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Aug. 5, 2019 - The Michael Knowles Show

47:24

Ep. 392 - Very Terrible People On Both Sides

Leftist partisans rush to blame Trump and conservatives for recent shootings. Conservatives disavow any connection. We examine the reality. Then, the Democratic Socialists of America fail to topple capitalism, and Tarantino deliver in Once Upon A Time. Date: 08-05-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	In El Paso, Texas, an eco-fascist slaughtered 20 people in a shopping mall shooting.
	The next day in Dayton, Ohio, a socialist, Satanist leftist slaughtered nine people, including his own sister at a bar.
	Leftist partisans rushed to blame Trump and conservatives.
	Conservatives, eager to fight the unfair attacks, want to disavow any connection whatsoever to the ideology of the El Paso shooter.
	We will examine the reality.
	There are very terrible people on both sides.
	How could these attacks have been prevented?
	How can they be prevented in the future?
	President Trump weighs in, and we weigh in on his weighing in.
	Then, the Democratic Socialists of America try to topple capitalism at their national convention, but fail to even finish the announcements without infighting over pronouns and phony grievances.
	Finally, Quentin Tarantino delivers in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
	All that and more.
	I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
	So much to get to today.
	Obviously horrific shootings over the weekend in Texas and in Ohio.
	And the way it's played out has been so predictable.
	You had these two shootings, apparently both motivated by ideology, one very clearly by ideology, and that's a mostly right-wing ideology, though not a totally right-wing ideology.
	Then the second shooting appears to have been motivated by an almost exclusively left-wing ideology.
	And in response, the left, not the right, the left blamed its political opponents on the right.
	This was not a both sides are throwing blame.
	The left totally unfairly blamed the right for this.
	And then the right, in reacting to it, wanted to disavow any connection, obviously, to the Texas shooting in particular.
	And so they said the guy's ideology has nothing to do with conservatism, has nothing to do with the right.
	The reality is a little more complicated than that.
	And the hard truth is there are terrible people on both sides of the aisle.
	So we'll get into a little bit of exactly what motivated each shooting.
	Because the broad narrative is what the left wants to promote.
	So the left just wants its own narrative, no details, no specificity, so that it can ram through its own policy goals.
	Details are the enemy of the left.
	And we'll get into the details and we'll get into Trump's response, which I thought generally was very good, though there were a couple issues with it.
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	Let's get into the details here.
	What happened in El Paso?
	This was the first shooting.
	A 21-year-old shooter opened fire at the Cielo Vista Mall.
	At least 20 people were killed.
	Hopefully no more people are killed.
	A lot of people were injured though.
	27 injured.
	The shooter posted a manifesto online and it appears to be authentic and it's circulated around the internet now.
	Websites are trying to take it down.
	The, as some people are saying, don't read the manifesto.
	I don't believe that.
	That's not my reaction to it.
	I always read the manifesto.
	I always want to know as much information as I can as to why these people committed these crimes.
	You can't always believe the shooters.
	Often they're a little crazy.
	Often they're liars.
	But to just say that it's senseless violence is to put your head in the sand.
	Because when these shooters tell you that they have a reason for what they're doing, We ought to at least take that seriously.
	When the 9-11 hijackers say we have a reason that we're doing what we're doing, it's because we believe our religion is telling us to topple these two towers.
	You at least have to take that seriously.
	You can't just put your fingers in your ears and say, la la la, I don't believe it.
	It's senseless.
	So what does the shooter say motivated him in El Paso?
	The manifesto is short.
	It's about four pages.
	And the ideology that he embraces is something called eco-fascism.
	Now, the left is saying this is a completely right-wing ideology.
	The left is blaming Trump for this shooter.
	The shooter himself says, don't blame Trump.
	I believe these things long before Donald Trump ever entered the political scene.
	The reality of this ideology is that it's a little bit right-wing and it's a little bit left-wing.
	So, basically, neither side right now is correct.
	The left is saying it's all right wing.
	A lot of conservatives are saying this guy has nothing to do with the right.
	He's only a leftist.
	Neither is really telling the truth.
	Or neither, at least, is really getting it right.
	They might think they're telling the truth, but they're not.
	Eco-fascism does not neatly fit on the left or on the right.
	So in some ways, it's very associated with the right.
	It's anti-illegal immigration.
	It's anti-immigration broadly.
	It has this very racist category, which, again, doesn't cut right or left, but it has this very racial bigoted category, which is he's anti-race mixing.
