THOUGHTCRIME Ep. 79 — Real-Life Dire Wolves? Austin Metcalf and Karmelo Anthony?
Jack, Tyler, Andrew and Blake explore the week's biggest discussion threads, including: -Why are so many people rallying behind the suspected killer of Austin Metcalf, and was the slaying racial in nature? -Is it moral to genetically alter your kids? -Is the last Game of Thrones book EVER coming out? Watch ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Alright, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard for this week's edition of Thought Crime Thursday.
Charlie, of course, is out on assignment.
We know that he's on the campuses right now.
It's hard to lock in Charlie's schedule because he's spending so much time on the campuses talking to literally thousands and thousands of students all across the country as they come to him.
on these campuses, on these camps, camp, camp high, camp high, maybe we'll ask Blake about that one and try to, you know, try to deal with a lot of the leftist social conditioning that they're getting on these campuses.
But as, as it stands, we have assembled still a panel of thought criminals for you this evening.
So let's check it out.
I think we've got Blake.
What's up, Blake?
Howdy, Jack.
I'm doing great.
I think it'll just be campuses, but we can really lay it on.
Campuses. Campi.
Camp Pisces?
I like Camp Pisces.
Say whatever you want.
And then we've got Tyler there at home.
I think the only one of us in home base right now.
That's right.
We're in four different places, but I'm here.
I'm in the desert.
And, of course, we've got producer Andrew Colvette, AK-47.
Yep, not wearing a Dodger hat, although I do see that Tyler's wearing his...
What's that team called?
That irrelevant team?
The 500 team right now.
The 500 team?
Diamondbacks! You guys used to have some good teams.
Anyways. We got lots to cover today.
We had higher expectations for pitching this year.
But it's not working out.
The first story that this was one of those ones where it feels like it's almost kind of...
Taylor made for a thought crime type show because it's something where, you know, it doesn't necessarily fit into the normal news of the day, but it's this massive culture war issue that's going on throughout the country, and it's been roiling social media.
Not so much, I think, the case itself, this criminal case that happened down in Frisco, Texas.
But the aftermath to it has become this massive social media just explosion of interest and explosion of debate and controversy, but actually in some instances not so much debate and controversy and disinformation and misinformation and fake news.
And this is the case of the murder of, of course, teenage high school football star Austin Metcalf.
By his alleged assailant, we'll say alleged for legal purposes, Carmelo Anthony.
Now, what's the case?
If you haven't heard at this point, I think everyone really has.
He was murdered at a track meet.
There was an issue over a seat.
And Carmelo Anthony, who, by the way, admits this to police and police records, stabbed him in the heart, killing him almost instantly or very quickly at the track meet on the bleachers.
But what's gotten really, I think, everyone riled up so much is the fact that there are now two crowdfunds, and this is sort of emblematic of the social media age in which we live.
There are two crowdfunds now, one for legal defenses for Carmelo Anthony, and then one for the family of Austin Metcalf.
And it's almost like they're kind of competing to see who can raise or which sides can raise more money in the case.
The one on GoFundMe for Austin Metcalf, as we record this, has over $310,000, whereas the legal defense fund for Carmelo Anthony has $284,000.
So they both sit right around the $300,000 mark.
I guess we'll go to Blake first really quickly.
Blake, when you're looking at this case, let's talk about it from the facts perspective.
Carmelo Anthony, his supporters say that he was acting in self-defense.
Is there anything that you've seen, and I'm sorry to put you on the spot, I don't know if you've really dug into this case or not, I know you're on the tour with Charlie there, but is there anything that you've seen that would provide for this self-defense argument?
Well, a lot more details are going to come out on this, I have to imagine.
It is all very vague what took place.
It does seem to be a lot of rumors.
I think the most recent accounts for what happened, as they say, it was a they say it was a seating dispute.
I believe it was reported on Fox.
It seems that Carmelo was allegedly...
It was for a sporting event and he was where the other team was supposed to be, so it might have been that he was fraternizing before a match.
It might have been that he was causing mischief before a match.
Unclear. I haven't heard more details on that.
I think the reason they're saying self-defense...
I should have called for this because we actually do have the side on it.
Let's play real quick 2-2-1.
This is what Blake is talking about.
School track meet in Frisco, Texas.
They're trying to figure out how this guy even got a knife in there in the first place.
It happened in Frisco, just outside of Dallas.
Witnesses say Anthony was under the opposing team's tent and wouldn't leave when he was asked to.
That's when witnesses say Metcalf stepped in.
Anthony reportedly challenged him, saying, touch me and see what happens.
When Metcalf grabbed him, John, police say Anthony pulled out a black knife and stabbed him right in the chest.
According to reports, Metcalf died and his twin brother.
Okay, so yeah, that's pretty much what you had said before.
I had heard some other information about, you know, it was raining and, you know, it's a track meet.
If anyone who's run track, you know, they kind of set up those tents on the bleachers.
But, you know, each team, and there could be multiple teams there, multiple schools there at a track meet.
That's kind of how it works.
So, you know, each team will set up their tent for the bleachers.
We don't have the information exactly on whose team was supposed to be where or anything like this.
But what's really been crazy is I've also seen there's been a ton of misinformation that's spread.
People were even making like, I don't know if you guys have seen this, there have been fake Facebook posts that were made by the sheriffs talking.
They literally made a fake post.
From the Frisco Police, or, you know, the Sheriff's Department, saying that, oh, there was a fight, and there was a huge altercation, and someone, you know, and that Austin Metcalf, the white kid, had been attacking the black kid, and he was trying to throw him off the bleachers,
and that's why he responded, etc., etc.
And that was completely fake.
And actually, the Sheriff's Department had to even put out a statement to say, hey, this isn't a real post.
We have no information on this at all.
And the actual police report has nothing about that in there.
So I guess, yeah, Blake, I'll let you finish your point.
But it's just crazy to me to see that there are so many fake facts floating around about this.
Just like in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, by the way, there were fake facts floating everywhere.
And people aren't even sticking to actually try to figure out what happened.
Yeah, exactly.
And like we said, more will come out about this.
And so, you know, to get at why this is becoming a politically resonant topic, so you have a ton of money being raised in what seems to be superficially at least a pretty, like a nasty case that would not justify stabbing someone to death.
