“Criminal justice reform” leaves five people dead and 48 injured in Wisconsin, the GOP peddles a radical transgender bill, and mostly peaceful looters empty out three stores in San Francisco.
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At least five people dead, another 48 injured after a man drove his SUV into a Christmas parade.
The man had a long criminal record.
Drugs, battery, domestic abuse.
He was charged just last July with two counts of reckless endangerment and possession of a dangerous weapon as a convicted felon.
But he was released on $500 bail last February.
Then he was charged again just a couple of weeks ago with resisting or obstructing an officer, bail jumping recklessly, endangering safety, disorderly conduct, and battery connected to domestic abuse.
Then he was released just six days after that on a $1,000 bond.
Then he struck again.
Now five people are dead.
This is criminal justice reform in practice.
This is compassion.
This is the compassion being peddled, not just by Democrats, but by many Republicans as well.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Mulder Show.
Welcome back to the show.
My favorite comment yesterday is from SqueebyPlays, who says, The only way to end the endless cycle of sins of the Father is forgiveness.
But who needs forgiveness when you can destroy someone's life for clout?
Right.
We talked about this yesterday.
I mentioned this great thinker, Rene Girard, who has this idea.
That culture begins with a sort of founding murder.
Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus.
And the definition of human culture is mimetic rivalry where we just kind of mimic one another and it gets worse and worse and worse.
And the only way to end it is by scapegoating somebody.
Or with a unanimous ritual killing.
Or with this kind of violence, this war of all against all.
Until Christianity.
Christianity comes in and says, no, we're not going to do that anymore.
We're going to take the side of the victim.
And what does the left say?
Nope.
No thanks.
And we all do it.
See, we all scapegoat.
We're all part of that.
And when we're scapegoating, we're not even aware that we're scapegoating.
Very, very insightful comment.
I'm going to remember that comment.
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The Criminal who killed those people and injured so many more people was out on a $1,000 bond.
He shouldn't have been out on the bond, obviously.
He shouldn't have been out even the last time because he got out on a bail for the last charges.
He's a career criminal.
He's a thug.
He should have been rotting away in prison.
But we have calls for criminal justice reform.
We have calls for leniency.
We have calls openly to abolish prisons.
And we're told this is compassionate.
It's very wrong to lock up dangerous criminals.
It's wrong and it's racist somehow and it's mean-spirited and it's cruel.
And so we've got to let them out.
Because the compassionate thing is to let five people be struck by an SUV. Well, I'm sorry, dozens of people struck by an SUV. Five killed and many, many more injured.
Even the DA in Milwaukee County, John Chisholm, now admits the bail was a little too low.
They were a little too compassionate, don't you think?
Quote, the state's bail recommendation in this case was inappropriately low in light of the nature of the recent charges and the pending charges against this guy, says John Chisholm, the Milwaukee DA. Whoopsie-daisy.
Yep, oops.
It was a little too low.
Ah, yeah, maybe it should have been $2,000.
Oops, whoopsie.
That's it?
That's it?
That now...
No, I don't think that's it.
I think that, first of all, this guy John Chisholm should resign or should be chased out of office.
And I think that we need to take a moment here and pause and figure out what got us into this mess in the first place.
I'm not just throwing blame on everyone.
Obviously, the guy who drove the SUV is the person primarily at fault here.
He's the one who committed the crime.
But how was he permitted to commit that crime?
Through gross negligence.
Through criminal negligence, if you ask me, of our law enforcement, really of our elected officials, and of the people of Milwaukee who voted for these people and who voted for this kind of stuff.
Criminal justice reform.
We've got to be compassionate.
It's not even just Democrats.
I want to do my best to mitigate scapegoating the left here and scapegoating the Democrats.
The Republicans did this too.
Trump peddled this stuff.
You know I love Trump.
I voted for Trump twice.
Big supporter of Trump.
But he peddled this stuff.
Remember the first step act?
Which I referred to at the time and still do as the jailbreak bill?
We were told it's somehow deeply conservative to spring criminals from the clink.
How is that conservative?
Even the Republicans, even right-wing conservative Republicans bought into this lie that we have an over-incarceration problem in the United States.
We got crime spiking.
Crime is going through the roof, especially violent crime.
Up to and including murders.
But obviously we don't have an over-incarceration problem.
We have an under-incarceration problem.