	He's not exactly a white supremacist, but he's certainly a white nationalist or a white segregationist.
	He wants there to be different areas of the country for different races.
	So at the base of his politics is racial essentialism.
	This would be categorized under the label alt-right.
	If you want to know more about what the alt-right actually is, not just what Hillary Clinton pretends that it is, but if you want to know what the term at least once used to mean, you can check out my PragerU video on this topic.
	Alt stands for alternative.
	It's an alternative version of the right to what we would consider a more traditional conservatism.
	I mean, they're calling it right wing.
	He identifies as right wing.
	In many of his policy prescriptions or policy preferences, he probably would be considered right wing.
	So in that way, the right does have an association with him.
	But the eco part is this intense environmentalism, which would be these days exclusively found on the left.
	And it's a fascism rooted in the environment.
	So he totally buys into the global warming alarmism.
	He says corporations are destroying our environment.
	Politicians of both parties are destroying our environment.
	We need to save our environment now.
	It's an intense environmentalism, which is strongly on the left.
	Though this kind of environmentalism has had a tie to fascism for a long time.
	There's what has now become a cliche, which is the observation that Hitler was a vegetarian.
	He was a fascist.
	He killed all of these people.
	He was a horrible mass murderer.
	And yet he wouldn't kill an animal because he was a vegetarian.
	There is a strain of fascism that embraces this.
	Because fascism, especially as the Nazis talked about it, was blood and soil.
	So the idea that it's not just about the race, but it's about the geography, the soil.
	We need to protect our natural environment, and it can be taken to this insane extreme, which is basically sacrificing even our own humanity to preserve the collective natural environment.
	That's the ideology.
	That's about as, I mean, we could go into this for two hours, but I think that's the broad view of the ideology.
	It's got a lot of components of the right, this love of tradition, want to preserve the nation.
	It's got a lot of aspects of the left, this hyper-environmentalism, even at the expense of human flourishing.
	That, beyond the ideology, what can we look to?
	Well, like so many mass shooters, this guy comes from a broken home.
	Before I even knew it, I read the manifesto and I said, you know, before I exclusively ascribe this to ideology, let me just Google shooter's name, Divorce.
	Guess what?
	The parents of this guy divorced when he was 13.
	The father has written extensively about his 40 years of drug addiction.
	So obviously the father was just a total degenerate for much of this kid's life.
	And this often happens.
	Beneath the kind of political level, there is a cultural level.
	Something just wasn't right with this kid.
	Kid, now adult, but when he was a kid, certainly when they divorced.
	We see this beyond just mass shootings.
	We see this in the regular homicides that happen all the time.
	We see this in gang violence.
	Often one explanation of gang violence is these kids come from broken homes.
	They have no fathers at home.
	Yep, looks like that may have been at play here.
	Now, in this case, the suspect was apprehended alive.
	So he wasn't killed, even though he wished to be killed in his manifesto.
	So he'll likely face the death penalty, as he should.
	And we'll get into what President Trump has to say about that in just a second.
	But moving over to the next day's mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio...
	Same thing.
	Young guy, 24-year-old young man, opened fire in an Ohio bar on Sunday.
	At least nine people dead, including his sister, and 27 people injured.
	Now, on the surface, these events look kind of similar.
	Young white men.
	So the media, irresponsible media, irresponsible Democratic candidates for president, irresponsible leftist pundits, have been saying they're both obvious white supremacy.
	There's no evidence that the second shooter was a white supremacist or a fascist or in any way associated with the right.
	Actually, when you look at his social media pages, it looks as though he was a radical leftist.
	He described himself as a Satanist.
	He described himself as a socialist.
	He described himself as a leftist.
	This is what he said.
	He wrote, quote, I want socialism, and I'll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.
	When President Trump won in 2016, he said, this is bad.
	He wrote, quote, vote blue for God's sake.
	He wrote, F. John McCain.
	Bizarrely, this guy actually wrote in favor of gun control and leftist gun policies.
	After the Parkland shooting happened, he tweeted out, quote, this is America.
	Guns on every corner, guns in every house.
	No freedom but that to kill.
	He apparently tweeted to Rob Portman, the Republican senator, quote, Hey Rob, how much did they pay you to look the other way?
	17 kids are dead.
	If not now, when?
	Obviously something snapped in this guy's ideology or in his mental faculties or likely both.
	Who does he endorse?
	Elizabeth Warren.
	He says, Warren, I'd happily vote for.