And it's like Carmelo Anthony has become I like the fact that GiveSendGo's position is,
it's a free platform, you can raise money for things, and of course...
People have the right to a criminal defense.
People have the right to donate to support someone's criminal defense.
I'm glad we had a place where we could do that for Kyle Rittenhouse.
I think that option should exist for people.
But the bigger picture, of course, is whether people have a right to donate to this or not, should they be donating to it?
And where this has become a cause for debate, as I'm sure you could elaborate on, Jack, or we can loop in Andrew and Tyler here, Creepily become a racially tinged thing that the idea is Carmelo Anthony is being railroaded or targeted in a racial manner that Austin Metcalf arguably deserved to be stabbed to death when there seems to be very little argument that that's the case.
And then competing with this is the fact that people are, you see this in a lot of cases where people are coming out and Let's get,
I want to get Andrew in on this.
Yeah, I mean, I actually haven't seen this clip yet.
I want to play it because I have so many thoughts, but I do want to see this.
2-2-1.
We didn't just play that one, did we?
2-2-1, touch me and see what happens.
Did we see that?
Yeah, yeah.
Maybe you did.
Now I'm remembering.
But I'm reading, according to the arrest affidavit, witnesses told police that Anthony warned Metcalf, so Carmelo Anthony warned Austin Metcalf, the white kid, not to touch him, and then he reached into his bag.
When Metcalf reportedly touched him, Anthony dared him to throw a punch.
One witness claimed that Metcalf then grabbed Anthony to get him to move, at which point Anthony allegedly pulled out the knife and stabbed him once in the chest before fleeing.
So their whole shtick here is that this was Carmelo Anthony acting in self-defense.
And you can see, and I think to Blake's point, why this is becoming politically charged and racially charged is because you've got...
Carmelo Anthony's defenders basically saying these were bullies, these white privileged jocks thought they could push around this black kid and he react to defend himself.
Carmelo Anthony was sitting under the wrong tent.
Not that that really matters, but you can understand that in high school kids are going to be like, hey, this isn't your school's tent.
Get into your own tent.
And then people posture, you know, you could see maybe a You know, a fight ensuing.
But the fact that this Carmelo Anthony kid so quickly reached for a knife and stabbed...
Austin Metcalf in the chest.
To me, to Blake's earlier point, there's zero explanation of why that was a rational or justifiable move in that moment other than a complete wild overreaction.
Now his family member, apparently Kevin Hayes is a relative of Carmelo Anthony, says it was self-defense and that he panicked after being allegedly jumped.
I've seen no indication that Austin Metcalf jumped him other than to try and grab, probably grab him and push him out of the tent.
Now, you could argue that that was the wrong thing to do.
But these kind of things happen all the time in high school.
And to say that it was somehow justifiable to stab him and that there's nearly $300,000 that has poured into his legal defense fund of people that seemingly agree is the part that troubles me so deeply.
To me, this has nothing to do with race.
I mean, it shouldn't.
It has to do with the fact that one kid overreacted and killed another kid.
Robbed him of his life and his future.
Over what?
Over what?
This is insane.
Yeah, over a seat.
Yeah, do we know how big the knife was?
Not that it matters that much.
I think it was a folding knife.
It was like a folding knife.
It's just so bizarre to me.
That the kid was carrying around a knife.
And they mentioned this in the clip, which is they don't know how it got in because most of these schools have detectors and stuff like that when you walk in now.
They have a bad check policy and all that stuff.
Unfortunately, for where we're at.
But yeah, just the immediate response to...
I mean, we've seen that situation play out so many times.
Andrew's point of if you're under the...
On the wrong side of the football field even, you know, there's always like fight.
We had fights break out after every football game at my school.
They would meet up at the Wendy's parking lot.
They would get into fist fights.
It was one team fighting the other.
You have this stuff happen all the time, like where kids are constantly just like, get off my turf type stuff.
We've seen it.
You've seen it happen at the mall.
You've seen it happen all the time.
So this sounds like, to me, the story that's been told sounds like a pretty standard high school confrontation.
And I don't think anyone would ever expect someone to pull out a weapon, especially at a track meet or a football game or something where there's probably maybe hundreds of people that are around.
I don't know how many people are there.
I don't think anyone would ever expect to have a knife pulled on them and get stabbed in the chest.
You know, and I think worst case scenario, you've heard about situations where someone's pulled out a weapon and kind of flaunted it and be like, oh yeah, back up.
And that would have been bad enough.
But the amount of psychopathic tendency that you have to have to have a weapon carried on you and at the moment of being challenged just to have the immediate reaction to stab somebody tells me that, number one, this kid has had been probably running in dangerous circles as it is.
And that he was willing to do that.
And that should point more to what we've seen coming out of some high schools of that gang mentality and that type of stuff that really isn't being handled because policing isn't being handled because nobody wants to do any of that, especially when race comes into the question.
Well, and they said this wasn't the first time that he'd had a knife incident at school, but actually that they knew he had brought knives in the past.
So when you're talking about like metal detectors and bag checks, it's like you'd think that, you know, student resource officer or whatever, school resource officer would kind of know like, oh, hey, that's the knife kid.
Well, and he said this to police.
He said, I'm not alleged.
I did it.
And stated that Metcalf had placed his hands on him after being told not to.
That, to me, is just thuggish.
I'm sorry, I'm just going to call it what it is.
That is somebody that has been idolizing gang culture, rap culture, thug culture, and it's like, big man, oh, nobody's going to mess with you, you touch me, I'm going to kill you.
As if that is somehow to be lauded and looked up to.
No, if you want to tell somebody that they're not allowed to put their hands on you, then use your fists.
Or not at all.
Sorry, you don't pull out a knife and stab a dude in the chest because he puts his hand on you when he asks you to leave.
This is insane.
And the fact that there is anybody, anybody supporting those actions is beyond the pale and really an indictment of some really sick, twisted narratives that are floating around this country.
Yeah, and I'll give a huge shout out to Andrew Branca, who does a YouTube show called The Law of Self-Defense, and he's got a book out about it.
And he goes through these things, and he talks about the basic elements that you would need to prove self-defense in many cases.
And he's, in fact, a lawyer, and he's consulted on a lot of cases like this.
And he points out that...
In any self-defense case, the first thing that you need is an imminent threat of deadly force.
