A suspected lone gunman commits the largest mass shooting in American history. Within hours, the hashtag #thoughtsandprayers began trending on Twitter. Michael discusses why thoughts and prayers are under attack. Then, journalist Mary Lane talks the relation between the #TakeAKneefootball movement and right-wing winning. Finally, Amber Athey, Amanda Prestigiacomo, and Jacob Airey join the Panel of Deplorables to talk about John Kasich’s leaving the Republican Party. He’s a Republican? U.S. manufacturing soaring, and UK schools’ removing BC and AD dating so as not to offend non-Christians.
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A suspected lone gunman identified as Stephen Craig Paddock committed the largest mass shooting in American history last night, killing at least 58 and injuring at least 515.
This is still developing.
Those numbers are changing.
Within hours, the hashtag thoughts and prayers began trending on Twitter.
We'll discuss why, of all things...
Thoughts and prayers are controversial and under attack.
Then finally, we will talk to journalist Mary Lane about the relation between the take a knee football movement and the right wing winning that we're seeing all around us.
Finally, Amber Athe, Amanda Presto Giacomo and Jacob Berry join the panel of deplorables to talk about John Kasich leaving the Republican Party.
He's a Republican.
I didn't know that.
U.S. manufacturing soaring and U.K. schools removing B.C. and A.D. dating so as not to offend non-Christians.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
It's a rough way to start the week, the largest mass shooting in American history.
I don't think that we need to go into the details of what happened, how it happened, who did this and who did that.
I think plenty of other people are going to cover that.
I want to focus much more on the response, what the response says about our culture, what it says about how we see ourselves.
Obviously, there are a lot of questions.
How did he come to possess fully automatic weapons?
Those have been practically outlawed for about 80 years, although there are ways to get them.
It's just very difficult.
Were mental illness signs ignored?
Did he just snap?
All worth talking about.
But I am more interested in how the cultural response represents a conflict of visions between the left and the right.
There was this hashtag that started trending, thoughts and prayers, but it wasn't earnestly people saying we give you our thoughts and prayers.
It was people mocking the people who were offering thoughts and prayers.
The first crazy Twitter response was from Hillary Clinton.
Surprise, surprise, my dear old cousin Hillary.
Hillary said, the crowd fled at the sound of gunshots.
Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get.
Cousin.
Cousin Hillary.
Come on, girl.
What are you doing?
Obviously, a silencer does not silence a gun.
You can't shoot off a.223 or a.556.
It's still extremely loud.
It lowers it a few decibels, but it's still pretty loud.
So Hillary just exemplifying how little the people who want to take away all of our guns know about guns whatsoever.
She then tweeted and said...
And this is what leads into the thoughts and prayers.
She says, our grief isn't enough.
We can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again.
The Clintons, the thing that defines them is having absolutely no shame, no sense of shame whatsoever.
The bodies aren't even cool yet before Hillary Clinton tries to score cheap points on the NRA. But consider this statement.
We must put politics aside and stand up to the NRA. You just said to put politics aside and now you're pushing gun control and you're offending one of the largest, most popular civil rights lobbies in the entire country, the NRA, which defends our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
That's Hillary.
Totally expected.
I mean, you know, perhaps a little much even for her, but again, the Clintons have no sense of shame, so who's surprised?
The hashtag continued.
Cara Calavera says, F your thoughts and prayers.
They mean nothing.
They're as worthless as you are.
Now, this woman, I don't know who she is, describes herself as a marginally talented writer, unintentional comedian, and future corpse.
And that last one, I mean, she's making a sort of joke, I guess, but that actually does get to the point because she's saying she's a future corpse.
She's not a future heavenly spirit.
She's not a future reincarnated spirit or whatever.
She's a corpse.
Her view of the world is a materialist view.
And so for her, the thoughts and prayers are meaningless and people who offer them are jerks.
From the Twitter account, Progress of a Kind.
And all of these accounts have a lot of followers.
F your thoughts and prayers.
Seriously, there is no more insincere, meaningless comment in American history.
It's a disgusting cliche.
Now, I can think of a few insincere ones.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.
You can keep your doctor if you like your doctor.
They go on and on and on.
I did not have sex with that woman.
There are a lot of empty statements that have been made in recent political history.
But thoughts and prayers, perhaps this person really does think that they're empty.
