Virginia Democrats propose Marxist-style legislation, including 11% ammunition taxes and gun licensing, while Hawaii's Supreme Court case attempts to restrict private property rights using discredited 1865 "black codes." The speaker condemns this historical dishonesty as a threat to the Second Amendment and warns of a "Barabbas trap," where crowds prioritize revolutionary symbols over justice. Ultimately, this blindness allows evil to infiltrate movements, trading liberty for license and risking societal collapse through blind rage rather than moral clarity. [Automatically generated summary]
Oh, on today's podcast, Virginia has gone full-fledged nuts.
They're going Marxist.
What does that mean?
And why the progressive income tax, which they're talking about, you know, raising more money with taxes again in Virginia.
Oh, and letting federal employees pay less.
Interesting.
Why that is so screwed up?
Why that constitutionally doesn't work?
Morally, it doesn't work.
Also, Hawaii has tried just the dumbest thing I've ever seen in an absurd gun case in the Supreme Court, arguing black codes to tell people they can't use their guns because that's what happened after the Civil War in the South.
And we should bring that back now for the Second Amendment.
It's nuts.
And a really important look at Minnesota and what is happening on the ground.
I have been wrestling with, I've seen this scene before.
I've seen the crowds in the street.
Where have I seen this before?
And I realized it's someplace I didn't expect to find the similarities that I did.
Really important on the crowd versus justice, all of that on today's podcast.
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The Quiet Lie About Dollars00:13:25
Now let's get to work.
You're listening to The Best of the Glenn Beck Program.
Okay, so the Democratic legislators are proposing major policy changes in Virginia.
And if you thought that Virginia or any of the Democrats are moderate, they are only getting worse.
And this should be remembered when it comes to the midterms.
Let me just give you a few things that they are proposing.
Taxes and economic policy is becoming full-fledged Marxist.
They are proposing new and expanded taxes.
What a surprise.
They have introduced bills now that will expand the sales tax space to include services like landscaping, gym memberships, vehicle repairs, food delivery, home repairs, raising the revenue beyond the traditional goods.
The progressive income tax brackets, they are now proposing creating new tax brackets, higher tax brackets, meaning people with taxable income over a certain threshold, they're saying 600,000, will pay higher rates than those with lower incomes.
This one I really love.
Federal employee tax.
The federal employee will get a tax break versus everybody else.
There are proposals now that will give special tax subtractions for retired federal employees and incentives for federal retirees, while you, who didn't ever work for the government, you'll see a broader tax increase.
What is the purpose of that tax?
Remember, you cut taxes on things you're trying to encourage.
What are they trying to encourage?
More people working for the federal government.
They're also trying to have a mandatory waiting period on gun purchases, a ban on leaving your gun unattended in your vehicle.
I don't ever, who leaves it?
I mean, I used to.
I grew up in Washington State.
We used to have a gun rack in the back of our truck and it would be in the back window and you'd have three rifles there and you'd pull up into school.
You'd leave your doors, your car doors or your truck doors unlocked and nobody would say anything.
It was not a problem.
But who's leaving it unattended in their vehicle?
I mean, unless it's locked in your trunk or locked in your glove box.
Also, a state firearm purchaser licensing system.
That sounds really good.
An 11% tax on ammunition and guns and civil liability for the gun industry participants for crimes committed using guns that they sold or built.
Oh, okay.
That's really good.
By the way, I can't wait to get into what they're doing in Hawaii on guns.
Wait until you hear this nonsense.
I've got a few things to say about that.
Also, they're trying to enact more DEI and ESG stuff.
And this one, I have to be really, really careful because they want to expand the racial bias and diversity training for professionals, nurses, nurses, real estate agents, and law enforcement.
Now, why does the real estate agent need diversity training?
Law enforcement and nurses.
Let me lay down the biggest warning I could possibly lay down, and I'm not going to dwell on it or spend time today on this.
The scariest people in Nazi Germany did not wear the black uniforms.
They wore the white coats.