	He said, kill every fascist.
	There you see a lot more violence creeping in.
	Cut the fences down, meaning the border wall and the border detention centers.
	Slice ice tires, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
	Throw bolt cutters over the fences.
	And he listed his pronouns as he and him.
	So this guy was a radical leftist.
	You don't see that in the mainstream news coverage.
	But there's not a hint of anything right-wing or of white supremacy or any of that.
	He's obviously a radical leftist.
	Now, despicably, cynical leftist politicians and pundits and commentators are In reality, one of these shootings was perpetrated by probably a Trump supporter, anti-immigration advocate and white supremacist and all those other things.
	But at least on the policy level, we know he was opposed to immigration.
	So I guess very likely he would prefer President Trump to some open borders politician, right?
	That's one of the shooters.
	And then the other shooting was perpetrated by a radical leftist who explicitly endorsed Elizabeth Warren.
	Now, in reality, neither of these were caused by Trump or Warren or Bernie Sanders or any of these other politicians.
	These people are responsible for their own actions.
	But that didn't stop the left, and just the left, exclusively the left, from using these barely cold dead bodies to push their own hack, cynical political agendas.
	Here's what Elizabeth Warren tweeted out, quote, We need to call out white nationalism for what it is, domestic terrorism.
	It is a threat to the United States, and we've seen its devastating toll this weekend.
	And we need to call out the president himself for advancing racism and white supremacy.
	Okay, if you believe that, if you believe that premise, which I don't, I don't believe the premise that when mass shooters quote politicians, the politicians are responsible for the shooting.
	But if you believe that premise, then you need to apologize for the shooting in Ohio, don't you?
	You need to bear responsibility for the shooting in Ohio, Elizabeth Warren.
	Because the shooter in Ohio explicitly endorsed you.
	Now, she won't do that because she doesn't care.
	Doesn't care about the victims.
	Doesn't care about the policy.
	Doesn't care about any of it other than promoting herself in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries in a way that is absolutely disgusting, even by the measure of presidential politics.
	I understand.
	In presidential political campaigns, people are going to just...
	Use and exploit events for disgusting purposes.
	This is especially disgusting.
	And Elizabeth Warren should be ashamed of herself.
	If she had the capacity for shame, she would feel shame.
	But she doesn't.
	She's the whitest woman in America who pretended to be an Indian Native American for her entire career.
	In a way that would take jobs away from Native Americans, in a way to look with her white face, look people dead in the eye and say, I am a Cherokee Indian, give me preferential treatment at Harvard and in the Texas bar.
	I mean, that sort of shameless person would absolutely have no problem using barely cold dead bodies for her own political purposes.
	But she's not the only one.
	I don't mean only to single out Elizabeth Warren here.
	AOC and Bernie Sanders get in on the disgusting exploitation before President Trump shows up as the only adult in the room.
	We'll get to that in a second.
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	So it's not just the shameless Elizabeth Warren exploiting dead bodies for her own personal gain.
	Uh, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did it too.
	She tweeted out, In response to the suggestion that video games and other cultural aspects that celebrate violence might have played some role in this shooting, she tweets out, Video games aren't causing mass shootings.
	White supremacy is.
	Sadly, the GOP refuses to acknowledge that because their strategy relies on rallying a white supremacist base.
	That's why the president has stadiums of people chanting, send her back, and targets Congress members of color.
	Okay, if you believe this premise, if you believe this premise that anyone who holds an idea that is also held...
	Well, actually, no, I'm sorry.
	What is the idea?
	The idea is white supremacy, right?
	So, I'm sorry, I must have gotten a little confused there for a second.
	Because she's ascribing white supremacy to President Trump.
	President Trump has repeatedly condemned white supremacy.
	He's repeatedly condemned racism.
	How many times a year does this guy condemn racism?
	Which conservative member of Congress, of the Senate, the President, which Governor, which of them says, I'm a white supremacist?
	I love white supremacy.
	None of them.
	Zero.
	Boop.
	Nada.
	None of them do.
	But let's take her premise at its word and let's just replace white supremacy with socialism.
	Yes, socialism.
	Okay, because we know that the shooter in Ohio was a leftist, socialist, satanist.
	Okay, let's see.
	Video games aren't causing mass shootings.
	Socialism is.
	Oh, remember actually the guy who shot up the congressional baseball game was a Bernie bro socialist.
	Sadly, the GOP Democrats refuse to acknowledge that because their strategy relies on rallying a socialist base.
