Ben Shapiro dissects the Las Vegas shooting’s politicization, dismissing ISIS claims and media exploitation while defending Trump against accusations of racism in Puerto Rico relief efforts. He contrasts fan backlash to NFL anthem protests—burned memorabilia, quitting staff—with ESPN’s bias, framing Trump’s presidency as a rejection of mainstream media narratives. The episode pivots to Hollywood censorship, his upcoming Another Kingdom podcast, and the need for real dialogue outside polarized media bubbles, arguing societal division stems from decades of left-wing dominance. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm not feeling all that funny after the events in Las Vegas.
And we'll skip the song because the Clavinless weekend sort of got a little bit more serious than we'd like it to.
And I'm not feeling actually all that hunky-dunky.
As I'm speaking, I'm not going to be talking about this all day, and I'll explain why in a couple minutes.
But, you know, as I'm speaking, the death count in this Las Vegas shooting is up to 58 was the last I heard.
The injuries are over 500.
Worst mass shooting in American history, worse than the Orlando shooting a while back.
Here's the president addressing the nation.
Hundreds of our fellow citizens are now mourning the sudden loss of a loved one, a parent, a child, a brother or sister.
We cannot fathom their pain.
We cannot imagine their loss.
To the families of the victims, we are praying for you, and we are here for you.
And we ask God to help see you through this very dark period.
Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
We seek comfort in those words, for we know that God lives in the hearts of those who grieve.
To the wounded who are now recovering in hospitals, we are praying for your full and speedy recovery and pledge to you our support from this day forward.
You know, when I first saw this, I woke up.
I didn't know about this until I woke up this morning, and the first words that went through my mind were, oh, some evil clown has opened fire on people.
And I immediately was struck by the irony of that because obviously there's this hit movie, It, now, that actually features an evil clown based on the Stephen King book.
And I was suddenly thinking, oh, but that evil clown is not actually an evil clown.
That evil clown is a creation of an artist who is trying to entertain you, a bunch of movie makers trying to amuse you, entertain you, scare you in the good way.
That evil clown was actually a work of art, which is always a good thing.
This evil clown is actually an evil clown.
And that's one of the things that is very tough when we are in this divided state, in this partisan position that we're in now where everybody's so angry all the time.
We're constantly using that word evil.
And, you know, behind the scenes, the people here at the Daily Wire, most of us have become very close friends.
And we have these political arguments all the time because we have all these differences and we want to iron them out.
And obviously we all want to hear what the other person has to say and try and convince one another.
And one of the things that people are always hammering me about is that I won't let them use the word evil unless it describes evil.
You know, when they talk about Barack Obama, I always say Barack Obama is not evil.
That's not what evil looks like.
And Donald Trump is not evil, whether you agree with him or not on any given day, whether you like his behavior on any given day, that's not evil.
And the reason I feel that that's important, even though it annoys people because they want to use that word, they want to go to that word, is when you get to the level of evil, you're now talking about extreme action.
A guy like the guy who opened fire in Las Vegas, you want to kill him.
That's really the only thing there is to do.
But with the rest of us, you want to talk.
You want to argue.
I don't want to use words like, oh, this is a war.
I don't want to say, oh, this guy is evil.
Because even if the consequences of something a politician is doing are bad, that doesn't necessarily mean he intends evil to anybody.
And I don't think Barack Obama, who I obviously didn't like very much and thought he was an incompetent, I don't think he intended evil to people.
I don't think Donald Trump intends evil to people.
And that's one of the reasons I get so annoyed with the way the press covers this and the way people talk about it.
I'll explain in a moment why we're not going to talk about this all day long, but we're not going to talk about it all day long.
I have a lot I want to say about Puerto Rico and the way the coverage is coming.
And Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles Show, will be with us to discuss the developments about the NFL and other things.
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All right.
Now, the reason I'm not going to talk about this all day is that there's not that much to say.
You know, the commentating is something that you do when things need comment.
But when somebody opens fire on people, this was a three-day country music festival.
They were in an open area in Las Vegas.
This madman went to the high room in a nearby hotel, hammered out the windows, and then opened fire with what sounded to me like automatic weapons.
I mean, it just, yeah, I fired semi-automatic weapons, and this didn't sound like that.
It sounded like fully automatic weapons.
And he then killed himself as the police were going in.
Here's his brother.
The guy's name is Steven Paddock, and his brother, Eric Paddock, has no idea why he did this.
ISIS is claiming credit for this.
I'll wait and see.
I'm not buying that.
That's like me claiming credit for writing Shakespeare's plays.
I think ISIS at this point, ISIS is about, the Islamic state is about to be like an outhouse in a desert after our military gets through with them.
So they're going to claim as much damage as they possibly can.
Here's the shooter's brother just saying he doesn't know what happened.
He looks as baffled as anybody.
He's never, I mean, he's never even drawn his gun.
I mean, it makes no sense.