So in this case, where is the imminent threat of deadly force or the use of deadly force?
The only imminent threat of deadly force comes from Carmelo Anthony, not from Austin Metcalf, because the police report doesn't say anything about people ganging up on him or jumping him.
And in fact, it points out that there, and I did read the police report, the entire thing that came out, there's...
Over a dozen witnesses, including the coaches of both teams, so people who are conceivably not biased against him.
And so this idea that people are making it up at all, no, it's very clear, it's very...
Obvious what happened.
This wasn't in some dark alleyway is what I'm trying to say.
It was done in full view of a number of people at this track meet.
So there's no imminent threat of self-defense.
But also, he even points out that saying the phrase, touch me and see what happens, it could be interpreted in some cases as a provocation.
And given the fact that it was a provocation, it's essentially, from a legal perspective, An invitation to mutual combat.
Like, he's basically egging him on to fight.
Well, if you provoke someone, then you don't get to turn around and say, oh, I was just defending myself against this person.
No, you provoke the encounter.
I'm not going to say that he provoked the fight just by sitting there, but by saying, you know, touch me and using language like that and see what happens, reaching into a bag, you know, from Metcalf's perspective, let's say he was around to make the...
the case that, you know, he could even say, I saw him getting a knife out and I was trying to prevent him from getting the knife out.
Right. So, no, not only is there no element of self-defense here, there's actually lots of arguments against it.
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I think you're 100% right.
We're messaging.
We're talking, we can go back and forth on self-defense argument, but the reason this is a national news story is not, you know, the finer points of self-defense law, because unfortunately, teenagers do kill each other in the United States with depressing regularity.
Two things are really...
Driving what makes this a topic.
And I think the first thing we should do is to set this up is we should play the dad's reaction.
So this is Austin Metcalf's father talking on television.
I think the clip that we want is 202.
Let's play that clip.
It's very unfortunate that this other child decided to make a bad choice that's going to affect him for the rest of his life.
I have compassion for every human being.
This is not, I wanna make this very clear.
This is not a race issue.
This is not a black and white issue.
I don't want someone stepping up on a soapbox trying to politicize this.
I don't appreciate some of the remarks I've seen online that people say there was this fight and they don't know.
They weren't there.
Now, what I will say is I would never question or criticize how a parent specifically chooses to respond.
To a tragic event, because I think it's understandable.
I think if you've experienced a huge personal loss, it would probably be traumatic and upsetting to have it be at the center of a national political discussion.
I am entirely sympathetic to that.
Nonetheless, it is a pattern that people have noticed that this occurs.
It's happened a lot in, for example, cases where illegal immigrants have killed people.
A lot of people remember Molly Tibbetts.
This would have been about, I want to say, seven or eight years ago.
She was a young woman tragically killed by an illegal immigrant in Iowa, and her father had this thing where, you know, actually, illegal immigrants are better than native Iowans, and we should not be angry
that...
that his daughter was was pointlessly murdered.
This sort of thing occurs with disturbing regularity and people are like, why?
Why is this a moral script that so many people feel driven towards adopting of, you know, we have to be clear anything that's happening.
There is no political angle to this.
Well, wait, wait, wait, though.
It's not just anything.
It's only in these cases, right?
If it's another case, like, say, I don't know, George Floyd.
That's all about race!
That's about race before anyone even says anything!
So it's like, it's like, it's this huge double standard that you're getting at, and I'll let you finish, but I want to say, it's not just any case, it's only when the victim is a white kid like this, or something like that, then it's, then it's, oh, don't talk about race,
or, you know, Molly Tibbetts, et cetera, it's all not about race, it's not about race, but if it's George Floyd, or any, you know, Trayvon Martin, et cetera, it's race from the very start, and nothing else is allowed to be talked about.
Sorry, go ahead.
Precisely. That's the thought crime aspect to it.
There are, unfortunately, a lot of teenagers who are accused of murder.
And a rational question to ask is, is Carmelo Anthony getting $300,000 in legal defense funds essentially because he killed a white kid?
And some people, I'm not going to question the motives of every single person who donates, but is the idea that some people...
Like the idea that he could stab a white kid to death and get away with it.
Kind of like there were people who wanted OJ to get away with it.
And there have been takes where people were like, this was getting revenge for Rodney King or for the LA riots generally.
Is that impulse manifesting itself?
You're saying people who donate?
Yes, yeah.
Some people who donated to this may be motivated by, they like the idea.
Could he get away with this?
They may genuinely believe he is innocent, but there may even be people out there who would say it doesn't matter if he is innocent, that we just want him to get away with it.
It's Luigi mentality.
Yeah, and that's kind of the Luigi Maggioni thing that we've been talking about for, you know, what, six months now or whatever.
Yeah, I just jinxed you in saying this is all Luigi mentality.
This is where the crippling effect of...
You know, societal decay, that's where we're at, is that it's just backwards, where you have people on the left who would rather see people they disagree with because they've been so mind-melted on DEI and everything that they sit through for,
you know, seven hours a day in class, hearing from, you know, preschool to where they're at, to now, you know, the true enemy is, you know...
just the person that doesn't look like them or and that's class warfare I mean this is class warfare stuff that is happening and that's who donates to
Well... I think it's very telling, though, and it's a generational thing, and I think, Jack, you would agree with me on this.
It's like, boomers especially were raised in a country with the civil rights era, and they wanted to see themselves as post-racial, and what happened is you had a bunch of whites, the country was essentially 90-85% white as they were growing up,
and they wanted to believe that it was post-racial, and I think It was true for Boomer Whites.
They had gotten to a point, and maybe they're Gen Xers.
I certainly know as a millennial when I was growing up, I kind of thought we were in a post-racial world.
That was what I was told.
But if you're of a certain age, you're a little older, that indoctrination runs so, so deep that I don't think you rush to that instantly.
this suicidal empathy, this indoctrination.
It's like, and you saw that from the father.
For me, this was the, this was the,
Again, I'm sympathetic to what Blake said.
It's like...
I don't want to judge him for the way he reacted to his son being murdered.
I cannot imagine the horror that that must be.
And so, like, I'm trying to extend some grace to the father in saying, like, listen, you're going to process this in your own way, and I don't ever want to know what that's like.
And so, you know, God bless you.
You have my sympathies.