Obviously, they're not empty.
But to someone with a materialist view, perhaps that's the case.
Then the Democratic senator from Connecticut, my former senator, says, quote, this must stop.
It is positively infuriating that my colleagues in Congress are so afraid of the gun industry that they pretend there aren't public policy responses to this epidemic.
There are, and the thoughts and prayers of politicians are cruelly hollow if they are paired with continued legislative indifference.
It's time for Congress to get off its ass and do something.
There's a lot of stupidity in that statement, obviously, the standing up to the NRA. The NRA represents the 100 million Americans who have guns.
The huge portion of this country that uses its Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and a larger percentage of the country that supports that right, that supports that important civil right.
But for Congress to get off its ass, that's the statement that's going around.
And for the thoughts and prayers to be cruelly hollow, why are they cruelly hollow?
Now, I think the reason that they think it's cruelly hollow is because they don't believe in God.
If you believe in God, then your prayers aren't hollow, they're prayers.
Everybody for all of history has prayed to God and they aren't hollow in traditional religious observance.
If you think there isn't a God, then they are hollow.
They actually are cruel because to those people, there is a public policy solution.
That's what Chris Murphy says.
There's a policy solution.
It's so easy.
Let's just take away all your guns.
That's the subtext.
We take away all the guns.
We get rid of the Second Amendment.
We undo federalism.
And then it's so easy.
And then these events won't occur.
These highly emotional, disastrous events won't occur.
Now...
What they're presuming is that something can be done.
There are about 30,000 gun deaths a year in the United States.
Two-thirds of them are suicide.
They're predominantly middle-aged men who are killing themselves.
If we get rid of the guns, those guys aren't going to kill themselves?
There's more than one way to do it.
Dorothy Parker wrote a poem about it.
What about mental illness?
What about despair?
Which law is going to fix despair?
Which public policy solution?
Which technocratic advancement is going to stop people from viewing their culture and their life as meaningless?
Now, if we could reduce these gun deaths by getting rid of the Second Amendment, getting rid of the Federalist system, coming state to state, town to town, house to house, and taking everybody's guns, what would that do to other crime?
What would that do to rape, burglary, assault?
Would those numbers remain the same if only the bad guys had guns?
What would that mean for our relationship to the government?
What would that mean about how we view ourselves, about how we view ourselves as citizens, as individuals with dignity?
I have some thoughts on all of this, but I will save it for the final thought, because right now we have to cover something, obviously...
Much more important than how we view ourselves as a nation in this tragedy.
We have to talk about these stupid football players getting on their knee again this weekend.
We actually have to cover it because for some reason this is a major news story.
And it does say something about our culture.
Now, I have tried to get this interview with Mary Lane, who has an interesting perspective and who thinks that the football protests in Germany played a large role in the right-wing electoral winning in that country.
We finally got the interview.
We had to do it offline, but we'll cut to it now and hear her take.
Now we finally have to turn our attention to Mary Lane.
Mary is an excellent journalist.
She's been with Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Associated Press.
She's now writing a book about Nazi art.
And yesterday we tried to interview Mary because she has an interesting perspective From Germany on the relation between football protests and national politics and nationalism.
Apparently, America isn't the first country to deal with this.
Obviously, there was some Zuckerbergian conspiracy to keep us apart that would not allow us to discuss this hot-button social issue.
But so what?
We've got you back today.
Mary, explain the entire situation to us and give us some context on how Take a Knee relates to politics.
Yeah, so I think, as with many things, Americans think they invented things, but actually this whole politicizing of sports and the fact that it has to be with national pride and something that should be a system of unity and even the word Antifa actually originated in Germany.
That's so interesting.
So you saw this happen.
That is really funny.
Those Germans are so efficient.
I guess they just do all these terrible things first.
So Antifa started there, anti-fascistische in Germany.
Then now we have Antifa.
And the politicizing of sports started in Germany, and now we have it here.
What happened in Germany?
How did the sports issue come up?
Yeah, so essentially this started in, I mean, a little bit of background is that So in 2006, Germany got this chance to host the World Cup.
And they were so excited, obviously, they're really into soccer, they call it football.
But it also brought up this problem because every other country that's hosted the World Cup has seen it as this triumph of their national pride.
And they're so, like, the ultimate dream of a football player in any country, soccer player, is to sing the national anthem for the World Cup on their own soil.