He's never hit anybody.
He's never gun enthusiast or just a few.
Oh, he had a couple of handguns, I think.
He had a safe with a couple of handguns.
He might have had one long rifle, but he didn't have any.
I mean, he had no automatic weapons that I knew of at any time.
There's no.
It just makes no sense.
That's now being reported that the guy's father was a bank robber who was on the FBI's most wanted list.
So there's some kind of history there.
But again, it's just too early to know, so I don't want to go off speculating.
Here's the reason I don't want to talk about this all day.
At this point, like I said, this is a job for the police, not for a commentator.
This is a job where the police go and gather information and do the actual job of gathering information.
This is a job for the terrific people who work in the hospitals, who take care of people who are injured, people who are in shock.
So many, I mean, over 500.
You know, obviously, these are people who went out to party.
Some of them probably didn't even know they were hurt until much later.
And some of them may not even know whether they're hurt.
They're in such shock.
When I see people trying to politicize these things, and because the left owns the media, it does.
It starts with the left, right?
We know how it works.
If a Muslim does it, well, it's not all Muslims.
But if a white supremacist does it, then everybody in the GOP is somehow guilty of being a white supremacist.
If it's a Bernie bro, like it was at the softball game in Washington, well, we can't blame Bernie bros, but obviously, if it has anything to do with the right wing, then suddenly all right-wingers are to blame.
And if they can do nothing else, it's the anti-Second Amendment agenda.
Hillary Clinton tweeted this morning: oh, you know, the people were running because they heard the gunfire.
Imagine how bad it would be if the NRA had its way and you could buy silencers, as if this guy was limited in his actions by the law.
I feel that I would like to put a silencer on Hillary Clinton so that when she opened her mouth, nothing came out, but that's neither here nor there.
So, what happens?
We fight back.
We fight back and we say, no, this is the, you know, it's not about guns, it is about Bernie, it's not about Muslims, whatever.
And then, and we become part of it, and we become part of it all the while.
All I can think is that some mom and dad sent their kid off to a concert yesterday, to a concert, and the kid's not coming home.
You know, and like, that's all I can think about.
Is like you're standing next to your wife having a good time, and suddenly your wife is gone, suddenly your husband's gone.
You know, that's all I can think about.
And I can't bring myself to get into that conversation.
I cannot bring myself, I don't want to allow myself to be dragged down into that conversation.
The fact is, the fact is, whether Islam is a problem or white supremacist is a problem or not a problem is something that you look at over time.
That's something you see over time.
If there's one incident that illustrates that, using that as the building block of a larger narrative is kind of despicable.
The narrative is going to be there after the incident is gone, after these people are healed, the wounded are healed, after the dead are mourned.
Believe me, the landscape is going to be there, the political landscape is going to be what it is.
And I don't want to be dragged down in it.
This is something that's happening all over in our entire society: you feel like you have to fight back.
The voices of the left, especially, have so much power.
They have so much of the media, they have so much of the entertainment media, they have so much of the education classes, the academies, and all that stuff, that you always feel like you have to fight back.
And that is a lot of what's going on.
So, let's turn from this now because there's not that much more to say about it.
But let's turn from this now to take a look at what I mean when we're talking about this hurricane that's hit Puerto Rico, right?
First, we had the Russians, Donald Trump is a Russian spy baloney.
Then, we had the Charlotteville, you know, Donald Trump is a racist baloney, where it was that Donald Trump said that there were good people among the neo-Nazis, which I will get back to that and I will show you that that is not what he said, and they are intentionally twisting that.
Now we have Puerto Rico is Katrina.
It's like CNN is basically reporting its daydreams at this point.
They're having trouble getting supplies and relief to Puerto Rico in ways they didn't have trouble getting supplies and relief to Texas when the hurricanes hit there.
And some of this, most of this is because FEMA, it's not that the federal government didn't get the supplies and the people there on time.
It did, okay?
But FEMA was not prepared for the level of A, corruption, the union corruption that is in Puerto Rico, and it was not prepared for the level of just absolute destruction.
You know, the infrastructure there is not any good, you know, and now the entire place is shut down without electricity.
So FEMA is kind of bungling some of this.
It's not that Trump didn't make sure that all the people got there.
It's that the logistics on the ground are really difficult.
Trump did make, I think, one mistake.
There's an act, what's it called, the Jones Act, I think, that it requires that you use American shipping to send stuff to Puerto Rico.
And at first he didn't suspend it, and then he suspended it for 10 days, which is not going to be enough.
He should just suspend it.
I mean, I know that the shippers don't want this to happen.
They like their little monopoly tough, tough.
Get the stuff to the people.
So now, the mayor of San Juan, which is the only city in Puerto Rico anybody knows about, the mayor of San Juan, far leftist, Carmen Cruz, her name is, she starts criticizing Trump and obviously trying to build up this Katrina narrative.