	That's why the Congresswoman from Queens hosts rooms of people chanting, I don't know, socialism, bring us socialism, tax the rich, soak the rich, and targets Congress members of baseball games.
	See how easy that is?
	See, in the case of AOC's tweet, It didn't make any sense because no conservative is embracing white supremacy.
	But the shooter in Ohio was an avowed socialist.
	She is embracing socialism.
	She's promoting socialism.
	Tom Perez says she's the head, the future of the Democratic Party.
	So are we going to blame AOC? Are we going to blame Bernie Sanders?
	I don't.
	I don't want to do that.
	But by AOC's logic, looks like AOC needs to take responsibility for the shooting in Ohio.
	And then, of course, there's Bernie Sanders.
	Mr.
	President, stop your racist, hateful, and anti-immigrant rhetoric.
	Your language creates a climate which emboldens violent extremists.
	A Bernie bro shot up the congressional baseball game.
	Do you, Senator Sanders, bear responsibility for the attack on the congressional baseball game that almost murdered Steve Scalise?
	By your logic here, which I don't believe, you, Bernie Sanders, are responsible for almost murdering Steve Scalise.
	Now, they would never accept responsibility because they don't care.
	They're just saying words and words to exploit dead bodies for their political gain.
	Fortunately, President Trump came as the adult in the room.
	And this almost sounds funny because we say President Trump, he sometimes behaves in a childish manner.
	He hurls insults at his opponents.
	He can seem petulant.
	President Trump is far and away the adult in the room in this situation.
	So he shows up and he gives remarks this morning.
	They just came out a couple hours ago.
	Quite good.
	He started out by condemning bigotry explicitly, as it was described in the El Paso Shooters Manifesto.
	Here he is.
	Bigotry and white supremacy.
	These sinister ideologies must be defeated.
	Hate has no place in America.
	Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart, and devours the soul.
	Great.
	Yeah, this was the right thing to say.
	I don't know how he could have said it more clearly.
	Now, the other aspect of why this comment was so great is he didn't go as far as he could have to hammer the left.
	Right?
	He could have easily said racism and white supremacy and bigotry, racial bigotry is absolutely awful.
	And that's what we saw in El Paso.
	Also, Satanism, leftism, and socialism are awful.
	That's what we saw in Ohio.
	Right?
	But he didn't say that.
	And this was smart.
	It shows that he learns.
	It shows that he gets a little savvier.
	Because that would have just been a repeat of there are fine people on both sides.
	Now, even though we know that in Charlottesville, when he said there were fine people on both sides, that he was explicitly condemning neo-Nazism, white supremacism, white nationalism, racism, bigotry, what have you.
	Even though we know that it was totally twisted and politically it still is hurting him.
	If he had said, we condemn racism and bigotry, we condemn Satanism and leftism, I guess he would have been right.
	But he's smart also because there was no leftist manifesto in Ohio, not that we know of.
	So we're pretty certain we know who this guy is.
	I mean, he had a long social media record.
	So we think we have an idea.
	But still, it's not totally clear.
	So we just...
	I mean, President Trump is playing it a little more cautious here.
	He was very smart only to focus on the eco-fascist.
	I mean, he's just gotten savvier about all of this.
	Then he turns his attention on finding solutions.
	So...
	The first solution he offers is probably what most of us were not expecting.
	It's a little bit vague.
	He's just talking about the internet, issues on the internet, and the way that information moves around the internet and the way that people get radicalized on the internet.
	First, we must do a better job of identifying and acting on early warning signs.
	I am directing the Department of Justice to work in partnership with local, state, and federal agencies, as well as social media companies to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike.
	As an example the monster in the Parkland High School in Florida had many red flags against him and yet nobody took decisive action.
	Nobody did anything.
	Why not?
	So the first one is The internet, right?
	There were a lot of these warning signs.
	This is very smart.
	And it's tied to mental health.
	And this is the real trick here.
	So, and he ties it to Parkland, which is really smart.
	There's going to be a great new book coming out very soon on how that Parkland shooting in Florida came to happen.
	There were so many warning signs along the way.
	And the schools did nothing.
	So many warning signs on social media, on the internet, in chat logs.
	Schools did nothing.
	This is a little bit of a dangerous point to bring up because you never want to censor the internet.
	You know, if you start censoring the internet, that can go real wrong real quickly.
	You could all of a, I mean, frankly, the left is already censoring the internet by kicking off conservatives.
