enforcement, this could happen.
But also, I think people jump to that conclusion that it is staged because Trump lies.
That means it's all fine and it's all good because, after all, Trump is a very bad man.
And so, conspiracy theories are justified.
By the way, the crossover in the conspiracy community is very, very large between conspiracy theories.
Because if you believe one, you tend to believe a lot of them, which is why Erica Kirk, as this happened, she was taken out of the room.
She was crying because, I mean, I can't imagine why.
After your husband gets shot to death in front of the entire world, and then you're at another event and gunfire breaks out in the background during an assassination attempt, yeah, it might give you a little bit of a problem, might give you a little bit of PTSD there.
There were literally thousands of comments, thousands of comments from people suggesting that Erica was crying wrong.
One person put out a tweet, now liked 42,000 times and viewed almost a million times on X.
And X is just a cesspool.
Giving Erica Kirk assassination CPTSD is so funny, actually.
The torture of a widow.
I mean, well done, guys.
Well done.
Because the most important thing is the narrative forever.
Thousands of comments saying she was crying fake, that the way she looked in a particular direction meant something sinister.
We have brain rotted a large segment of an entire generation of the American public, and then we are surprised when political violence breaks out.
There is a soul sickness in the country, but that soul sickness does not start with President Trump.
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