She shows up on TV with a hat that says, help us, or a t-shirt, I'm sorry, that says, help us, we are dying.
And she starts saying that Trump doesn't do a good job.
And Donald Trump responds with his usual grace by just opening up on her.
He says, you know, the problem is that he says, such poor leadership, this is a tweet, such poor leadership ability by the mayor of San Juan and others in Puerto Rico who are not able to get their workers to help.
They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.
Obviously, a graceless thing to say when people are in trouble.
But, you know, we're so tired of the politicization of everything.
Trump's Puerto Rico Criticism00:06:30
And it seemed clear.
It seemed clear that this very, very left-wing mayor of San Juan had been positioned, told to go out.
Because before this happened, the people in Puerto Rico were saying, no, Donald Trump is helping us out.
He's sending us the stuff we need.
And suddenly, suddenly they're criticizing him.
It did seem a political thing.
So now Trump, as he always does, he overreacts, especially when he's personally attacked.
And the media goes nuts.
And what's their narrative?
Guess.
Guess what the narrative is.
The problem is that the people in Puerto Rico are brown, right?
That is the problem.
As if there were no black people in trouble in Texas.
That wasn't a thing.
Nothing like that in Louisiana.
But here's just Brian Stelter, just as a sample of what CNN is selling this week in their garbage sale.
At best, the president's tweets are insensitive today.
I think at worst, Fred, they are a racist dog whistle, a disgraceful reaction to what he's seeing on television.
He's clearly watching the mayor of San Juan on CNN and other channels, calling for more help, begging for more help, and reacting this way.
I think it's personally beyond the pale and unpresidential.
And I think it's a tough situation for journalists because we've got to call it that.
We've got to identify what we're seeing.
I'm so glad that all of our reporters there in Puerto Rico are describing what's actually happening on the ground.
And I hope the president, in between his golf game today, watches more of those reports from the ground rather than just impulsively reacting to what he's seen from the mayor of San Juan.
Thanks, Brian, for pouring oil on the troubled waters of the country.
What a jerk, you know.
I mean, come on.
So, of course, this is the two-step, right?
It's not just the news.
It's not just the media, the left-wing media, which it all is.
It's also the politicians then know that they can show up and say these outrageous things.
I mean, come on.
Does anybody think, does anybody think, truly think, that Donald Trump woke up and said, ah, we're not going to send anything to Puerto Rico.
Those people are brown.
You know, I mean, come on.
I mean, come on.
So Bernie Sanders, right, who should be hiding away on any day when a mad shooter goes nuts, he comes out and he hammers the narrative home.
The White House denies it, but there are a lot of critics who say that race or ethnicity might be playing a factor here.
What do you think?
Well, look, given the president's history on race, given the fact that he a few months ago told us that there were good people on both sides when neo-Nazis were marching in Charlottesville, yeah, I think we have a right to be suspect that he is treating the people of Puerto Rico in a different way than he has treated the people of Texas or Florida.
Okay, now let's just stop here for a minute because this is part of what happens in the media and this is part of the way it works.
They start with a lie.
We on the right debunk the lie.
They kind of back off it, but then they circle back around and then the lie becomes enshrined in the narrative.
So now Bernie Sanders can go and speak the lie about Charlottesville as if it were just part of what we all accept to be history, all right?
Let's go back for a minute because this has really bothered me for a while.
Let's go back and look at what Trump said that day, all right?
He was speaking as the reporters, as they constantly do, were interrupting him, not letting him get a word in because it is so important for us to hear the reporters' voices and opinions that we don't want to listen to the president of the United States.
We just want to hear them.
And he's saying, I want to read this.
I don't want him to say it because I want to be able to analyze it as I go.
Trump is talking over them.
He says, excuse me, they didn't put themselves down as neo-Nazis.
And you had some very bad people in that group.
In other words, the people who came to protest the tearing down of statues were not all neo-Nazis.
But yes, there were some of them who were neo-Nazis.
There were bad people in that group.
But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.
You had people in that group.
And then he says, excuse me, excuse me, because he's being shouted down.
He says, excuse me, I saw the same pictures you did.
You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
So when he said there were fine people in that group, he was not speaking about neo-Nazis.
And if the press didn't want it to clear that up, they would ask him.
Do they ever ask him?
No.
Why?
Because they want it like this.
They want us to be divided.
They want us to hate one another.
The right and the left, you know, not the far, look, the far right and the far left are always going to be at daggers drawn, but I am talking about conservatives and liberals.
They want us to hate one another so that we don't communicate because they are Democrats.
And they can sell, as long as they can sell the narrative that the right is evil, they can sell you the crappy policies of the Democrats, the non-working failed policies of the Democrats.
If they ever had to assume, if I say, you know, if I say, gee, I disagree with tearing down the statue of Robert E. Lee, if they ever had to assume, well, maybe he has some good reason for saying that, maybe he has some positive reason, maybe it is, maybe as he likes his fellow Americans and he says that, why would he say that when it seems so strange to me if they ever would say that?