	You don't want to get into that kind of world.
	But you do want to be able to use warning signs on the internet.
	You know, this guy in Dayton, Ohio, he apparently had a kill list and a rape list that he would write on the wall of the school.
	People had been chatting about this.
	People knew about this.
	Why didn't someone step in?
	Why didn't someone heed the warning signs?
	This is tied to mental health, which Trump gets to in a second.
	Then Trump gets to his second suggestion, which I think is a little bit weaker.
	I think this is the weakest of all of his arguments, and it has to do broadly with a culture of violence, and specifically video games.
	Second, we must stop the glorification of violence in our society.
	This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace.
	It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence.
	We must stop or substantially reduce this and it has to begin immediately.
	I don't know if this is true.
	I don't know if this is false.
	When I was a kid, I didn't play video games a lot, but there was one violent video game, Grand Theft Auto, that I played for, I don't know, six months or something, and I was playing it.
	And then when I went to learn how to drive...
	I did have this impulse to drive like a maniac.
	I didn't do it, fortunately.
	Well, I mean, I drove like a maniac like all teenagers do, but I didn't, you know, drive like I was in a video game.
	But I did have this impulse.
	I distinctly remember it thinking like, oh, I should swerve into that lane and swerve over here.
	And obviously that had just been kind of bred into my mind because I played this video game a lot for a few months.
	Maybe video games have something to do with it.
	Our culture has always been violent.
	Our pop culture has always been violent.
	I don't think it's the violence itself.
	I think it's the fact that in the old days, the violence had an order to it.
	It had a purpose.
	It had a moral context.
	And today, violence is pretty much nihilistic, random, arbitrary, absurd, senseless.
	I think those are two different things.
	Don't forget...
	Our culture, the three biggest poems that found our entire culture are all war poems.
	The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid.
	They're all about one specific war, which is one of the bloodiest wars ever written about, which is the Trojan War.
	The Aeneid begins, arms and the man I sing.
	I mean, the first lines, I'm going to sing about war and all this gory, crazy violence.
	But that was war with a purpose.
	That was war with a moral universe, a war that had value, a war that had honor and valor and purpose, and even a sense of good and evil.
	The Lone Ranger, one of the biggest shows from the 1950s.
	It's about a good guy getting the outlaws, getting the bad guys.
	But in modern depictions of violence, It's just senseless.
	It's just crazy.
	There might be something there to that cultural problem.
	I think Trump probably has it.
	Then he gets to the key, the biggest issue of all, which is mental health.
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	President Trump then gets to the heart of the matter on the solution.
	This is really correct.
	He's talking about mental health.
	We must reform our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence and make sure those people not only get treatment, but when necessary, involuntary confinement.
	Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun.
	There it is.
	That's the key.
	Involuntary confinement, involuntary commitment of the mentally ill.
	Today, this is taboo on both sides.
	The left doesn't want to do it because the left is completely insane and the left doesn't really even believe in the concept of mental illness.
	They sort of celebrate mental illness.
	They say, let's all talk about our mental illness.
	We're all mentally ill.
	And the right doesn't want to talk about it because we don't want to give the government that much power to involuntarily commit people.
	But this is the key.
	Today it is virtually impossible to do it.
	But in the 1950s we had a peak high of mentally ill confined people.
	Then states began to empty the asylums in the 1960s.
	Actually Ronald Reagan of all people helped that process along.
	He didn't begin the process but he did help it along when he was governor of California.
	And And we need to be able to do it.
	I mean, a huge proportion of these people have clear signs of mental illness, if not all of them.
	And we need to be able to take them off of the street.
	I mean, President Trump makes this great point, which is that guns don't kill people.
	Mentally ill people kill people.
	It's the mental illness, it's the psychological process that leads to the decision to pull that trigger.
	The trigger doesn't just pull itself.
	And it is not just, it is not fair, it is not sustainable to allow dangers to society to be on the street.
	We do it because of a false sense of freedom.
	Because we think freedom just means anything goes.
	It doesn't.
	People who are mentally ill are not capable of freedom.
	Actually, people who are totally uneducated, totally uncultured, totally disengaged from their civilization also are not capable of their freedom.
	The founding fathers and the people who have constructed our republic had a very elevated view of freedom.
	You had to earn your freedom.
	You had to become fit to govern yourself.
	You had to be moral.
	You had to be virtuous.
	You had to be religious.
	You had to be educated.