They were the nurses and the doctors.
Do not train them in any of this DEI, any of this bullcrap.
It's very dangerous.
They want to change the curricula in school.
They're doing all kinds of stuff.
Okay.
But I want to concentrate here for just a second on taxes because there is a quiet lie, a quiet lie that we have accepted in America, that the same dollar that is earned by two different Americans is not the same dollar at all.
That if one man earns it after years of sacrifice and years of risk and failure and another one earns it with less risk, less responsibility, the first man's dollar is someone somehow or another less his own.
This is really dangerous because this is the moral foundation of the progressive income tax.
Not that government should be funded.
That's not in question.
But who is punished, punished for making that possible?
We're not talking about, you know, anything even.
You are punishing certain people.
Okay.
The progressive tax does something very, very dangerous.
It doesn't tax behavior.
It taxes outcomes, which you never, ever want to get into.
It doesn't ask, has this dollar been earned honestly?
It only asks, who earned this dollar?
Now, does that sound fair?
See, fairness always breaks down because of the stories we tell ourselves around it or the stories we've allowed others to construct around.
That's why the Constitution is common sense.
That's why progressivism breaks down once you really start thinking about it, because you can't follow the common sense.
It's not fair.
A progressive tax does not tax behavior.
It taxes the outcome.
Once you accept the principle that you don't care how honestly the dollar was earned, what you really care about is who earned it.
Once you accept that principle, equality under the law dies.
And this is why you start with the taxes.
Everything else follows from here.
You know, our founders understood this better than we understand it today because they lived under a system where the crown decided who could be squeezed and who could not be squeezed and how much to squeeze.
And they knew that once the states gained the power and they could gain the power to decide which citizens would owe more than the other citizen, that liberty would become conditional.
James Madison was all over this.
He warned against laws that would divide people and citizens into different classes.
By the way, James Madison was from Virginia.
Hello, Virginia.
Can you read your own founding principles?
Alexander Hamilton also cautioned against this.
He said, taxation can never become arbitrary.
So what they were saying at this point was they were not afraid of taxes.
They didn't fear taxes.
What they feared were unequal taxes because that's what they had come out of.
Okay.
And this is why our founders, this is why they avoided income tax altogether.
We didn't have an income tax.
The federal government was broke.
The federal government had to raise money through tariffs.
We didn't have an income tax up until 1913 because Americans knew this would become unfair because you're choosing who to tax, who to squeeze and not, and who not to squeeze.
Okay.
And when you have taxes indirect, uniform, and visible, then you have real equality.
But the moment the government claims a larger share of one man's labor than another man's labor, because that's time is money.
Look at your money as the time it took for you to earn that.
How many hours did it take you to earn that money?
That's what it means.
Time is money.
So how much time did it take?
So they're not taxing you the dollar.
They're taxing your time.
And once you can take somebody's time, somebody's labor, and take more of it from one guy than another, and not for what they did, but just for what they achieved, you're no longer dealing with justice.
Would it be just to say, I'm going to tax people who do poorly more than the people who do well?
Because the people who do well, let me make this argument just quickly.
If you do well, you're creating jobs.
You're better for the community.
You're leading us into prosperity.
But if you do poorly and you're not doing that, maybe it's because you're lazy.
Maybe because you're not working.
I don't know, whatever it is, because that's the argument.
On the other side with the progressives, they say it's because every rich person is greedy.
So let me just flip this over.
Would it be fair for me to say every poor person should be taxed because they're not creating enough?
They're not creating jobs and it's only because they're lazy.
Of course not.
You would never accept that.
So why do you accept the reverse?
Okay.
You've accepted the reverse in this country because we have been taught over and over and over again that you're not going to be able to make it.
You'll never be that person.
And all of those people over there, they're all so greedy.
Okay.
You then get to a point to where you're dealing with resentment, dressed up as policy.
Does that sound like anything that we're dealing with today?
Resentment.
Is there anything in our society that Marxists, Leninists, and progressives are shoving into your face?