They would destroy their own narrative.
Just to add to this, just to say, you know, I've told you what I think about what's going wrong in Puerto Rico, but here is a colonel in the United States Army, Michael A. Valley.
I think his name is V-A-L-L-E.
He's a commander of the 101st Air and Space Operations Group and director of the Joint Air Component Coordination Element, First Air Force responsible for Hurricane Marillo relief.
That's the hurricane in Puerto Rico.
And the efforts to bring The relief there.
He is a first-hand witness of the U.S. Department of Defense response supporting FEMA in Puerto Rico, and he is a Puerto Rican himself with family members living in the devastation.
He says his passion for the people is second for none.
And of the criticism, he says it's just not true.
I have family here.
My parents' home is here.
My uncles, aunts, cousins are all here.
As a Puerto Rican, I can tell you that the problem has nothing to do with the U.S. military, FEMA, or the DOD.
The aid is getting to Puerto Rico.
The problem is distribution.
The federal government has sent us a lot of help.
Moving new supplies, in particular, fuel is the issue right now.
And they just can't get the generators and all this stuff.
So this is part of what I'm talking about when I'm talking about the shooting in Vegas.
When I'm talking about this, we feel like we have to strike back.
They lie.
Puerto Rico Aid Distribution00:03:20
They pour lie on lie on lie.
They even, even offhanded things where they just say, oh, in Charlottesville, he said this a lie.
And making a lie part of the narrative.
He didn't say it.
He didn't say it.
And so we feel we have to strike back.
And then we're brought down to that level.
And not only do we feel we have to strike back, in many ways, I feel that we have elected a president who will strike back.
I've been saying this again and again, and we're going to take a break in a minute, but I've been saying this again and again: that Trump was elected.
He was elected to fight back against these people.
And his rudeness and his sometimes bullying and sometimes his saying things that are untoward are part of the fact, part of the reason the people who love him love him is because they've been hammered by these people.
They get hammered on the late-night comedy shows.
They get hammered at the movie award ceremonies.
They get hammered in the rock songs.
They get hammered in the news shows.
They get hammered every day.
And this is the only way they could get anyone powerful enough with a big enough voice to strike back.
But what does it do to us?
And that's what I'm going to deal with at the end of today's show when we get to our crappy culture.
But first, we're going to go to Michael Knowles.
But first, before we go to Michael Knowles, we are going to talk about how beautiful my head looks.
You know, I was watching, I was watching Knowles.
I could see him on the camera.
Knowles is in the studio next door.
He's in his studio, right?
Yeah.
So he's in his studio, and our wonderful makeup lady, Jess, who I just, you know, obviously Jess is the reason I'm sitting here today.
If it weren't for Jess, this face, you know, it would look like the last reel in a vampire movie after the sun comes up.
But I was watching Jess spray stuff on Knowles' hair because Knowles actually has hair.
Now, not many people know it's a toupee, but no, it's not.
And I said to Jess, I'm jealous.
You know, you spray stuff on Knowles' head.
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Burning Memorabilia: Fans React00:13:24
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All right, we've got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
And if you want to hear the wonderful and talented, the lovely and talented Michael Knowles and his hair, you have to come over to the dailywire.com and you can listen.
But if you would only subscribe, only subscribe, you could watch the whole thing right there and you wouldn't have this problem where you're cast out into the exterior darkness where there's great wailing and gnashing of teeth, which you deserve because you didn't spend the 10 lousy bucks a month it cost to subscribe to the Daily Wire.
And if you subscribe for 100 lousy bucks, you get an entire year subscription.
That means you can be in the mailbag if you just subscribe for the month, right?
Yeah, but you can have all your problem solvers just for a lousy 10 bucks.
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Plus, you get the leftist tears tumbler, which fills up every time Michael Knowles even just sits up in bed.
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So come on over to TheDailyWire.com and hear the rest of the show.
All right.
Have we got Mr. Knowles?
Knowles, hey, your hair looks marvelous.
I can't believe you told them about the 2K.
I've managed to keep that under wrap for 27 years.
But it's a good one, I gotta say.
It is terrific.
So this week, I didn't want to just keep talking about the NFL.
I'm a big NFL fan, and I could just go off on it every week.
And I have just been first of all, I wrote a piece at PJ Media that you can go over and look at at Claven on the Culture, where I just say I thought Trump was 100% right about this.
I thought he got it exactly right.
Absolutely.
I've said it on the show.
Is it still going on?
I mean, I'm not going to watch until they stop doing it.
So is it still going on?
You may be a big NFL fan.
I am not a big NFL fan.
It will not surprise you to find out I was not the quarterback of my high school or college team.
Neither.
No.
The water boy.
That's right.
This is the most NFL I've ever had to watch.