When crime's going up, you have an under-incarceration problem, okay?
So how did we get here?
How did we get to the point where, obviously, the libs were leading the way on it, but how did we get to the point where even the right-wingers were peddling this kind of insanity that leads to such horrific results?
Here is the logic peddled by, articulated by Rashida Tlaib.
She is, I guess she's sort of the George Harrison of the squad.
AOC is McCartney.
Ilhan Omar is John Lennon.
Ayanna Pressley is Ringo.
She's kind of the least important member.
And so I guess Rashida Tlaib is the George Harrison of the squad.
She just sat down with Axios and was questioned about her bill supporting the emptying of prisons.
Here's her argument.
In 2020, you endorsed the Breathe Act, which is a series of proposals to transform America's criminal justice system and create, quote, a roadmap for prison abolition.
The Breathe Act proposes emptying federal detention facilities within 10 years.
To what extent have you wrestled with any potential downsides of releasing into society every single person who's currently in a federal prison?
Yeah, again, I think that everyone's like, oh my god, we're going to just release everybody.
That's not what I'm...
That's what the...
Yeah, but did you see how many people are mentally ill that are in prison right now?
No, I know, but the act that you endorsed actually says release everyone in 10 years.
But in 10 years, but think about it, who will release...
But there are like...
Human traffickers.
Oh, I know.
Child sex.
Do you mean that you don't actually support that?
No.
Because you endorse the bill.
No, I endorse the BREATHE Act and looking at federal policies and how we incarcerate.
Absolutely.
But it says in there...
But you cannot just blankedly say, oh, look, she wants...
That's not what I'm...
But that's like in plain text.
That is what you're saying.
You've got to give it to Jonathan Swan over at Axios.
He is a pretty dogged interviewer, and he's basically fair.
I assume he's on the left, but he's basically fair.
And obviously, he's much, much more intelligent than Rashida Tlaib, who is not the brightest bulb in the pack.
So she endorsed this bill that literally said, empty out the federal prisons.
And so he says, do you really support emptying it out, like child rapists and mother killers and psychos and all these people?
And she said, no, that's not what it says.
And he says, no, it's literally what it says.
And she goes, no, but think about how many mentally ill people there are.
I said, well...
Oh, so you're admitting that you're saying the reason we need to let everyone out is because they're mentally ill, even though there are plenty of criminals who are not mentally ill.
And the ones who are mentally ill, I'm not sure we want them on the streets either if they're criminally insane.
And he says, okay, so you do want to let them all out.
She goes, no, but it's not fair to say we're going to let them all out.
It's going to take 10 years.
Okay, well, what about in 10 years?
Well, no, Jonathan, you're not.
And she can't keep up.
And so she's just got this smile on her face, and she's saying things that don't make any sense.
And he's giving her the out.
He's saying, okay, so you...
We're agreeing you don't want to let every single person, and she won't take the out.
What I'm saying is look at who's in prison now.
No, look at the folks that are mentally ill, that have substance abuse problems.
But I'm not disagreeing with you that there are people who shouldn't be in prison.
Yeah, but then why aren't you asking me about them?
You're asking me about the human traffickers and others that should be able to be held accountable.
What I'm trying to understand is your proposal is so sweeping.
It does release everyone.
And what I'm trying to say to you is- Within 10 years, and obviously there's a process of looking at how can we get away from mass incarceration and move towards care first.
But what I'm trying to understand, because it is such a sweeping concrete proposal, do you believe that there are still- I don't think there's any rehabilitation happening right now for those that might actually have, you know, and again a majority, there's so many that have mental health issues.
She can't say it.
She gets so close to saying it.
And she's saying, stop talking to me about the child rapists.
Let's just talk about the poor drug addicts.
And he says, right, no, but the issue with your bill is not exactly the poor.
It's not mostly the poor drug addicts.
What about the child rapists and the mother killers and the serial killers and the psychopaths?
You're going to let them out too?
Well, no, but you're not.
And then finally, he says, will you at least admit that there are some people Jeffrey Dahmer, just some people who should be in prison.
And she goes, well, I will admit that there are some people, yeah, yeah, who, and we need to look at, and she won't do it.
She won't do it because her logic is not a single person should be in prison.
She says the purpose is rehabilitation.
First of all, that's a purpose of criminal justice, but it's not the primary purpose.