And this was never a problem before, but in Germany, the national anthem since World War II was so associated with Nazis.
That's Deutschland, Uber Alice, right?
Yeah.
Unfortunately...
Exactly.
So, after World War I, they came up with the song, and then after World War II, they decided to keep the song, but use the third verse, which is about unity and freedom and justice, which sounds anodymed, but the fact that they kept the same tune was, like, really awkward.
And at least they took out the verse about just killing everybody in the world, especially the Jews, which is really good.
That's a lyrical improvement.
It's progress.
But a big problem in 2006 was that in every other country, a politician would have said, like, I'm so proud to be South African and that the World Cup is in South Africa.
In Germany, even Angela Merkel, who has been the chancellor for 12 years, to this day will never be caught dead saying the sentence, I'm proud to be German.
And even the phrase, like, so I've been in Germany nine and a half years.
I could technically become German.
But you would never say in German, say I get a German passport.
I would never say, and I would have to give up my American one, so I'd be full German.
You would never linguistically say in German, I have become German.
Ich bin Deutsch geworden.
Well, this raises an interesting point about American exceptionalism, too.
One can become an American because the country was settled by...
My dear ancestors, my religious extremist ancestors, who came from the UK through Leiden to America.
Then there came the Scots-Irish, the Irish.
There were American Indians who integrated.
The first people we saw were Samoset and – what's the other guy's name?
Squanto.
And obviously there were black slaves who came over.
So it's a country that doesn't really have an ethnic identity per se.
Whereas Germany, when you think of a German, you get an image in your mind.
When you think of a Frenchman, you get a much more pathetic image in your mind.
And so on and so forth.
In 2010, there were problems because so...
And this is where we get to Antifa.
Antifascismus.
They call it Antifa.
Is that this Turkish family in Germany, in Berlin, in an area where people with Turkish backgrounds and annoying students and tourists have been together since the 1950s, they saved up and got a 22-meter, so what is that, like 60-foot flag?
I don't know.
I'm completely unfamiliar with the metric system, but sure, I'll take you for it.
60-foot, sure.
So they put it over all four stories of their house, this German flag.
And they'd been from Lebanon, and they had become German citizens.
And they were so proud!
Right.
And it got torn.
It became this national show.
Sorry.
Because people were tearing it down, but it wasn't Nazis or far-right people tearing it down.
It was Antifa.
It was the left.
The left was upset that the immigrants were grateful toward the country that had taken them in.
So essentially, that's what bled over because, you know, people saw this brutal in 2010 and that's when the far-right party and obviously Antifa in Germany It started blooming.
But then in 2013, the off day, the far-right party, only got 4.7% of the vote.
And everyone was like, phew, because you have to get 5% to do parliamentary representation.
But off day was like, hey, we're a really new party, and we got 4.5% with no funding.
Watch out, guys, because 2017 is coming.
And then, lo and behold, the World Cup happens in 2014.
And then Germany pummels Brazil 7 to 1.
And Brazil was the home country.
And, you know, there were no foul play going on.
It was just like Germany was the better team.
And normally you would be so excited to be beating the home country.
I mean, they would be bummed out.
But Brazil was bummed out, but they weren't saying, like, oh, you're racist or something.
And besides, they were colonized by the Portuguese anyway.
And Germans in the bar were depressed.
They wanted to win, but once I got to about 4-1, they were like, oh my god.
Oh my god.
This is almost the worst colonization that we've engaged in in hundreds of years.
I know!
Oh my gosh.
And I thought, you know, trying to be a reasonable person, I was like, you know, anecdotal evidence is not pure evidence.
But the plural of anecdote is data.
It is true.
And then the next day I go in the newspapers.
Germany has a very wide newspaper industry.
So every major city's newspaper is widely distributed.
And every single one was like ashamed of the fact that they beat them so badly.
The Western self-flagellation is endlessly stunning.
It never ceases to amaze me.
But now, if this is all happening there, if politics is downstream of culture, we see this happening in Germany 10 years later, 11 years later, what can we look forward to in the United States?
For conservatives, there's a lot of good news.
But there's also some interesting, if you look, say, yeah, down the road, consequences of culture.
So basically, the establishment parties that didn't want to take a side on either Of the Anthem problems.
They had their worst results.
And that meant that the Miracles Party is still reigning.