South Park actually joked about this: that everyone's just tuning in to see if they stand or kneel or not, and then they tune out, which their ratings seem to bear out.
But it's gone on again.
I have a little run.
I actually, we don't have enough time for me to read everybody who knelt and stood, but just a quick rundown: six Seattle Seahawks sat, 30 49ers knelt.
Drunk hit and run driver Marshawn Lynch of the Oakland Raiders wore an Everybody versus Trump shirt.
One New York Giant knelt, Baltimore Ravens and Steelers all knelt to massive booze, and then they stood up when the national anthem was actually sung, trying to have their cake and eat it too.
Doesn't work, fellas.
Six Buffalo Bills knelt.
One Tennessee Titan stayed in the locker room.
New Orleans Saints took an A, three Dolphins knelt.
The Jacksonville Jaguars knelt before the anthem to booze.
Two Detroit Lions knelt.
Everybody else tap-danced or did a little sachet.
I don't know.
It was very complicated this week.
I will say that the LA Rams, I tuned them in just to see, and they did not kneel.
One guy raised his fist or something like that.
Yeah, there were some raised fists around, but it is true.
The LA Rams all stood.
Good on them.
Me too.
I thought so.
So what's the reaction?
I mean, you know, what I love about this, by the way, I get this on my iPad.
They send me the news, and it is the, it basically is CNN ranting about Trump.
And so what a bad week Donald Trump had because he criticized the NFL.
And I thought, I'm not so sure.
What are the people saying?
First of all, I loved Byron York had this piece out today.
The headline was, on game day, new polls show that Americans, what Americans think about NFL protests and Trump.
And I thought he was actually joking.
He is referring to real polls, but the polls are that nobody's watching these games.
That's the poll.
Great analysis, Byron.
It is true.
I mean, across all of these polls, the kneeling protests have massive disapproval across the American people.
And Donald Trump's handling of it is basically 50-50.
People are split on whether they like that he's weighing in, but they despise the protests.
There is this phenomenon going on now, which is that people, NFL fans, are holding public burnings of their memorabilia and of their season tickets.
You know, this is just before, but I laugh when you say that, but just before you go on with this, I don't know if you ever saw a movie called Silverlining Playbook.
It's a great movie.
It's a terrific movie, but it is about the passion with which NFL supporters support their team.
So when people go out and burn their memorabilia, this is like, it's like me going out and burning pictures of my kids.
You know, I mean, like, they really love these teams.
So this is no small thing.
It's so beautiful because it turns out the people love their country more and they don't like it when these criminals, you know, one NFL player is arrested on average once a week, every seven days.
Every seven days, really?
Yeah, every seven days.
And these aren't like, you know, they didn't pay a traffic ticket.
These are like rape, murder, you know, very serious crimes.
There's no punishment whatsoever.
Yeah, these absolutely empty-headed people who make tens of millions of dollars a year to run around and make us giggle.
When those people criticize the country and spout off on things they know nothing about, turns out the fans don't like it.
So Ronnie Rebar, the owner of a bar and grill, who's a big Steelers fan, he hosted a burning of his memorabilia, and he posted it on Facebook.
It got hundreds of likes and shares.
Steelers fan Robert Smith posted a video of himself burning over $1,000 of memorabilia.
Two groups of Ravens fans posted videos burning merchandise a couple weeks ago.
New York Giants fan posted a video of himself burning season tickets.
There's real future value.
It's really making a statement.
Indianapolis Colts fans, same thing.
New Orleans Saints fans had a big Facebook video where they poured lighter fluid all over their jerseys and flags and lit it all on fire.
100 Patriots fans showed up to a guy's house in Massachusetts.
They weren't actually, it's against the law to burn anything other than wood in Massachusetts.
So they just symbolically burned a few caps, threw out the rest, or donated it to charity.
When you say they showed up at a guy's house, you mean a player's house?
No, no, no, at a fan's house.
He hosted the gathering.
The gathering included 100 people.
Wow.
And they burned all of it, and then they sang the national anthem as it burned.
Gotta love the cleverness.
And the thing I notice about this, I mean, there are people who are quitting their positions.
Some guy left the Buffalo Bills after 30 years.
He was a staff member there.
He just thought it was disgusting.
What is interesting about all of this is, sure, the burning of the memorabilia, the reaction.
But what they all have in common is they all post this on Facebook.
They're all posting videos of this.
And it's because the silent majority of Americans finally can break a media stranglehold.
We've been seeing this for two years.
We've seen this with the way that Donald Trump has interacted with the political establishment, with the American people.
We're seeing that the mainstream media, which now ESPN might as well be CNN or MSNBC, they no longer tell us what reality is.
We can see for ourselves that, huh, I'm not the only person who thinks that this is drivel.
And they now have their own new media platform, the right-wing exuberance that we're seeing in culture and new media.
They're expressing that too.
The players have a right to express their opinion.
Well, now the fans have a right to express theirs and broadcast it to millions of people.