The primary purpose of criminal justice is retribution.
You commit a crime, you are punished to satisfy justice.
A second effect would be rehabilitation.
It's very important, but rehabilitation is not the primary purpose because you need to commit a crime first.
Plenty of people need rehabilitation who haven't committed crimes.
We can't just start sending them to prison.
Deterrence would be another reason, but deterrence is not the primary purpose.
Otherwise, you can just make an example out of anybody.
You can't do that.
But there's a higher threshold.
You've got to commit a crime, and then you send them there to satisfy justice.
And there are other reasons to do it as well.
And I don't want to just say that this woman is an idiot or her moral lens is completely wrong.
She is...
Making this very same argument that we were talking about earlier, about victimhood, about mimetic rivalry, to use the technical term.
She is trying to take the side of the victim, and she's saying the victim in this case are the people who were failed by society, who grew up in bad homes, who had bad examples, and yes, they went to a life of crime, but they're victims too.
Sure, and as a result of that myopic view, she is ignoring the other victims of the criminals.
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Joe Biden.
As the head of the Democrat Party doesn't want any part of this issue in Wisconsin, of this attack that left five people dead and over 40 people injured.
He doesn't want to talk about it.
He doesn't want to get into it because it exposes problems in the left's agenda.
Take a listen.
Yesterday he was giving some remarks and he knew he had to address it a little bit, but he said, I don't want to get into it before the facts are out.
Before I begin, I want to comment on the tragedy that Occurred last night during the holiday parade in Wisconsin.
While we don't have all the facts and details yet, we know this morning that five families in Waukesha are facing fresh grief of a life without a loved one.
At least 40 Americans are suffering from injuries, some of them in critical condition.
And an entire community is struggling, struggling to cope with the horrific act of violence.
He doesn't want to talk, though, until the facts come out.
He's certainly not going to talk about how the attacker appears to be a leftist who made a lot of left-wing social media posts.
And he's not going to talk about how he was out on bail and all that.
He's not going to talk about any of that.
He doesn't want to jump to any conclusions.
Joe Biden put video of Kyle Rittenhouse into a campaign ad and called him a white supremacist.
Completely baselessly.
Forget about waiting for the facts to come out.
Kyle Rittenhouse was just exonerated by a court.
But in this case, Joe Biden wants to wait because he knows how bad this looks for them.
This is what's so difficult to understand about wokeism.
Woke-ism is, we think of it as anti-Christian or anti-conservative or anti-American.
In a way, though, it's just, it's too Christian.
It's too American.
It's too compassionate.
It's not that it's a vice running freely.
It's that it's a virtue running freely.
The wokeism is trying to out-Christian the Christians.
This is why you'll very often see people on the left who don't believe in Christianity, who don't go to church, who don't believe in Jesus.
They'll attack Christians and they'll say, you hypocritical Christians, you don't really believe what you say.
You don't really understand the Bible.
You don't really follow Jesus.
I mean, I don't either, but you especially don't.
I'm going to out-Christian the Christians.
I'm going to outcompact.
And what they do is they take one of the, if not the central anthropological feature of Christianity, taking the side of the victims, that God himself in the Passion is a victim and takes the side of the victims and, you know, destroys this kind of unanimous scapegoating mob violence on the cross, right?
He destroys Satan on the cross, right?
They take that, and they point to any instance where a Christian has ever done anything wrong, and it's a fallen world, so all Christians have done something wrong, and they say, yeah, see, you're hypocrites.
You're not really living up to your standards.
We're going to take that compassion.
We're going to take that side of the victim, and we're going to divorce it from Christianity.
That's not going to work.
Do you know what ends up happening?
You just end up scapegoating other people.
You just end up being cruel to other people.
So in this case, you are being cruel to the victims of this killer in Wisconsin, to the victims of crime.
Or, you know, at the broader social level, you're saying, look, we're going to take the side of the victims, black people and women.
And so we're going to scapegoat white men.
White men are going to be the cause of all of the problem.
They can't get out of it.
The only way you can get out of that is with God.
This is the essence of Christianity.
It actually takes God.
Mankind is not able to overcome this kind of thing on his own.
And this is why all of the attempts to recreate Christianity in the modern world without God...
Humanitarianism, wokeism, liberalism, progressivism, whatever-ism, they're all bound to failure and they're all going to make all the same mistakes that the pagan world made before Christianity pervaded the world in the first place.