She's going to be having 16 years of consecutive power now.
But she has to team up with these kind of smaller parties, the FDP and the Greens.
What's good for America out of that is that the Greens are really big Russia hawks.
And they're going to be less oppositional to the idea of spending money on NATO and really stepping up their game for that.
The FDP is really good news for America because they are for small businesses and they are for less regulation.
But the problem is that since so many people are divided, there might be so much internal gridlock that getting into these great benefits for America may not happen.
Mary, thank you so much for being here.
That's a really interesting perspective, and nobody's talking about it, but it's pretty scary to think about.
It is pretty strange the analogy too when you think about the crazy leftist culture, the lefties ripping down symbols of national pride and the push rightward that then the culture engages in and how perhaps internal gridlock makes it difficult to do anything.
Something to watch out for.
I guess it's just things that are coming up in the United States.
Maybe it won't take as long as Germany did.
Okay, now it is time to move to our panel of deplorables.
And do we have an excellent one today?
We have from The Daily Wire, Amanda Presto-Giacomo.
Also from The Daily Wire, we have Jacob Berry.
And from The Daily Caller, we have Amber Athe.
Now, our first question is going to you, Amanda.
I don't want to harp on this too much, but we're talking about political gridlock.
We're talking about Hillary Clinton moving in on this issue immediately, trying to politicize this tragedy immediately.
President Trump is not exactly an orthodox political player.
Could we see any gun control coming out of this White House?
I mean, yes, he's not politically orthodox in any way.
But the thing is, is that the NRA backed President Trump really early on, and they poured millions of dollars into his campaign.
This is like in the primary.
And they're still pushing out a lot of ads for President Trump against the protests against him, etc.
So, Sure, I never know what President Trump is going to do.
I know there are a lot of calls on the left for crackdowns on this.
They're going to exploit the heck out of this tragedy.
But the NRA has really been there for President Trump, so it would be pretty surprising to me if he does kind of crack down on this.
Let's hope.
And, you know, it is true that he's not an orthodox political player, but he's been pretty good and in some ways more conservative than I think many of the ostensibly more conservative candidates would have been in office.
All right, enough about this tragedy.
Sorry, your last point, Amanda.
Oh, yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, DACA kind of threw me for a loop.
That's the only reason why I, like, hold some reservation.
I thought he was going to use that at least to get, like, funding for the wall, but that didn't happen.
He just kind of tossed it to Congress.
So I have a little hesitation, but it wouldn't really make sense for him to go at this gun control point.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
Okay, on to news.
John Kasich announced that he might leave the Republican Party.
He was sucking up to Jake Tapper and explained, quote, If the party can't be fixed, Jake, then I'm not going to be able to support the party.
Period.
That's the end of it.
Amanda, this of course raises one question.
John Kasich's a Republican?
Yes.
That's news to me.
We're all learning this for the first time.
The best part about this is that in that interview, he was talking about how, you know, basically how Trumpism has taken over the Republican Party.
And, you know, we're anti-immigrant now.
Oh, let me clutch my pearls.
The thing is, during the primary, John Kasich stayed in the race to basically, you know, essentially give Donald Trump that nomination.
He killed Cruz.
He stayed in so long that he totally destroyed Cruz's chances.
100%.
And he basically gave President Trump the nomination.
So it's all about John Kasich.
I don't believe anything he says.
He clutches his pearls when he knows it bodes well with his Ohio constituents.
But he doesn't really care.
If he did care about this, he wouldn't have basically clinched a nomination for President Trump during the primary.
It's a bunch of nonsense.
Amber, this seems to me like a classic example of...
I'm a conservative, but I'm not that kind of a conservative-ism, which is very prevalent.
I've noticed it on campuses.
I've noticed it in polite conversation.
People say, well, I'm a conservative, but I don't support President Trump.
Please like New York Times.
Please, please like me.
How prevalent is this phenomenon on the right?
Well, it's definitely prevalent enough to pose a problem to President Trump, as we saw with the repeal and replace of Obamacare.
It really only took three or four of those so-called not that kind of conservatives to kill the repeal and replace effort.
And then when you look at the media, it's the same exact thing.
You'll have former Bush staffers getting their cushy gigs at MSNBC and CNN, where all they have to do is trash Trump and they get, you know, their little Six-figure salary after they got out of the Bush administration.