You know, it's funny.
Bob Schieffer, the veteran reporter, I mean, he must be almost 80 at this point.
He has a new book out called Overloaded about how we're getting too much information.
And he was complaining.
He said, you know, yeah, okay, they can get the news on social media, but they don't have our standards.
And I think the thing is, their standards are pretty good compared to the media.
You know, speaking of young folks using the media, the new social media, I have to say that you and I, I think we finally have had a breakthrough on our proposed podcast for my new novel, Another Kingdom.
We finally are getting the episodes together, and we're hoping to launch this on October 13th.
Well, the devil does not want us to do this.
The devil does.
I swear, Knowles, that I believe that it's been uncanny the way opposition has come to this.
It is bizarre.
Parts of episodes disappearing, sound not working, people dropping.
I mean, it has been really strange, which is why we are going to do this book.
It's a great story.
But it's also about, I mean, it is evidence that conservatives get to use the new media to get stories out that would never be made.
But it's not even that it's a conservative story.
It's just that it's a story that doesn't toe political correctness.
You know, I mean, I don't want to give away too much of the story.
I think people are going to probably tune in when we're going to release on Friday the 13th.
But Another Kingdom presents a transsexual killer.
You could never get that made in Hollywood ever to do.
Not now.
And I have to say, I mean, it's not a comment on transsexualism.
It's not, you know, that's not what it's about.
It's just that's the character.
And it's a very, and it's an old, tough guy.
It's not, you know, it's not a political story.
But, you know, yesterday, I went to see American Assassin, which is based on one of the late Vince Flynn's novels.
And Vince, I know, was a staunch pro-American conservative, okay?
And it's, I won't go into it.
The original novel took place in the past.
It was the backstory of his character, Mitch Rapp, but they've updated it so it takes place in the present.
And the guy with the top screenwriting credit on it is a guy named Stephen Schiff.
And this is not to knock Stephen, but he did one of the major drafts that was based on my novel, True Crime, which became a Clint Eastwood picture.
And Stephen and I went to lunch and he said to me, listen, true crime centers around a white man on death row who may be there because of political correctness.
He may have been sentenced to death because nobody wanted to say that it was a black guy who did this thing.
Stephen sat there and said, I cannot do that politically.
We're making him a black guy.
And they made the guy on death row in the movie a black guy, which made a lot of the movie not make sense because the whole point of the movie was only a jerk like the reporter in the movie could see the truth because he wasn't constricted by this.
So Stephen is writing American Assassin, and sure enough, it's a pro-American story.
It's got evil Islamists in it, which I really appreciated.
But it's got a lot of dialogue suggesting that the Iranian nuclear deal was a great thing, and it's only the evil, the moderates in Iran support it, but it's only the evil doers in Iran who are against it.
I'm sitting there going, what on earth?
Wait, the screenplay was written by Ben Rhodes, or it was written by this buddy of you.
I thought, like, I don't want to speak for Vince Flynn.
The guy died way, way too young.
It's not for me to say what he would have thought, but I'm pretty sure that he was not sitting there going, mmm, that Iran nuclear deal, that was a good thing.
So the point is, it's not that the story we're telling is a conservative story.
It's just the story we're telling.
We just don't think about political correctness.
And that's why I, well, that's why the devil doesn't want us to make it, certainly.
But I do find it pretty funny that the blank book, I think, destroyed 90% of any shot I'll ever have in a Hollywood career.
And then immediately the next thing we do is this, which is like a sledgehammer to it.
But it's such a joy.
And that is the way to put it.
There's nothing about the story where you would say, oh, yeah, that's a Trump voter who wrote that.
No, no, no, yeah, yeah.
But you do get the sense that it was a conservative who wrote it because you read the story and you think, oh, yeah, that's reality.
Oh, yeah, that's a reality that I could understand.
It's sad that reality has become a conservative principle.
You know, it's like you'd think that we could actually agree on that.
All right, that's coming out Friday the 13th of October.
Another kingdom, Friday the 13th.
Absolutely.
It's good to talk to you.
The Michael Knowles show comes up after.
You are going to do a show today, right?
I'm doing a show, and then I am flying out to the UK.
But we will also have one Columbus Day show.
Oh, good.
I'm going to pre-record one because all of this anti-Columbus Day stuff is driving me so crazy.
We can't let it go away without mentioning it.
Excellent, excellent.
And I know Shapiro has got the Jewish holiday, so he's taking some time off.
So basically, I am the Daily Wire.
That's all you.
It's better than the alternative, though, because if you were the one on vacation, we'd be plunged into a clavinless week, and God only knows what would happen to you.
You'd probably never survive.
All right, the Michael Knowles show will be on today after this.
Good to see you, Knowles.
I'll talk to you later.
See ya.
Our crappy culture.
All right, I want to go back to this idea of what the media is doing to us and how we've responded to the media with Donald Trump and how that gets some of us, I think most of us, into a bit of a bind.