Resentment?
That's why the progressive income tax goes hand in hand because that's what you're dealing with.
You're resenting the people who have made it and then teaching people you can't make it yourself.
So it's so corrosive because a progressive tax tells the most productive people, your success is tolerated, but we don't respect you.
Your effort is useful, but it's not fully yours.
It belongs to us.
It teaches everybody else something even worse, that the guy who makes more than you that lives down the street, he's not a full citizen.
He's not really one of you.
He is a funding source, but that's really all he is.
And that's how societies fracture.
That's how things fall apart.
And our founders knew this.
And it doesn't start with riots at furts.
It starts with ledgers.
Yes, the 16th Amendment does say that we can have a federal income tax.
That was the progressives back in the Woodrow Wilson years.
But it doesn't require Congress to abandon equal treatment.
Why do we allow this to happen?
A flat tax completely complies with the Constitution.
A consumption tax would honor it even more because it's not what you make.
It's what you buy.
It's what you consume.
But what the progressive tax violates is something deeper than a clause or an amendment.
It violates the understanding that law judges actions, not outcomes.
The law is supposed to look at actions, not outcomes.
It's supposed to be actions and not people.
The government is there to protect effort, not to take effort.
But every single progressive tax begins by targeting the rich.
Notice the new ones, they're going to go after the rich, the super rich, the 600,000 and above.
$600,000 a year.
That's a businessman.
That's not rich.
You know what rich is?
George frickin Soros.
But you'll notice those guys are never at the end.
They'll all talk a good game.
They were at Davos yesterday going, you know what?
You should tax us more.
It's not going to happen.
It's not going to happen because it never does because they'll find a way out of it.
And every single time you start to expand the income tax, it always expands downward.
And history is relentless on this point because once you accept that rights are proportional to income, there's no logical place to stop.
You know, we didn't fight a revolution so we could be free on a sliding scale.
They thought that citizen meant something, the same thing meant something, and it was the same thing for everybody.
So the question is not what the government costs.
The question is, who owns you, your time, and your labor, and whether success in America is still something that we look up to and say that should be earned.
Or is success in America something that should be really shamed?
And then if you give us enough money, we'll forgive you.
As a gun owner, I understand the importance of being prepared, but it is crucial to recognize that according to law enforcement statistics, 99% of all altercations do not require lethal force.
Who Owns Your Time and Labor00:12:04
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Now back to the podcast.
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
Welcome to the Glenn Beck program.
Have you been seeing what's happening in the Supreme Court?
I mean, something that is just nuts is happening in the Supreme Court right now.
And I guess the best way to explain it is I want you to imagine something for a second.
Imagine that you have just inherited an old family house, okay?
And the deed is really clear.
It's been in your family forever.
The property is clearly yours.
But then the city knocks on the door.
And all of a sudden, the city says, yeah, yeah, we saw that you just inherited this house.
Yeah, and here's the deed.
Yeah.
Well, but look, we just found this.
It's an old rule from 1787.
And boy, it was written in the city of a really dark time, really dark time back then.
And it was written for that dark time and really ugly reasons.
But it says you can't use some of the rooms in your house unless somebody gives you permission.
So you can't use part of your house.
You'd be like, wait, what?
Well, you know, it's part of our tradition.
You know, that restriction proves, you know, it's part of our tradition here in the city.
And you'd be like, wait, wait, that doesn't.
Wait, that rule was evil the day it was written.
And then the city would say, yeah, I know, shameful.
Wasn't it shameful?
But part of our history and tradition.
So you can't use, you know, that part of the house.
Now, as crazy as that sounds, that's what's happening right now at the Supreme Court.
Hawaii has passed a law saying gun owners can't carry on private property open to stores and restaurants and churches unless the owner explicitly allows it.
That means your constitutional right only exists if somebody else says yes.
And the judges are like, I'm sorry, how are you doing the math on this one?
And Hawaii steps up to the microphone and says, yeah, Your Honor.