So then you have not only the liberals posing a media challenge to Trump, but also these so-called Republicans, including John Kasich, who are just trying to, you know, oppose anything Trump does, it doesn't matter what it is, just so that they can be accepted by the mainstream media.
Yeah, there's a woman named Anna Navarro who goes on these channels, you know her, and she says that she's a Republican strategist.
That's just the term, by the way, if you don't do anything but you want to blab about politics.
She worked for McCain, by the way.
Yeah, I mean, she has been associated with these more left-wing campaigns, John Huntsman, John McCain, that sort of thing.
I'm actually surrounded by the man who's advising John Weaver as well.
But, you know, someone like Anna Navarro, it seems like her only job is to attack Republicans while nominally being a Republican.
Jacob, is there any place for these squishy liberal moderates in the Republican Party?
Yes, it's called a primary.
My wife described John Kasich the best during the 2016 GOP primary.
She said he's the guy who showed up to the party uninvited and then refused to leave.
That's exactly John Kasich.
And for him to just go on this virtue signaling and, look, I'm not Trump's biggest fan.
I think he's doing a great job so far.
I know I am Trump's biggest fan.
You couldn't possibly be Trump's biggest fan.
Well, maybe you and John Nolte are tied.
But seriously, John Kasich and people like Anna Navarro, they make me ashamed of being a non-Trump advocate.
You know, it's kind of like, oh, guys, just sit down and shut up.
They do.
They make you want to—you don't want to defend Trump because of Trump.
You want to defend it because his critics are so shrieky and frustrating.
And they make us who are against Trump from a conservative angle think, oh, maybe we should back Trump.
Right.
Absolutely right.
In other news, U.S. manufacturing activity has hit a 13-year high, Covfefe, Covfefe.
Construction spending is up.
Reuters is reporting that in September there is strong gains in new orders, raw material prices, and points to the underlying strength in the economy, even as Hurricane Harvey and Irma are expected to dent growth in the third quarter.
So, Amber...
Is this the winning that Trump promised us?
Or are you sick and tired of winning?
Definitely not sick and tired of winning.
We'll never get sick and tired of it.
But it definitely does sound like winning in terms of what Trump campaigned on and what a lot of his supporters were hoping for when they voted for him.
As we know, a lot of Trump supporters were those blue collar, blue dog Democrats who previously voted for Barack Obama.
And then switch to vote for Trump because they were hoping that he was able to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States.
So this is, you know, a really good win for those people who said, maybe we don't love Trump's personality, but we really like the fact that he's sort of campaigning for this forgotten man in middle America.
Yeah, for this forgotten man, you know, between Los Angeles and New York, you know, a little sliver of America.
This forgotten subject called the economy.
You're absolutely right.
But what about the trans bathrooms that we all care about?
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Jacob, some are saying that the reason that the manufacturing growth has surged is because of these hurricanes as a response to some are saying that the reason that the manufacturing growth has surged Is that true?
Are the hurricanes playing a role, or are they just trying to take away the White House's credit?
I think they're trying to take away the White House's credit, honestly.
And of course, you'll always see an uptick in manufacturing after some sort of disaster.
I know war is really good for manufacturing, but in all honesty, I think that this is just an attempt to take credit away from Trump's economic policies, which you have to admit are doing some good for our economic situation.
I'm almost sick and tired of winning, but enough about that.
Let's talk about ridiculous things that don't really seem to matter and little trivialities on campuses.
Schools across the UK are doing away with the terms BC and AD in favor of BCE, before the Common Era, and CE, Common Era, to denote precisely the same thing, same dates.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has blasted the move as shameful, and reporting has made it clear that Muslim and Jewish leaders, quote, were also mystified, saying that they were not offended by the familiar terms.
The familiar terms meaning anno domini, the year of our Lord.
Now, this was happening even when I was in high school, and this gets to the heart of my theory of leftism, which is that leftists want the form of the thing, but they don't want the essence of it.
So they want the form of Western civilization.
They literally want its mode of dating itself, but they don't want the heart of it, which is Christianity, Anno Domini.
The year zero denotes the year that a man named Jesus Christ was born.
So does this matter?
Amanda, is it just a minor thing?
A couple of letters, no big deal.
It's no big deal, right?
Yeah.
So this is kind of what the left does.
I mean, they always push these boundaries.