But it's yet, I have to observe the fact that he reacted instantly and said, I don't want to make this about race, and I forgive him one day after.
It was the next day.
He had one day and he was already forgiving this kid and saying, you know, it's not about race.
Well, you don't know that it's not about race.
And I think it's very fascinating that he rushed to say that it's not about race when it very well could be about race.
Austin Metcalf could be dead today because Carmelo Anthony wanted to, you know, basically
I mean, I don't know that it's not.
But the point is, it's like you have the white father saying it's not about race because this thing has gone so, so deep into the subconscious of a certain subsection of America.
And then you've got younger Americans that have been like, well, listen, we were told it wasn't about race and it was post-racial.
And yet the world that we live in has become more racialized than ever.
So it's like we tried to live up to our end of the bargain.
Now, I know there's a big part of the country that doesn't agree with that, but I certainly grew up in an America where it felt like all the white kids were trying to be post-racial.
And it's like we didn't get reached out to on the other side.
The other side didn't live up to their end of the bargain.
And so now we've got to have these conversations again, and we've got to be honest about it.
And the younger you are, the more willing you are to be honest, in my opinion.
And I think it's telling that Austin Metcalfe's dad, of a certain age, so quickly went to that line that very...
Yeah, and you see it again and again, and it's become this sort of script.
And in fact, at humanevents.com, we've had pieces about how the DOJ actually had a unit where I believe that Pam Bondi is working to shut down this unit.
They call it the community relations services where they would go around.
No way.
Wow. The breaking point of the white guilt narrative.
And so what's the white guilt narrative?
And it goes back to this 1965 essay by James Baldwin that I think that we'd all recognize where it's, you know, he said that the white man's guilt is a, quote, curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hide,
unable to confront the realities of their history and talk about how this narrative of sort of white guilt then became the cornerstone of progressive ideology, DEI and all these things that we talk about that say that, you know, white privilege
is mainstream and these ideas of systemic racism.
But it also created a sort of cultural hierarchy of moral culpability where there's an idea that so being labeled a racist is currently the worst possible thing.
That you could be labeled as in your entire in the entire country.
It's in fact, it's so taboo.
Our whole country is basically, you know, really in sort of the post World War Two consensus and definitely in the civil rights era has been the it is the largest crime.
And something that when I was on Tucker, I talked about this, that I've always thought it was very fascinating.
Jeffrey Dahmer, of all people.
You know, I think it was like 16, was the 16, 17, up to like early 20s.
But in interviews that he gave later from prison, so he confesses to the police, and then in interviews that he later gave from prison or while locked up, he would implore people to Understand that he was in fact not a racist.
That he did not choose his victims.
He said it over and over.
That he didn't choose them because of the color of their skin.
Because he didn't want people to think Izzy was a racist.
So I just want everyone to understand that Jeffrey Dahmer, a guy who killed in some cases eight body parts of his victims, was willing to admit to murder.
Admit to cannibalism.
But he really wanted to make sure people didn't know he was a racist.
And obviously, you know, that's an extreme example, but I do think that it's something that discusses this social fabric of what's going on in our country, where it's like, even a guy like Jeffrey Dahmer, as depraved as he is, is still worried about breaking this social taboo,
when he's obviously done so many other horrible things.
And so, it's like we have this narrative that can't be broken, and even in a situation like this, we've just got this horrible human tragedy.
You know, a twin brother dying in his own brother's arms, that you still have people that want to hold to this narrative of, you know, well, you know, it's not really his fault because he's acting out based on the years of oppression that he's, which by the way,
if you go and look at, and people have showed pictures of Carmelo Anthony's house that he grew up in, he's got a bigger house than I do.
You know, his family does.
And they've got, you know, gorgeous, by the way, you know, gorgeous looking family, great cars.
Looks like he's very upper middle class, if not higher than that.
So, I mean, this is not someone who comes from, like, poverty or anything like this.
It's actually someone who comes from a very stable background, it seems like, and yet still was willing to be violent in this instance.
And so, obviously, you know, it's like our realities are not comporting with the things that we have been taught at school or taught by Hollywood.
Yeah, exactly though.
But Jack, I mean, let's play cut 229.
I think this is the day after.
This cut is from the day after his son is just unexpectedly, tragically murdered in cold blood.
229. I want to clarify something right off the start because I've already heard some rumors and gossip.
This was not a race thing.
This is not a political thing.
Please do not comment if you do not know what happened.
Try. Do not turn this into a racial thing.
Do not politicize this.
It's not.
This is a human being thing.
This person made a bad choice and it affected both his family and my family forever.
That's his dad?
Yeah, that's his dad.
His dad is playing it very cool.
I would be very...
I would say things a lot differently.
I would say...
I don't think that I could say...
Well, first of all, I wouldn't be doing media.
That's number one.
I wouldn't be doing media at all.
I mean, yeah, I don't even think I'm comfortable even saying how I would react if someone took one of my kids away.
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I wanted to highlight because we mentioned the Jeffrey Dahmer one and I wanted to give because I think this would be an update to a lot of people.
We gave a lot of focus to the when there was that shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, where the shooter appeared to be, you know, had pronouns of uncertain gender identity, and then they were never releasing the manifesto for ages, and it trailed off.
And recently they released a very lengthy police report on the shooting and what motivated it, and they basically did give the whole story on it.
And one of the things that was revealed in that report was that the shooter...
...had been planning a shooting for some time and had considered many different targets, and the shooter had been bullied and had been unhappy at her, I think it was her middle school.
But she didn't want to do a shooting there and instead targeted the Christian school she had attended where her best memories were because she believed she would be regarded as racist if she shot up her middle school and didn't want to distract from the real reasons for the shooting with misleading reporting about her motivations.
And this is not to say she should have shot up a different place.
That would be a deranged thing to say.
But it is...
I think a revealing look at American psychology, when you have absolutely psychopathic people still having this thought intrude on their thought process for how these things work.
There was another case I was reading about the other day, because Jack mentioned.
Oh, Blake, I'm sorry to interrupt, but some of the lines that she used will underscore your point here.
It's like, she says, yeah, so she says, Again, this is Audrey Hale, who thought that she was a boy.
But being white sucks, but being black is so cool.
Black people should rule.
White people should fall.
Every white person who lived and died, I hate you all.