Don't worry.
History supports us on this.
History supports us on this?
Yeah, we got history.
It's not the founders, not even early American practice.
But we found in 1865, Louisiana had a black code.
And it was a law written after the Civil War.
And what it was meant to do was to disarm newly freed black Americans so they couldn't defend themselves from mobs or the Klan or corrupt authorities.
Now, this is when Gorshitz stopped and said, black codes?
Really?
I mean, that's an outlier.
You know, you need to look at the mainstream of American history, not statutes that were unconstitutional the moment they were passed.
I mean, why are you relying on this?
And then he says the quiet part out loud.
People who normally recoil from black codes, you know, like garlic with a vampire, suddenly embrace them because it helps restrict guns.
He's like, why?
Then Justice Alito says, weren't these laws designed specifically to stop black Americans from defending themselves, to leave them at the mercy of the Klan and the racist law enforcement?
And then the hammer comes down.
Isn't it the height of irony to cite a law written to destroy the Second Amendment as proof of what the Second Amendment allows?
Kavanaugh then comes in, seals it up.
He reminds the court they've already rejected racist jury laws, even though they had history because history rooted in oppression cannot justify limiting constitutional rights.
We've always had oppression.
Yeah, but we're trying to be a more perfect nation and not have oppression.
Okay.
Exceptions must be deeply rooted, broadly accepted, widely recognized, not isolated, not shameful, and certainly not born in black codes.
But the case isn't really about guns.
And that's what I think everybody who is analyzing this case is missing.
It is not about guns.
It's about whether your rights exist before government or only after permission is granted.
Hawaii says your right exists if someone else allows it.
The Constitution says, no, no, your rights exist because you exist and you're free.
And the court's being asked to answer the question, do we define American liberty by its highest principles or by its darkest moments?
And once you use poison history to limit rights, rights stop being rights, okay?
They become permission.
And permissions can always be revoked.
And this is what Hawaii is arguing right now.
Their argument boils down to this.
A thing existed in history, therefore it can define our tradition.
But, I mean, are we really, are we really down to these are the lawyers that are the smartest to argue in front of the court?
I mean, this seems to me to be like a four-year-old argument, you know?
And not, I don't mean like something that people have been thinking about for the last four years.
I mean an argument made by a four-year-old.
That's not how constitutional law works.
That's not how morality works.
It's not how history, it's not how anything works.
If that logic were accepted, then couldn't I say slavery is really a deeply rooted American tradition?
I mean, we had slavery in here for a long time.
Slavery existed, you know, at the founding.
It existed for generations.
It was written into state law.
It's in the Bible.
It was accepted in large parts of the country and all over the world for centuries.
So why don't we make that case?
Hawaii.
The entire constitutional project after the Civil War was built on a single radical idea.
Some things existed, but they were always wrong.
The 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments were not adjustments to tradition.
They were repudiations of centuries of tradition.
The court here is not asking, you know, can we find any historic example?
It's asking, was this restriction part of the legitimate mainstream understanding of the right?
And that's what Gorsuch keeps, you know, repeating.
You know, that's why Alito is talking about the purpose.
That's why Kavanaugh says deep and broad and commonly recognized tradition.
A law passed, it was to disarm free slaves, to empower radical terror groups, and to nullify a constitutional right.
And it can't suddenly now be used as proof of what rights allow.
Okay?
That's not legal reasoning at all.
That's, let me be kind.
That's historical cherry picking.
And the slave thing is precise.
If Hawaii's theory were valid, then I could stand up in court and say slavery was part of tradition for nearly a century.
It deserves weight in constitutional interpretation.
And do you think anyone in their right mind would not laugh you out of the room?
And rightly so?
Of course they would, because history is filtered through moral and constitutional judgment.
The Constitution is to correct those things that man has done for a very long time that were immoral and say, no, that violates human rights, the things you were born with.
We don't treat lynching and literacy tests and poll taxes or slave patrols as tradition.
That's shameful.