	You have to be sane in order to have some freedom.
	And if not, then it's not that that liberty will be taken from you.
	It's that you are not capable of that liberty in the first place.
	So that would be a good place to start is building some more mental asylums and throwing people who are a danger to society in them, getting them drugs.
	I mean, one of the reasons why they emptied out in the 1960s and 70s is because we had all these good psychological drugs now and we could cure people.
	So if someone had some mental illness, they'd take a drug.
	It seemed like they were cured.
	So we would let them out of the asylum.
	And then what happens?
	Instantly they stop taking the drugs.
	They wind up on the street.
	Or they wind up to be a threat to others.
	That's one way to do it.
	And then President Trump hits with great moral clarity on what we should do about the killers now.
	Today, I'm also directing the Department of Justice to propose legislation ensuring that those who commit hate crimes and mass murders face the death penalty and that this capital punishment be delivered quickly, decisively, and without years of needless delay.
	Trump has a lot of moral clarity on this issue.
	So one of the guys who shot up the bar in Ohio, he was killed, but the guy who shot up the El Paso, Texas mall was not killed.
	He was apprehended, and he should face the death penalty.
	And he should face the death penalty swiftly.
	You've got to remember, I know it's unpopular these days, there are three purposes of capital punishment.
	Retribution, deterrence, And rehabilitation.
	Now, rehabilitation doesn't seem like it factors in a whole lot in terms of capital punishment.
	It actually does have a role in capital punishment in the sense that it can reform one's mind as he prepares to meet his maker and face the gallows.
	But broadly speaking on criminal justice, those are the three purposes.
	Retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation.
	And retribution is the key.
	An injustice has been committed, and for that injustice, because the civil authority exacts justice for which we have a criminal justice system, the criminal has to be punished just for committing the crime.
	And then there's the deterrence factor.
	So if capital punishment isn't a great deterrent now when we have 30 or 40 year waiting periods to kill people, We need to enact or exact justice rather swiftly.
	We need to do it quickly.
	That will increase the deterrent effect.
	A few facts to keep in mind here as we hear the endless debate that is just beginning.
	You're going to hear gun control brought up a lot.
	There is no gun control law that would have prevented either of these shootings.
	Not one.
	Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you and they're exploiting your emotions to affect their political purposes and they're exploiting dead bodies to affect their political goals.
	There is a reform that could have stopped maybe the Ohio shooting.
	The Ohio shooter had that hit list.
	He had that rape list.
	I mean, he was clearly a demented person.
	He could have been committed to a mental institution.
	He could have been denied his civil liberties.
	He could have been denied his Second Amendment rights.
	He could have been denied other civil liberties, too.
	But that's a mental health issue.
	That's not a gun control issue.
	You can't just take away people's civil rights, Second Amendment rights, willy-nilly just because you don't like them or you don't like the cut of their jib.
	You can take away their civil rights if they are not deemed fit for liberty.
	If they're not deemed fit to behave as individuals in a free society.
	If you commit them to an insane asylum.
	That's what they could have done.
	That's not a gun control law.
	That is a mental health reform.
	Also on gun control, as they tell you, all gun control laws would have fixed it.
	Don't forget, President Trump is sympathetic to gun control.
	He has passed certain gun control measures.
	He actually bragged in his remarks about how after the last big mass shooting in Las Vegas, he banned bump stocks.
	Here's his boast.
	At my direction, the Department of Justice banned bump stocks.
	Last year, we prosecuted a record number of firearms offenses.
	But there is so much more that we have to do.
	Now you see that he accidentally, or maybe intentionally, undermined the argument for gun control there.
	Because we said at the time, when they banned bump stocks after that mass shooting in Las Vegas, I said, this bump stock ban isn't going to do anything.
	It's not going to stop any mass shootings.
	It's completely pointless virtue signaling.
	Looks like I was right.
	The bump stock ban didn't stop this mass shooting.
	It didn't stop either of the mass shootings this weekend.
	It achieved nothing other than to limit people's Second Amendment rights to protect themselves.
	The other thing to keep in mind here, mass shootings are not really on the rise, at least according to the most recent data that we have.
	So New York Magazine, which is not a conservative publication, published a long piece on this in 2014.
	The number of mass shooting incidents that involve four or more fatalities is not really up since 1976, since they've been keeping track of this.
	Number of people killed and the number of incidents has not really increased since 1976.
	It feels like it has, but it hasn't.
	Now what is different here is the media coverage.