And it should be noted, Audrey Hale is white, and she wrote about killing, kill all the white kids.
Kill all the white kids.
And she loathed America.
She wants to kill my own race, destroy all the white people who are teachers.
Just to put a button on that.
It was a really extraordinary language.
Tyler, you were saying something?
I was just saying, I just was looking at this thing.
I don't know if I can tell you exactly how I respond if my kid got killed in this situation.
It would be saying some of the things much more vibrantly than we said here, which is this is told like what Andrew said.
This is thug behavior.
I don't send my kids to public school for thug behavior.
And by the way, this is a good reason why everyone is pulling their kids out of public school.
They're pulling their kids out of cities, they're getting their family out of cities, and they're getting their kids out of public school.
And I know this isn't like an inner city place.
This is a very suburban location, but this has grown a lot.
This location...
Where this happened is a once suburban rural community that's turned into a more suburban urban area.
And that's what's happened to a lot of places.
and a lot of people are saying, I don't recognize my community anymore.
And this is what happens when you don't have a good handle on things, when you let things slide, when you let gangs like start to infiltrate, like we saw in Denver, we're seeing in Dallas, we're seeing in Phoenix, we're seeing Las Vegas, we're seeing all over California.
You let gang-like mob-like behavior happen.
And when you have lackadaisical leadership that's in schools and
I would call this out and say, this is...
This is thug stuff.
This is why our communities need to get cleaned up.
This is why I'm yanking my kids out of public school.
This is why I'm yanking my kids out of cities.
That's a normal conversation I think America needs to have in suburban America.
I honestly don't even like thinking about it.
It's so far beyond...
Everything would be off.
Just everything would be off.
But look, there is a problem.
There's a huge problem in this country.
The violence is getting absolutely out of control.
The interpersonal violence is getting completely out of control.
And there needs to be something fixed.
And I'm sorry, this demonization of young white males at every level of society needs to stop.
It just absolutely needs to stop.
Yeah, and I am thinking about it, Jack, because I've got a 15-year-old, which is crazy, and I go to his wrestling meets, and I see some aggressiveness all the time.
Obviously, it's wrestling, and you see kids getting into fights.
And sports, it's just normal.
It's part of it, but I've thought about before, what would I do if my kid was in one of those situations?
And I don't think making excuses for the situation helps.
I think it's, again, it's, you know, again, and my kid, for full disclosure, is in public school.
You know, that's the decision that we've made with his parents and between parents and him.
But it's like, you know, you have to be on guard and be thoughtful of this stuff because, again, you're losing.
Your community around you.
And that's why I think it's so important right now with what's going on.
Not just in the education spectrum, but we're talking about with the legals.
A lot of people are boohooing about ICE coming in and sending people home.
And they're even sending home kids and teenagers coming into high schools in some cases and pulling them out.
And it's like, this is the reason why.
I mean, you're losing everything around you.
And we cannot sit by and just let this stuff keep going on.
You just can't.
I hope there's a major reaction that happens in their community there and it's not just like, oh, well, you know, it's not anyone's fault because of their skin color or whatever, you know, how they were raised.
It's like, no, actually, how they were raised has everything to do with it.
How they're being taught and managed, you know, in the classroom has everything to do with it.
How they're being coached has everything to do with it.
Like, this is terrible stuff.
Life-altering stuff, and it shouldn't just be glossed over and ignored.
And again, I'm not trying to be critical of the dad.
Like you said, I probably wouldn't be going on TV, and if someone caught me outside my house, I would be going probably a little bit crazy, like what I'm saying right now, which is just like there's no excuse.
It's despicable.
It's disgusting.
And the school deserves a lot of responsibility for our community, deserves a lot of responsibility for this, and we've got to fix it.
But it's just crazy.
Now, one thing that I do want to say before we move topics here is that de-escalation, this is really a great example of why, and we're not justifying anything here, but what I'm saying is if you do find yourselves in one of those situations, it's always the best opportunity or the best option to take yourself and say,
take a step back and say, all right, guys.
you know this way is it really worth it over a seat right is it really worth going and paying that price overseeing i'm not saying that you know he thought that that would happen at all or was anywhere within his thinking but again De-escalation is always an option in these cases.
Like, hey, we're going to go get somebody if we have to, et cetera, et cetera, something like that.
Or, hey, this guy's threatening, you know, whatever it is, you do want to try de-escalation.
And I would say teaching that to people.
Now, if you find yourself in a threat, if you find yourself in a fight, someone actually is threatening you, of course, you got to do what you got to do.
But again, de-escalation, I think, is absolutely key.
And I've been in a number of situations where, and people have seen stuff where I've been, you know, outnumbered by, you know, hundreds of people and, you know, held my ground, but I did what I could to deescalate.
So I was able to get out of those situations.
questions.
What is our next topic?
We've got a bunch of topics up on this.
Yeah, we're going to pivot to something a little lighter here, Jack.
And that is Dire Wolves 208.
Let's start the segment with clip 208.
The howl of a dire wolf hasn't been heard on planet Earth for more than 10,000 years.
That's because the species is extinct.
Or was.
Colossal Biosciences is a Dallas-based company that's using genetic engineering to de-extinct long-gone species.
And this is the first time Colossal's dire wolf pups, who are now six months old, have been seen by the public.
That's wild.
That's the clip, and I think there's a photo of a certain famous celebrity type guy who was seen with the direwolves.
There we go!
George R.R. Martin himself.
Yeah, Blake, take it away.
This is the best thing.
The direwolf, so for those who don't know, a lot of people have watched Game of Thrones and they don't know, direwolves...
...are real, or rather were real.
They are a species of wolf that went extinct about 10,000 years ago, so they overlapped with people, but not, like, written history.
And kind of what makes a direwolf different from a normal...
They're not...
They're not as portrayed in Game of Thrones or in A Song of Ice and Fire where they're basically just really big wolves.
It's more like they're a more robust wolf.
I think they're wider.
They have a heavier skeleton.
So it would probably be a tougher wolf, but not necessarily a bigger one.
Now, what's fun about this, of course, is I think they've been extinct for 10,000 years.
I read my first George R. R. Martin novel in, I think, 2005.
And I was in high school then.
And, you know, 20 years have passed now.
And we literally have brought Dire Wolves back from the dead.