We treat those things as evidence of betrayal of our own principles.
And the black codes fall into the same category.
And it's so dishonest because they know that.
Nobody on the left is arguing for black codes and saying, you know what?
It's part of our tradition.
And I think we should bring this back.
No, they're arguing for slave codes because it accomplishes what they want.
And it's not just about guns.
It's about all rights need permission.
I mean, this is the most intellectually unserious argument I have ever heard in the Supreme Court.
Okay.
It mistakes what happens, what happened for what was right, principle or power for principle, oppression as tradition.
And that's why I think the judges sounded yesterday, I don't know, little offended.
Not because the argument is clever, but because it's so dangerously shallow.
Is this really the best we can do?
Honestly, Hawaii, you should be ashamed of yourself that you send people over with this argument.
If you allow evil to define tradition simply because it existed, then no right is safe.
No injustice will ever truly be condemned.
It'll be used.
And that's the line they're drawing.
And that's the only line that makes sense.
Draw that line.
Nope.
Nope.
Just because it happened in the past, if it was evil, it doesn't mean it's part of our tradition.
It means it's something we conquered.
The left just, I mean, it is amazing to me how the left just doesn't seem to have any universal principles.
Like, I would never use this.
Never use this because it would violate my principles.
It would be like, no, we're against that.
We're against those things.
But the left's understanding of winning, it is the most important thing.
I mean, they hate Donald Trump because the most important thing to him is winning.
And yet the ends justify the means with the left.
They will use black codes to not just take out guns, but also to say your rights must receive permission to exercise them.
That is just some of the most evil, stupid at the kindest level, but some of the most evil reasoning I've ever heard.
And I can't believe that that argument ever advanced to the Supreme Court.
I mean, we are in real trouble.
If that's what our best law firms are churning out and saying, you know what?
You should go to the Supreme Court and make that argument because I think you might win.
If that's the best you can do, holy cow, Hawaii, you should talk to that congressman that thinks that islands can capsize because he's got a boatload of stuff to sell you.
Do we have an update, Ricky, on the pilot situation?
We had somebody call in a little while ago from California.
Blindness Turns Movements Into Machines00:15:28
Yeah, I got something for you.
Go ahead.
Thanks to my good friend Matt Couright, one of our researchers working on the Insider program with Jason Buttrell, we found that it is, in fact, a mostly true story.
Breitbart covered this, but their original source documents for it were from Peter Schweitzer.
He referenced it and research in his new book where that became a bestseller.
What is happening?
What's happening is we are training a bunch of Chinese pilots in Atwater, California.
It is a majority Chinese nationals.
According to a caller who called in after that first caller, they say it's like Cessnas, not military jets.
So I don't know if that comforts you at any level, that it's just Cessnas we're training them on.
Oh, yeah, that makes me feel much more comfortable because, I mean, we've never had anything where individuals came up and trained in small little planes and then did anything with those planes that nobody could imagine.
That's never happened before.
So I'm perfectly comfortable with that.
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
So let me just give you a couple of things.
Nakima Armstrong, she is one of the people I believe that Pam Bondi arrested today.
She is one of the activists that was storming the church the other day.
She apparently took home over a million dollars from the anti-poverty nonprofit that she led.
Wow.
And I got to get into these anti-poverty, you know, I'm helping the poor people things because, wow, you can make a lot of money, apparently, in that, a lot of money in that.
Meanwhile, the NGOs, left-wing NGOs, are planning an economic blackout across Minnesota.
And what they're doing is the Democratic Party has aligned with dark money NGOs.
We've known that left-wing militia groups and anti-Trump labor unions.
And one of the big labor unions in Minnesota is not just the teachers' union, but the nurses union.
And the nurses union is saying that you need to go out on a general strike and you need to get involved in this because, quote, it's time to suspend the normal order of business and demand immediate cessation of ICE actions in Minnesota, accountability for federal agents who have caused the loss of life and abuse to Minnesota residents and call for Congress to immediately intervene.