	So people are covering this and we all have instant access to media everywhere.
	But what's up is not the incidents themselves.
	It's the media coverage.
	This is not a lot of comfort to victims or families or people who see these images on their TV screens.
	But those are the data.
	Those are the facts.
	And another fact here, which is now unpopular, is that mass shootings are just one tiny aspect of our national misery epidemic.
	Just one tiny aspect of our national problem.
	Neil deGrasse Tyson...
	That leftist scientist, clock that is broken is right twice a day.
	He tweeted this out over the weekend and he's getting a lot of flack for it.
	He tweeted, quote, 250 people to suicide, 200 to car accidents, 40 to homicide via handgun.
	Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.
	290 people killed in just the last 48 hours from homicides and from suicides.
	It's almost 10 times as many people as were killed in those mass shootings occur every two days.
	That's, again, that's no consolation when you see these awful images on TV, but those are the facts.
	Almost ten times as many people killed every two days as were killed in those mass shootings.
	Just in Chicago this weekend, seven people were killed, 59 people were wounded from gun violence.
	Just in Chicago, that's one American city, just this weekend.
	Not a mass shooting, just the way it was.
	And yet, the whole purpose of this hysteria, this sensationalism, This vitriolic exploitation of dead bodies on the left is to get you to stop thinking.
	They don't want you to think.
	They don't want you to look at data.
	They want you to be so riled up by emotion that you do whatever they say.
	You saw these cynical political hacks On television all weekend, they want you to stop acknowledging reality.
	On MSNBC, they had this professor from Princeton, Eddie Glaude, who told people that they actually had to stop using the phrase illegal immigrant because it contributes to mass shootings.
	But it's also important for us to understand the kind of continuity, the line, the connection.
	What does it mean to have a discourse in which people are dehumanized?
	Where you use a phrase like illegal immigrant, where the phrase itself places that person outside of a certain kind of sense of empathy and decency.
	What happens when we use language like infestation, children?
	You use this, Governor.
	Children carrying perhaps disease across the border.
	What happens?
	You set the stage for people who are even more on the extreme to act violently.
	We are in a cold civil war situation.
	We are in a cold civil war.
	And there are some people who bear the burden of it.
	Chuck?
	Listen to how perverse that is.
	Listen to how false everything he said is.
	He said, if you tell the truth, you are responsible for mass murder.
	If you use the phrase illegal immigrant...
	It's not even the best phrase.
	The correct phrase is illegal alien.
	Illegal foreign national in our country.
	If you use that phrase, if you point out that they carry disease and crime over here, you are responsible for mass murder.
	Then he turns the rhetoric up even higher.
	He says that we're in a cold civil war.
	What do you mean a cold war?
	You're talking about a mass shooting, so obviously that's not cold.
	That's hot.
	And over the weekend, you had a radical eco-fascist and you had a radical leftist each commit a mass shooting.
	So it doesn't seem like a cold civil war at all.
	But what he's saying is, you have blood on your hands if you tell the truth.
	This guy goes on television and encourages everyone to lie.
	Allow your emotions to run away with you and lie, lest you calm down, look at the facts coolly, and tell the truth.
	The time is now.
	We can't wait.
	Don't think absolutely despicable emotional exploitation from the left.
	What should we actually do?
	We should grieve.
	We should comfort one another.
	We should accept with resignation, but nonetheless acceptance.
	That we live in a fallen world.
	Even if these mass shooting incidents are not increasing, which they're not.
	Even if gun crime is decreasing, which over a 30, 20, 30 year span it is.
	Even if all those things are true, we live in a fallen world, we will never eliminate murder, hatred, bigotry, violence.
	We won't eliminate any of that.
	This is a broken world, and no utopian scheme promised us by the left is going to do it.
	And no amount of emotional manipulation is going to lead to that utopia, to that paradise.
	Actually, those utopias tend to be hell on earth.
	We should calm down.
	We should accept that tragic fact of life.
	We should comfort one another.
	And then, when we are thinking clearly...
	Once all the emotional exploitation is gone, we should address these issues in a rational manner.
	There is something to be done.
	You could rebuild some mental asylums.
	You could make it easier to involuntarily commit people.
	Those two things would help.
	You could encourage a culture that fixes broken families.
	The vast majority of these mass shooters come from fatherless homes and broken homes.
	You could do all of that.
	You should do all of that.
	You've got to do it in a thinking manner and not allow these sick, cynical, political anglers to exploit your grief and a national grief to their own benefit.