Allegedly. We can get into the details of that.
And he still hasn't written Winds of Winter.
And there's no evidence he ever will.
And I know Jack is going to have strong opinions on that.
Yeah, yeah.
For people who don't know my background, before politics, I kind of first got big on the internet for running this Game of Thrones blog called Angry GOT Fan.
And I was, you know, like...
Someone who's like from the perspective of a books reader.
It was like very sarcastic and very tongue-in-cheek.
But yeah, I was always hating on the HBO show because it wasn't true to the books.
And then it just kind of took off and just had a life of its own.
But yeah, so the very first scene in both the books and the show is the finding of the dire wolf pups in the north outside of Winterfell.
And like the main characters get there.
And so there's this, yeah, it's literally been, so the book series has not ended, is what Blake's talking about.
Because the first five books are out, but there's planned to be seven, at least as we know of.
Although the TV series, of course, ended and had this hugely controversial ending.
that the book series has not ended.
And in fact, no new books have been released in the series since the TV show started.
So the final book, book five of the series, came out in 2011.
So 14 years ago is when the last book actually came out.
And the next book, which...
And, you know, a lot of the fans and this has been something where, you know, HBO has been trying to kind of overcome this by releasing the prequel series, which isn't quite as popular as the original one.
I mean, when Game of Thrones first started, it was just this massive cultural force.
And, you know, that's definitely one of the things I would be like on deployment.
And tweeting about it.
And yeah, you just see, you know, thousands and thousands of people there live tweeting the show or, you know, arguing about it and arguing about things.
And, you know, then of course we had like the SJWs came in and I sort of experienced like a little bit of, I think with the video game guys called Gamergate, you know, around about that same timeframe in 2014, 2015.
And then I took a brief sabbatical, brief break from that to go and make America great again.
So here I am.
But, you know, it's been this crazy thing where, yeah, you know, it was such a good series, and, you know, I think that what they did on the TV show, I'm just going to say it, I think what they did on the show totally poisoned the experience for a lot of people,
and it just killed what could have been this massive fandom, but instead, you know, it just made a lot of people be like, oh, yeah, I don't like that anymore, and they kind of just walked away.
But now the Dire Wolves are back, so maybe there's...
Maybe there's some hope.
Maybe there's some hope for the winds of winter.
I was reading this whole thing about how this is not actually bringing the dire wolf back.
This is a genetically edited gray wolf.
This is all a lie.
Oh yeah, yeah.
This is massively fake news.
We should clarify on that.
First off, because I was really into this, I was like, oh wow, this is cool.
And everybody was talking about all the things that they were going to bring back.
We literally can bring nothing back.
They just genetically edited a gray wolf upon further research.
And it's the easiest thing to edit because designer dogs, you know how there's all these different breeds of dogs and everything else?
Dogs are...
Canines are actually really easy to manipulate their genetic code here.
Apparently, this is just a really massive step in genetic editing on stuff.
They don't know how long they're going to live.
They're not going to breed them or anything like that.
I just wanted to throw that in there.
There's always that question if they can mate for themselves.
Producer Foz is saying it's like IVF for extinct animals.
Yeah, so I want to explain more of it, because this is real science that's coming that people should be aware of.
Because what they did is, really what they did is they took existing wolves, I think, I'm not sure if it was a timber wolf or a gray wolf, and they just added, they manipulated a few traits of it to take it in a dire wolf direction.
And then they're hyping it as they brought the dire wolf back because they're a Texas startup that wants lots of attention on themselves because biological sciences.
But it does raise the possibility we are headed in the direction of being able to do this more and more.
The thing they used to do this is called CRISPR, and it's basically a science we have that allows for gene editing.
And what is coming eventually is CRISPR-edited technology.
So you can take a baby that is in utero and edit its genes to potentially change its eye color.
On the positive end, you could manipulate its genes to take away some otherwise fatal or harmful genetic abnormality.
But obviously you'll also have it on the other end.
Could we be using CRISPR to make sure people come out with an IQ of 120 or 140 or 190?
We could make sure they're 6 feet tall or 7 feet tall or 10 feet tall.
Who knows?
All of this is coming down the pipe and it's interesting how the spin of we're bringing back an animal you thought was fictional is just sort of the...
...leading edge of what will actually be an enormous social and scientific issue in the years to come.
And I think there was a lot more attention on it before AI came and suddenly took over all of our ominous future technology vibes, but the future is coming very aggressively.
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Yeah, this is Gattaca.
There's a ton of Michael Crichton where he gets into this.
Not just Jurassic Park, but other books as well that do specifically get into gene editing.
The fact that there's no laws on this whatsoever.
It's also, interestingly enough, it's going to play a role in insurance rates.
Right. Because, you know, people will be able to, you know, the company will say, well, hey, we want your DNA sequence.
And then they're going to say, oh, well, you have a, you know, you have a propensity for this, propensity for this, propensity for this.
And so your insurance is going to be a lot higher for a number of different things.
But on the flip side, too, just with gene sequencing, not necessarily gene editing, you potentially can actually get like tailor made health care, like your health care could actually get.
Really better because of this.
And even I've seen some writing about, you know, people talking about the idea that you could get specifically made synthesized medicine that's made specifically for you because they know it's exactly something that can work with your, you know,
work with your genotype and to say like, OK, this is exactly what you need.
But if you give it to somebody else, like it might not even have any effect at all or it might kill them, you know, which is you're not supposed to be giving your medicine to other people anyway.
But it's.
There's all sorts of implications for this.
But yeah, obviously the scariest one is, do we get into Gattaca?
Are we going down that road?
And we clearly are, by the way.
I was at the NATO conference in Austin last weekend, and this was like a huge controversy they were writing about because there were some speakers there who claimed that they have used a, so they use IVF, and they were
about a sort of process that they were using for screening the embryos that were created in their IVF process and screening for intelligence.
It wasn't like...
Editing, but it was like they were looking at the embryos and they were trying to figure out which ones would be the strongest or the smartest, etc.
And then they were selecting for those.
And so that's just for me as a Catholic, that's something I have a huge issue with, particularly when it comes to the destruction of the embryos.
But I don't know.
Andrew, you're out in California.
I'm sure you hear stories like that all the time.
I mean, my whole thing is why.
That's my whole thing.