And, you know, I was thinking about all this yesterday, last night, and talking to a friend of mine, and I'm like, I've seen this before.
What is this?
What is this?
It's delusional, right?
Nobody is talking about the crimes that have been committed.
Now, let's just be fair and say, okay, ICE committed a crime.
I don't believe they did, but let's just say.
But that doesn't mean you excuse everything else.
There's no logic in any of this, okay?
So, where have I seen this before?
Where have I seen this scene?
And then I remembered.
Then it became very, very clear.
Ah, there were two guys that were offered to a crowd, okay?
And the governor said, hey, one of these guys, I'm going to let go.
And one of them was Jesus, right?
Innocent, unarmed, a teacher, not an enemy to Rome, but anybody who opposed the will of God, he was an enemy, okay?
The other one that he said, or you can take Barabbas, the enemy of the crowd's enemy, Rome.
He was in prison, if I'm not mistaken, for murder, at least violence and rebellion.
He was tied to violent rebellion, insurrection, murder, robbery.
He was not a good guy.
Well, when they're given this choice, who does the crowd call for?
Not Jesus.
It chanted for Barabbas.
Now, this is the part where I think anti-Semites always say, well, see, they just hated Jesus so much.
No, that is not the lesson you should pull from that.
That's not what they were saying.
Crowds are like a weather system.
They move on pressure, not principles, pressure.
And they're not choosing who to condemn and who to go free based on good or evil.
They were actually choosing what kind of hope felt the most satisfying in that moment.
Okay.
And the two choices are the slower hope of Jesus that demanded repentance and true change in everybody's life, or the faster hope of the revolutionary Barabbas.
The people always want to go the fast way.
They chose revolution, not repentance, because they hated Rome more than they hated sin.
They let what they were against lead them instead of what they were for.
And so they lost the ability to see the truth of the situation because of their anger.
They were truly blind.
Now, take that human pattern from that time, because that's what it is.
It's a human pattern.
We all can go through this easily and put it up against what we're seeing in Minnesota.
This is possibly the biggest fraud case in American history.
And there's no way the Democrats in power didn't know about it.
But no one's talking about that.
No one's talking about how you, the taxpayer, the people who are now saying Barabbas, how you were ripped off, how maybe your children were hurt because your government, the state government and the local government, was giving money knowingly to people who were abusing the system.
And when the government comes in to arrest, they start shouting for revolution.
And they're shouting for it because of the leaders, the same leaders who likely allowed the fraud, know the people in the streets will look past their egregious sins if it means stopping Trump.
Okay.
Now let me make this really clear.
We're not talking about Trump or whether the federal government is right or wrong.
You can protest government power.
You can distrust the federal government.
I do.
You can demand accountability and transparency.
I do.
Those things are sane, even if we disagree on what should be transparent or exposed, okay?
They're sane.
Those things make you an American.
Distrust is not an American sin.
It's a survival instinct in a fallen world, okay?
But there's a line and it's quiet and it's invisible where distrust becomes devotion.
Where you stop evaluating the facts because you're devoted.
Where your movement stops being about justice and becomes about being against something so completely that it doesn't matter what you're now defending.
When people are told these arrests are targeting truly dangerous criminals, the sober response isn't blind faith in the government, okay?
I don't have that.
I'd like to see, can we see the evidence here?
The sober response is separation, case by case.
Show it to me.
Show me the evidence.
That person, does that match up with what you say?
And if the claim is true, if people are being swept up who are really violent, predatory, destructive, then the society is indeed standing at a knife's edge, cliff's edge, okay?
Not because enforcement can't be abused.
It can.
Not because the state can't lie.
It can.
But because a crowd can begin to treat evil as an acceptable ally as long as it wears the right costume, resistance.
I would like to coin a term here.
This is the Barabbas trap.
Barabbas doesn't win because people suddenly love murder.
They didn't want Barabbas out because they loved the guy.
Barabbas won because he was a symbol.