This kind of reminds me of when there's a monument of the Ten Commandments and nobody complains about it except some random liberal activist group, you know, six states away, and then they take it down.
I mean, they want to disassemble any semblance or anything resembling Judeo-Christian values that basically built Western civilization.
They want it gone.
And as we saw just recently with the The whole debate over Civil War monuments, it's always going to go way too far.
I mean, they were talking about taking down statues of Robert E. Lee, and then two days later, an Asian guy from ESPN was losing gigs.
I mean, it's never going to stop.
Poor Mr.
Robert Lee.
Yeah, so, I mean, this is just step one, which is ridiculous, and it's going to keep on going.
Amber, nobody in the Jewish or Muslim communities in the UK seems to be offended by the terms with which we date our civilization.
Is anybody actually offended by this?
Who is offended by this?
Or is this another classic example of people pretending to be offended on other people's behalf?
Yeah, I think most of it is just classic virtue signaling from, as Amanda said, these sort of small, fringe liberal groups.
And I know this is true because these groups will attack people who are supposed to be offended but aren't offended.
A great example of this, when I was in college, someone actually made a sandwich joke about women on Facebook, and I thought it was hilarious.
I laughed at it.
Do you remember the joke?
No, you don't have to tell me.
Not specifically, but it was funny.
And someone accused me of having internalized misogyny because I laughed at the joke.
So it's all about these people getting mad because they're like, oh, well, how dare you for not being so happy that I'm offended for you?
Can't you see how good of a person I'm being?
Yeah.
It's true.
And it's actually harder for us men, by the way, because we eat the sandwiches and then further internalize the misogyny.
It's a vicious, vicious cycle.
Jacob, what about the separation of church and state?
Come on, man.
Aren't we supposed to keep church and state separate?
Freedom of religion?
Is it really right for us to be dating our calendars by the name of Jesus?
Well, if it wasn't for Christians or the church, there would be no calendar.
The Julian calendar was off, I think, something by three weeks, which is what they had before the Gregorian calendar.
So you're welcome.
Thank you, Jacob.
I appreciate it.
It's very kind of you.
But I just think that it's just virtue signaling.
It's nothing but showboating.
Personally, you should see some of the alternative calendars they've been suggesting.
And BCE and CE is just kind of the easiest ones, but they've been suggesting ones where they start marking the years by 10,000.
So this year would actually be 1,217.
I mean, they're just, or 12,017.
I mean, they're just ridiculous. - Yeah, and you have to date it by Lord Zinu, and there are a lot of competing metrics.
And you bring up another good point.
So you bring up the point that without Christianity, without Christianity, We wouldn't have this calendar.
Exactly.
But we also wouldn't have separation of church and state.
Christ says, render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, to God that which is God's.
And obviously our civilization is Christian.
It's been formed by Christianity.
Our country is Christian.
It was formed by Christian ideals of natural law and natural rights.
So without that, we simply wouldn't have anything to be arguing about in the first place.
Okay, panel.
Get out of here, you.
It's been very fun having you.
Amber Athey, Amanda Prestigiacomo, and Jacob Berry.
Now it is time to put on my smart glasses for the final thought.
Ben had a good piece up on Daily Wire today called "Where Does Evil Come From?" In it, he describes psychologist Roy Baumeister's four categories of evil, instrumentality, threatened egotism, idealism, and sadism, and he adds his own mental illness.
What does evil look like?
What form does evil take?
How does evil express itself in the mind are important psychological questions that emotionally manipulative Democrat politicians willfully ignore when they capitalize on human tragedy to push largely unconnected policy agendas.
But it's a good question, too.
Where does evil come from?
That question is not ultimately a psychological problem.
It's a philosophical problem.
And the answer to that question lies at the heart of the political debates that began seconds after the news of the Las Vegas tragedy were reported.
For utopians on the left, evil comes from bad public policy.
Tweak a few laws here, give the government some more power there, and we'll be right back in paradise, they say.
Imagine all the people.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
The rest of us know that this is nonsense, that the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth.
We are fallen and banished from earthly paradise.
And wherever there are men, there will be evil.
No government policy or agency can redeem mankind.
But idealists persist in their delusion because it's far nicer to delude ourselves into thinking that a law can eradicate all evil than it is to face the grotesqueries that we glimpse in the mirror.