I guess there's like, you know, it's in the human spirit to explore the unknown and to embark on things that haven't been done before.
But I'm like, you know, where we have wolves in Yellowstone, it's like, it's already a problem.
With the ranchers and things throughout Montana.
So it's like, I don't know.
Why do we need more wolves?
I blame George R.R. Martin for this fascination in the first place.
I'm sort of relieved to know that it's not a pure dire wolf.
I don't know.
That seems scary to me.
They died out for a reason.
I don't know.
I don't have a whole lot of opinions about this.
Wait, wait.
Can we use them for border security?
Then that would be a good why.
That would be a good why.
That fulfills my why.
Maybe some saber-toothed tigers.
Get some of those back.
Put them down on the border.
A couple of those giant sloths.
Blake, what are those?
It's kind of like it's a rhino, but it's the size of an elephant.
You know what I'm talking about?
I can't remember that one.
You know what I'm talking about, right?
Kind of.
I'm mixing it up with a creature that might only be in Star Wars.
The ancient megafauna I always think of is they have those giant ultra sloths that used to live in the Americas that are like the size of a grizzly bear.
I can't remember the name of it, but I think it might have just been like giant sloth or super sloth.
Didn't they have like hairy rhinos?
Oh, yeah.
No, there was definitely a giant.
I think you should call them giant rhinos.
No, there definitely were giant rhinos that were, like, bigger.
There was also short-faced bears, which are, like, twice the size of grizzly bears.
Paraceratherium. Paraceratherium.
Yeah, we're gonna go with giant rhinos.
So, it was the size of four African elephants.
Oh, yeah!
I want that right on the Rio Grande.
All this is reminding me of, like, visiting the tar pits in Los Angeles, and they have all the megafauna and all the...
No, that's where George R. R. Martin got the idea.
Oh, okay.
No, he's literally told the story that that's where he got the idea to do direwolves, because he was visiting the tar pits, and I guess, like you're saying, they have some display of the megafauna, the mega mammals, and he saw direwolves and was like, oh, this would make a cool thing.
He's literally talked about that.
Yeah, the tar pits are actually really cool.
That giant rhino was hairy.
Wow. It was a woolly rhino.
Yeah. Was it as hairy as Blake?
I want to...
Just so you guys know, Blake from the neck down is incredibly hairy.
It all just slunk through my head and then it just grows out further down.
Angela's got a very fun question.
Maybe Angela has a good question for us, which is would we be willing, would we consider it moral to Alter the genes of any children we're going to have.
What could the tiers of it be?
You could alter it.
Is it moral to alter it so they don't die of something?
If you know, 99% they'll die before age 5 of a degenerative genetic condition.
And then the next one, would you do it for stuff that is...
Not mandatory, but clearly advantageous in life.
So you can guarantee they'll have 10 higher IQ points.
Or you can guarantee they'll be taller if they're a guy.
And then purely aesthetic things, like give it so they have green eyes or red hair, which they otherwise would not.
I think a lot of us would agree it would probably be unethical to, for example...
Create ten embryos and then throw nine of them away to pick one?
But is it ethical to just literally edit one child where if they already exist, they won't die, but you just modify their traits?
Is that ethical or not?
So, I mean, this is Gattaca, right?
This is the Gattaca question, is what kind of a world does that create when everyone's doing that?
You're essentially creating this idea that, you know, you're playing God.
You're playing God with society.
You're playing God with your own children.
And yeah, of course people are going to say like, well, I don't want my kid to have this genetic disease.
I want my kid to have this.
But eventually, down the line, what you will do is you'll create a society where basically you have like, and this is what they depict in Gattaca, they call them the valids and the invalids, where there's this two-tier system of social classes.
Where one are the genetically modified people and then the rest, they call them like love babies.
And you're the invalid.
So you're not valid.
You're not valid to have certain jobs.
You do the menial labor.
Gore Vidal is there.
It's a very interesting movie.
And so it becomes a problem, I think, for society because what you're doing is you're taking away that essential human condition to say that people can naturally be stronger, people can naturally be better,
people can actually have that talent, and that there is something that you're tapping into that's ultimately bigger than just the sum of your genes.
Well, and I just want to point out, too, the effects of...
Current CRISPR outcomes is that there are tons of mutations that are awful.
I mean, they have recorded.
This is part of the reason why most of Christendom opposes stem cell research is because of the outcomes that are there and how it does cause.
There is a bunch of throwaway.
Yeah, outcomes that come from it.
But to your point, let's say that there was none of those that existed.
I still think that like exactly what what Jack is saying is that you like part of the beauty of the procreation is that you don't have control over the outcomes.
And this is this goes to where, you know, some of the arguments are made from the pro-life community is that you.
Take the outcomes that exist and you work with that because that's what God has given you.
So I think that that's, you know, you start getting into that.
Obviously, there's things that haven't.
Plus, I mean, we saw what happened in the Clone Wars and Star Wars, right?
So, you know, we just, yeah.
I mean, if there's another Blake walking around, I mean.
Truly, if we start getting into slightly better-looking versions of all of us out there, we're definitely going to fall to the bottom of the barrel.
Since we're specifically on the topic of dire wolves, I think we have to engage with a particularly horrifying kind of genetic engineering, which could be possible, which is, what if...
The furries become capable of creating actual humanoid furry creatures.
I think, because one, they'll definitely want to do this.
Two, it's not well known, but furries often work in tech.
They're an oddly well-funded, gross, creepy hobby.
So they will have the money, and soon they will have the technology.
They may unleash horrors beyond our comprehension.
That's weird.
I actually got an Uber ride when I was in Florida from a furry.
Whoa! What?
This should have been our lead topic.
This was months ago.
I was in the car.
You've been sitting on it for months?
There was a whole bunch of weird stuff that happened in this interaction.
It was a furry...
What city is it?
What part of Florida?
This is Miami, right?
No, this is in Palm Beach.
West Palm Beach.
Yeah, that makes sense.
West Palm Beach.
Miami culture is spreading.
It's spreading.
Yeah, I mean, candidly, I was there for, you know, official business.
And so we were close to the winter White House.
And they picked me up in a Tesla Model 3. So, it was a Tesla.
This person was not a Trump fan, but they voted for Trump because, I don't know, they just, anyway.