	Before we go, speaking of these cynical anglers, I just want to show the bright side of this.
	We talked about tragedy, now let's talk about farce.
	At the National Democratic Socialists of America Convention in Atlanta, The DSA promised to topple capitalism.
	And they were this close.
	They were so close to doing it, weren't they?
	Except they couldn't get past the announcements because all of the crazed leftists were arguing about pronouns and phony medical conditions and fake grievances.
	And it just, it was absolutely hilarious.
	Take a listen.
	If we want to defeat capitalism, we are going to need a party that will organize working people to fight for the demands that we want and to win socialism.
	Thank you so much.
	Quick point of privilege.
	Quick point of personal privilege.
	Guys, first of all, James Jackson, Sacramento, he, him.
	I just want to say, can we please keep the chatter to a minimum?
	I'm one of the people who's very, very prone to sensory overload.
	There's a lot of whispering and chatter going on.
	It's making it very difficult for me to focus.
	Please, can we just...
	I know we're all fresh and ready to go, but can we please just keep the chatter to a minimum?
	It's affecting my ability to focus.
	Thank you.
	Thank you, comrade.
	Okay, is there a speaker against name, chapter, pronoun?
	Point of personal privilege?
	Yes.
	Please do not use gendered language to address everyone.
	You know, I think they're pretty close.
	They're on the way to toppling capitalism.
	But it's going to be a little longer.
	It's going to take a little bit longer.
	You couldn't see, by the way, in the video when the first guy talks about sensory overload, everyone just raises their hands and starts shaking them.
	But they don't clap because that would be sensory overload.
	But I assume it's not just the auditory sense, right?
	I assume also the visual sense could be overloaded.
	So that, I think, would overload it too.
	And then just the righteous anger of that second guy.
	Could we please stop using gendered pronouns?
	And then I wanted the auditory, the sensory overload guy to get back up and say, please stop yelling so it's too much!
	And they could just get into like a screech-off.
	That's basically what we're seeing in the 2020 Democratic presidential debate anyway.
	This is just the broader version of that.
	I would say, you know, the young people, the university campuses, that's the crystal ball.
	That's what our society is going to look like in 20 years.
	So you are looking at a preview.
	Of the 2048, whatever the year is, Democratic presidential primary debates.
	And it's going to be a whole lot of fun.
	And somebody tells me capitalism's going to win.
	Somebody tells me capitalism's going to survive.
	Before we go, I just have to give a quick little review of Quentin Tarantino's latest movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
	Went to see it last night with Jay Hay and...
	Andrew Klavan and Spencer Klavan, and it was a lot of fun.
	It's a very fun movie.
	It's almost three hours long, but it actually flies through.
	Tarantino's not a great filmmaker, but he's a really good one, so you're never bored all the way through.
	The reason I would encourage people to watch it, I don't know that the film has a lot of meaning.
	It's pretty entertaining, at least by the end.
	But if the film has meaning, I think part of the meaning of it is how Hollywood went so wrong.
	And how in the 1960s and 70s, Hollywood basically cracked up and went just totally off the rails.
	And it's a movie about how it might have avoided that fate.
	How it actually might have...
	Saved itself.
	Tarantino likes to go back and fix history.
	So he goes back and the Jews kill the Nazis and so on.
	The black slaves rise up and kill the white slave owners in the South.
	This is a movie about that too.
	But it's got a profoundly conservative tone to the movie.
	There's a conservative subtext.
	So I'd encourage you all to go see.
	It's pretty fun.
	You'll at least get your money's worth for three hours of Of gratuitous violence and Tarantino Entertainment.
	So it might be worth checking it out.
	At the very least, you'll be able to lament, along with the filmmakers and all of us, the demise of our culture.
	That's our show.
	Come back tomorrow.
	We'll have a lot more to get to.
	We just had to get to this big story today, but much more coming up.
	So tune in tomorrow.
	I'm Michael Knowles.
	This is The Michael Knowles Show.
	See you then.
	See you then.
	hair and makeup by Jesua Olvera, production assistant Nick Sheehan.
	The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2019.
	Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, of course, we'll be discussing the horrific shootings that happened over the weekend.
	But what I want to do is go beyond talking points, go beyond the partisan blame game, and talk instead about what factors are really contributing to this epidemic, especially what new factors in our society might be contributing to this.
	I have a few ideas that I think hopefully get to the heart of the matter, or at least get close to the heart of the matter.

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