Must Love One Another Or Die00:03:38
I want to start, the poet W.H. Auden, one of the last great poets, I've always thought he was a very good poet, but he was actually borderline great, Auden.
He wrote a famous poem on September called September 1st, 1939, which is that's the day that Germany invaded Poland and World War II began.
And he was just so depressed.
I'm sure you all know, the way I felt when I was reading about this Las Vegas shooting today.
Let me just read you a little bit of it.
He starts out by saying, I sit in one of the dives on 52nd Street, uncertain and afraid as the clever hopes expire of a low, dishonest decade.
Waves of anger and fear circulate over the bright and darkened lens of the earth, obsessing our private lives.
The unmentionable odor of death offends the September night.
And that's a very famous line that it was a low, dishonest decade.
And now he starts to talk about all the things that have unraveled and war has come.
And one of the final stanzas, he says something that people like me, I know, feel all the time.
All people who care about what they're doing and are speaking and have an audience.
He says, all I have is a voice to undo the folded lie.
All right.
And he goes on and on and he says, he says, there is no such thing as the state.
No one exists alone.
Hunger allows no choice to the citizens or the police.
We must love one another or die.
And this is another of the most famous lines in the poem.
We must love one another or die.
And the story goes that Auden later wanted to change that line because people don't know this about poets, but poets are usually the most realistic people in the world.
They want to describe everything very exactly.
And sometimes if you look at old-fashioned romantic poetry and then look up the science of what they're describing, they got it exactly right.
And Auden wanted to change this line because he said, it doesn't matter whether we love one another, we die anyway.
But of course, as so often with poets, his muse was smarter than he was.
When he said we must love one another or die, after the war, Auden returned to his Catholic roots and became a believer again, I believe.
I can't speak for his inner life, but he did return to his Catholic roots.
And I think that the story of the Gospels tells us the story of the Bible as read by Christians tells us that, in fact, we must love one another or die.
You know, when Adam and Eve were in the garden, God said to them, don't eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or thou shalt surely die.
And the devil or the serpent came to Eve and said, thou shalt not surely die, which is Charlton Heston used to read that line.
He used to say it was one of his favorite lines in the Bible, because it was so insinuating.
Thou shalt not surely die.
And a lot of people say, well, Eve eats the apple and she doesn't die.
But in fact, that's not the case.
In the Gospels and the Gospel of John, Jesus says, this is eternal life, this is eternal life, that they know you, he's speaking to God, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent so in that sense.
So in that sense, right, in the sense that life, true life, eternal life is to know God, when they disobeyed God, when they turned away from God, they did die.
They did surely die, okay?
And so it is true that we must love one another or die, and I know how hard this gets.
As I said before, the left has been hammering us now for 50 years.
And it's one thing for me, it is one thing for me.
You know, I have a voice.
You know, I can write things, people read them, I can say things, people listen to them.
But most of us in this country, you know, what Knowles was saying about Facebook is true.
Social media has given us a voice, but it's not like the voice of the media.
Talking Back to the Media00:07:21
The mainstream media is like the German tanks.
It just rolls over everything.
It rolls over everything.
And you turn on the TV and the comedians are making fun of you.
You turn on the news and they are slanting the news away from your point of view.
You turn on to watch a stupid award show.
All you want to do is see the women in their pretty dresses and the good-looking actors.
That's all you want to do.
And they stand up there with their statuettes that they're feeding to one another, patting each other on the back for their million-dollar hijinks, and then looking in the camera and telling you you're an idiot.
And it's offensive.
And they don't understand how offensive it is.
And they don't understand that a lot of the reason that Donald Trump was elected president, even though he's so rude and sometimes bullying, is because he's so rude and sometimes bullying.
And that's the people talking back, talking back to George Clooney, talking back to Meryl Streep, talking back to Stephen Colbert and all these people who spend every single day hammering the left.
You don't like it, guys?
That's what it feels like.
That's what the Stephen Colbert show feels like to people on the right.
You don't like the stuff Donald Trump says?
Well, that's what it feels like.
And you know, if you wanted to see, I just brought in a couple of incredible examples of the bubble people are living in.
Brett Stevens, who is a guy I don't always agree with, but I respect him.
He's independent.
He's smart.
He now works for the New York Times.
And he's kind of was so, he hates Donald Trump so much that he was alienated from the Republican Party.
He wrote an article called The Dying Art of Disagreement.
And it was on the Chuck Todd Show.
And Chuck Todd says, how long has this been going on?
And Brett Stevens talks about how we lost the art of disagreement.
In the last 20 years, one of the things that has happened is that too easily we inhabit our kind of social media filter bubbles in which we only hear and have reflected the views that we agree with to begin with.
And the second thing is that too much of television has become a kind of rage factory for one side or the other when there's never any actual meeting of minds.