And this person was apparently sort of ambiguous gender stuff and had a boyfriend, but I think was actually technically a girl, but didn't identify as one.
It was lots of strange things going on.
Wait, wait, wait, Andrew.
No, you have to explain.
What costume were they in?
Were they a wolf?
Yeah, they had like a...
It's not a costume.
They had kind of like a nose, like a fox or something.
And then they had kind of like a raccoon tail.
I don't think it was a fox tail.
I'm not even kidding.
It was a hole.
Like a mismatch.
Yeah, they had ears.
You know?
True story.
My only actual interaction I've ever had.
Did they have like anime stickers all over the car?
You run into that sometimes.
It was.
They had it over the dashboard.
Something was hanging from the rear view mirror.
And I just was like, I was sitting there going, so, how long have you known this?
And it was just basically, this feels more real to me than not wearing this costume.
Like, okay.
Very nice person.
That guy is so excited for CRISPR.
That guy saw this news story and actually I don't want to say more about how that person reacted to this news story because I'll get in trouble.
But that's what's coming.
There are a lot of people who are going to be way into that.
It's very upsetting.
We have to prepare ourselves.
We may need to prepare in advance, maybe announce.
Like, if we pull off the Greenland thing, we could say there will be a safe part of Greenland and it can be the colony for all of the furry people.
And you can make them, you can exist, but they have to go into exile.
We have to have a parallel society.
They'll be warm, they have fur.
The falony.
No, you can't.
That's a horrible idea.
Tyler, where are you looking?
Where are you looking?
Greenland only has...
Sorry, I keep looking at the big screen because I'm not used to this seat.
Greenland only has, like, 50,000 people in it.
We can't, like, have, like, 10% of the culture be furries.
We can't have it, like, be 20%.
Are you saying the furries would take over Greenland?
Immediately! They would, like...
No, you have to...
The furries belong in, you know, somewhere where we're never gonna win again.
You know, deep...
Yeah, deep in L.A., deep in New York City, wherever, right?
Well, Andrew just said this one voted for Trump, so maybe Scott Pressler can go and register some furries.
We did not win the furry vote.
We do not need to win the furry vote.
You know, just saying.
Maybe we could get a point, like a turning point action.
Maybe. This was a Florida furry.
They're the exception.
Low propensity voter.
Turning point fur.
What would we call it?
Turning point fur?
Maybe furball point action?
You're not winning the furry vote, all right, Jack?
That is taking your eye off the ball.
No, it's not winning the vote.
It's about the low propensity.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Where's Mr. Low Propensity Voters?
You target and you get them out.
What if Charlie has to go do an event?
What if Charlie has to do an event at a large furry convention because we determined that they're political swing voters and he has to speak at the...
No, we cannot.
But here's a funny story, though.
We've had, in the early Turning Point days, we used to hold our conferences at the cheapest time of year at some of the cheapest hotels.
And there was more than one occasion where we had some really interesting conventions happening like the week before or like simultaneous like right next door to us.
And one of them for one of our trainings was a furry convention was happening at the same hotel.
Did you go, Tyler?
Did you go to the furry convention?
from a distance and they were not can I say this this has been one of the weirder thought crimes and I dig it so they were not Charlie Charlie leaves for one week Tyler says they observed
Tyler says they observed it at a distance, and all I'm going to note is, like, five feet is a distance.
It was close.
They were just, like, in the next, you know, conference.
One foot, in fact, is a distance.
There was other ones, too.
One time there was a pole dancing convention happening right next door.
I'm not even kidding you.
This was, like, early, early on.
Early on, we were like, ugh.
It's terrible.
Not good.
So there were pole dancing furries.
No, not the same one.
Separate times.
Oh, oh.
Oh, thank you.
But there could have been furries there as well.
Yeah, probably.
I mean, whoa, that's okay.
I actually do think a lot of pole dancers are Trump supporters.
I don't think the furries are on our side.
I think there's actually a lot of...
I view the furry culture the same way on Reddit when I read Disney adult stuff and things like that.
We're not winning that vote.
What do you read on Reddit?
What do you read on Reddit, Tyler?
I made the mistake of following Disneyland or something on Reddit when we went to Disneyland a few years ago.
And I've got sucked in because it's all just like the most beta male and all the Disney adult type language.
Oh, it's a religion.
It's a full religion.
It is like a slow train wreck to watch.
It's like the most horrifying thing.
But speaking of which, we have to We have to know why Mormons, specifically Utah Mormons, love Disneyland so much.
We already talked about this.
It's Instagram.
It's all Instagram culture.
Instagram culture, plus it's cheap enough to direct it.
Of course, I like the last part of the episode, but I'm like, Instagram brain is so bad.
It's so bad.
It's destroying so much in society.
We were not made for this.
We were not set up for this.
You know, and TikTok culture is like right on top of that.
But Instagram brain, yeah, it's a real thing.
It's so bad.
And it's like the difference between Instagram people and like, I think we're all kind of more like Twitter, text-based kind of people.
But Instagram brain is a real thing.
People really have it.
And yeah, I don't have a full theory of Instagram brain yet, but I think we all kind of know what it is.
And it's losing its footing, too.
I think that's part of the reason why the election was won, was because a lot of people have kind of given up on all the fakeness of Instagram, so I think that was more at its peak ahead of 2020, which that's a whole other theory, but it's interesting.
All right.
Do we have anything else we want to hit?
No, I think that's a good point.
Let's end on Instagram brain and the fact that we won.
Well, that's a cliffhanger.
It's a cliffhanger of Instagram brain because I intend to bring this up.
By the way, so much more.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, I would just say there's one weird breaking news tie in, which is not usually what we do on Thoughtcrime.
But TikTok, the sale of TikTok has been shelved indefinitely.
Not even sure there will be a deal to be made with the Chinese because of the tariff announcement pausing with all the other countries and going up to 125 percent with China.
So the China trade war is putting the future of TikTok in some in some question.
Seize it.
Just seize it.
Seize the farmland.
Seize it.
Seize all of it.
Take it all.
Seize the app.
Seize the algo.
Seize the app.
Seize the app.
Seize the assets.
Seize the memes of production.
Alright, guys.
I think before we get into any more trouble, once again, Tyler's comments may have to be scrubbed from the record, but as always, go out there and...
But as always, go out there and commit more thought crimes.