He was a symbol of a weapon that the crowd thinks it can aim at the government it hates.
And in the heat of that hatred, something breaks.
It's human.
It breaks.
And it's the ability to distinguish between a righteous cause and a righteous person.
This is where the blindness becomes really lethal, because once you lose the habit of judging separately, once you refuse to say, wait a minute, this government action may be wrong and this individual over here may be dangerous, you don't lose just accuracy.
You lose the moral language that keeps a civilization a civilization and keeps you safe.
And it's not going to be just the country that pays for that collapse.
It's you and me and the protesters.
When you make yourself unable to name evil, evil will happily borrow your body for a while.
It will happily stand behind your slogans.
It will march and even carry your banners.
It will hide inside of your crowds because crowds are the perfect cover for evil.
And if you insist that every badge is tyranny, you will eventually protect the tyrant who doesn't wear a badge at all.
Just the one who wears your language, your anger, your righteous pose.
Blindness is not neutrality.
Blindness is recruitment.
It turns ordinary people into shields for causes that they don't fully understand.
For actors who don't love them back, for criminals who are not going to hesitate to burn your neighborhood down or the neighborhood that fed them.
I mean, think of they already burned down Minneapolis once.
And people were putting signs on the door.
I agree with you.
Don't burn down my business.
Burn it down anyway.
Because they don't care.
And then comes the bitterest part.
When the inevitable violence arrives, when the bad guy you excused becomes now the bad guy you can't control, the state has to respond harder.
And the crackdowns get uglier.
And the liberties you thought you were defending begin to shrink.
But then what do you do?
If you're blind, you protest even harder.
You grab your gun.
You grab a Molotov cocktail.
You start lighting fuses.
And the ones who light the fuse, the first fuse, like the governor and the mayor and some of these that are being arrested today, they're never the ones who stand closest to the blast.
It will not be their house that is burned down.
It will be yours.
That's how a protest becomes a trap.
That's how a movement becomes a machine.
I mean, these are paid for by oligarchs.
These are being paid for by George Sources of the world.
And you're comfortable with that.
And I don't understand that.
Other than to say, it's because you haven't thought it through, because you are so wrapped up in the emotion, you cannot separate things piece by piece.
Once everything just is one thing, you have no reason left.
And that's how you get the oldest story in the world.
A crowd demands victory right now.
It's going to make us feel good right now.
And in the process, it trades away the very thing it claims to cherish.
Human dignity, truth, moral clarity.
We're living in an amazing time because such dramatic things are happening.
And yet, the answer is really boring.
The discipline that feels boring until it saves your life is this.
Judge things separately.
Hold two thoughts at once without losing your mind.
A government can overreach, and that overreach should be resisted lawfully and loudly, and those conditions should be corrected.
And criminals can be criminals.
And protecting criminals is not resistance.
It's surrender.
You can say, investigate the shooting, demand transparency, require accountability, I'll be with you.
But you must also say, if this person is a danger, we have to get them off the streets.
That's not betrayal.
That's called adulthood.
And the opposite, refusing to separate, leads to a very specific kind of national ruin.
And not just disorder, but moral inversion, where people can no longer tell the difference between justice and vengeance, between liberty and license, between courage and chaos.
And when that inversion becomes a habit, society becomes really easy to govern by fear because it's forgotten how to rule itself or govern itself by truth.
The crowd at Pilot's platform thought they were choosing freedom.
They instead chose a shortcut.
Shortcuts never take you to freedom.
They take you to the place where freedom is always promised and never, ever delivered.
Because people who live by blind rage are always just one chant away from being used.
Distrust the government if you have to.
In fact, I encourage you.
Protest if you choose.
Demand accountability with every breath.
But do not go blind.
Because the moment you cannot name evil, especially when it's standing right beside you, cheering at the same volume, you've entered a new level of trouble, not political, but spiritual trouble.
The kind that follows you home and sits with you in quiet until you're asking that one question.
When the moment came, did I choose justice or did I choose the chant?