You simply caricature what the other side has to say or think, you know, unpatriotic liberals or Neanderthal conservatives, and then you attack the straw man.
So I think a lot of, I mean, this has been going on for a long time.
I think one thing, though, is that part of the problem is on campuses.
I don't think we are teaching students as well as we ought the arts of persuasion and of learning how to handle a contrary point of view.
Okay, so now Chuck Todd offers his theory.
I mean, this is an amazing moment.
Chuck Todd now offers his theory on how we lost the art of disagreement.
This is cut number eight.
Well, let me ask you this.
I think a lot of people would point to cable television as well, talk radio as well.
I'll give you one example, and some may fire at me for this, but I don't think it was healthy that we had a cable news channel run by a former political operative.
All right, so the problem for Chuck Todd and Chuck Todd's life is the cable news and talk radio, all conservative.
And when he says a political operative running a cable news channel, he's talking about Roger Ailes at Fox, right?
That's who he's talking about.
A political operative, George Stephanopoulos, is the chief anchor on ABC News, one of the biggest networks and news networks in the country.
What is he talking about?
The kind of blindness.
You know, I was talking about Bob Schieffer before.
You know, that same thing, that kind of blindness that they're in this bubble.
The bubble is made of iron.
So what happens?
So we send Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump, like, he says stuff that drives me crazy sometimes.
He's so rude.
He's so bullying and all this stuff.
But I understand.
I do get it.
It is, you know, they're talking back to the people.
And Trump, by the way, loves it.
Trump was said to tell his aides to say, you know, just tell him that crazy guy in the White House is going to do something really bad.
Like he said, you know, he said Rex Tillerson is off negotiating with the North Koreans.
And Trump says, he's wasting his time.
They're not going to listen to this.
And everybody's going like, oh my God, the president.
Well, Trump does this on purpose.
This is part of his negotiating technique and part of the reason the people who love him love him.
The problem is, the problem is we have to fight back.
We have to strike back against this incredible, incredible monolith of the news and the entertainment media and the academies.
We have to make our voices heard and Trump is one of the only ways we can do it.
But if everybody is stooping to everybody else's level, we just keep going down and down and down.
When do we stop hating one another?
The fact is, I truly believe that 70% of this country could get in a room together and talk face to face and start to make changes, start to go forward.
Here's the thing.
That is not going to happen on the news.
That is not going to be, I love Glenn Beck.
He's a great guy.
He's a terrific commentator, a brilliant man.
But Glenn Beck going to the New York Times and talking to the New York Times isn't going to solve anything.
Not because of them, not because Beck isn't a good guy, but because the people who are opposed to one another look at that and think, oh, you know, Beck is selling us out or the New York Times, why are they talking to him?
Or, you know, Beck just wants the New York Times to like, whatever they say.
The conversation is not going to be, you are not going to be led back to a unified America.
I'm not going to do it.
Rush Limbaugh is not going to do it.
The New York Times is not going to do it.
Chuck Todd's not going to do it.
This is going to happen.
This is on you.
It's on you guys.
It's going to happen in your dorm rooms.
It's going to happen in your dorm rooms when you don't tell the other guy to shut up or when you invite, you do invite him in to talk.
It's going to happen in emails.
It's going to happen in coffee shops.
It's going to happen in town halls and in churches where people who disagree speak to one another in a civilized way.
You know, the other day, I have a friend, an email friend, Obiana Uju Ikiyocha.
I just call her Uju because that is her nickname and I cannot pronounce her name.
And she has written a wonderful book and I'll bring her on to talk about it, a book about what's happening in Africa.
And she is a cultural conservative and a Catholic, a devout Catholic.
And I wanted to praise the book and put a blurb on the book because I think everybody should read it.
It's called Target Africa.
It hasn't come out yet, but like I said, we'll have her on when it does.
But I wrote her a note saying, you know, I just want you to know I'm not as culturally conservative as you is.
And I think the book is wonderful, and here's the reason I think the book is wonderful.
But these are places where I disagree.
And she wrote me back this wonderful note saying, oh, you know, I listen to your show every day.
I know you don't agree with me on all this stuff.
That has nothing to do with it.
We have to have these discussions and all this stuff.
That is where this is going to begin.
It is not going to begin with wonderful people like Uju, you know, who will talk to people even when they disagree.
And it's not going to happen.
It's not going to be Trump.
It's not going to be the news media.
We cannot sit around and wait for them.
We have to start talking to one another because this moment has to pass.
It has to pass.
We have to get to a point where the gears of government can move.
We have to get to the point where we're not hating one another.
We have to get to the point where we can all agree that a guy who goes and opens fire on a concert is evil no matter what he thinks.
I don't care if he says he's anti-fascist.
I don't care if he says he's anti-black.
I don't care if he says he's anti-white.
I don't care if he says he's pro-Muslim.
He's evil.
And that, once we can decide what the evil is and that you and I are not evil, then you and I can start to talk to each other.