So good old compassionate Joe Biden, he's going to keep his mouth shut about Wisconsin because he knows how bad it looks for him.
Democrats are fleeing Joe Biden.
Even the would-be future governor of Texas, Beto O'Rourke, is fleeing Joe Biden.
He was on CNN. He was asked, do you want the president to come campaign for you?
He says, no thanks.
A recent poll shows, though, that just 35% of Texans approve of his performance.
Would you like the president to come and campaign with you?
This campaign in Texas is not going to be about Joe Biden.
It's not going to be about Donald Trump.
It's not going to be about anyone from outside of our state.
This is going to be about the people of Texas and what the people of Texas want.
And I told you, they want the big things like jobs, great schools, and making sure everyone can see a doctor.
But they also want to see some confidence in their government.
Does that mean that you would prefer that he not come based on what you just said?
It means that I'm focused on Texas and on my fellow Texans.
Those are the people most important to me.
There's no politician, there's no other person from outside of this state who can help to change the course of this election for better or for worse.
So, first of all, credit to the CNN lady for pushing Beto on the point.
She says, hey, Beto, do you want Biden to come help you?
And he was like, no, look.
Oh, listen, man.
Hell no, I don't.
Heck no.
No, man.
Because no, this is going to be about the people of Texas.
And he gives this ridiculous platitude, which is just a polite way of saying, Joe Biden, please don't come here.
And she pushes him.
Says, hold on.
Are you saying you actively do not want him to come?
And he says, there's no politician who could help us.
That's not true.
That's not true.
There are plenty of non-Texas politicians who are popular in Texas who could come and help.
I mean, this happens in every single race.
You always have politicians from out-of-state flying in to help various candidates, not just in Texas, but all over the country.
Unless the politician's not popular, and we know Joe Biden's not popular, his approval rating's at about 38%.
Even though he's basically a rock star compared to Kamala Harris, whose approval rating is 27 or 28%, lower than Dick Cheney after he shot the guy in the face.
But Joe Biden's still underwater in terms of his approval rating, and so Beto doesn't want it.
Beto knows that Joe Biden will drag him down.
And Beto doesn't have very far to go.
He's already lost two races.
His last two races he lost for Senate and for President.
So he can't afford that.
What are the Democrats going to do?
Forget Texas.
What are they going to do in 2022 all around the country?
What are they going to do in 2024 when Joe Biden...
May be running, may not be running.
If his vice president is the one running, she's in an even worse position.
They don't seem to have anyone on the bench other than Pete Buttigieg, who's going to be away on paternity leave.
And no one's even going to miss him when he's away.
So the Republicans are in a very strong position right now.
But don't worry.
For the Democrats out there listening to this show right now, do not worry about the strong position the Republicans are in.
They will find a way to clutch defeat from the jaws of victory.
They will.
You can trust the Republicans to do that.
You can almost always trust Republicans to make, at least the Republican leadership, to make the exact wrong decision.
Story out from Nate Hockman at National Review.
He just had a great piece on this.
The GOP is going trans.
Yes, the GOP is now a trans party.
They are pushing something called the Fairness for All Act.
This is an all-Republican bill that would make sexual orientation and gender identity a federally protected class according to the Civil Rights Act.
Now, in return, what the GOP would get would be certain carve-outs for the right to discriminate against those things for religious institutions, for instance.
But no one really thinks that's going to hold up in court anyway.
So this is not the Republicans compromising.
There aren't any Democrats who support this bill.
The Republicans who are pushing it are saying, well, this is our version of the Equality Act and we're going to avoid the worse Equality Act.
But there are no Democrats even agreeing to this.
So it's just a surrender.
It's just a concession to radical transgender ideology for no reason.
For no reason at all.
We just won a governorship in Virginia on transgenderism.
On saying that boys are not girls and girls are not boys and you shouldn't let boys into the girls' room.
We just deprived a blue state, blue commonwealth, of a Democrat governor and got a Republican governor in there on this issue.
And these idiot Republicans, pardon my blunt language, I hate to be so direct, but they're idiots.
Or...
Either they're political idiots and they can't make the right calculation, or they're moral idiots and they don't see that actually boys are not girls and girls are not boys.
I'm so angry, I'm spilling my leftist tears all over.
I'm not going to get any of those leftist tears today because of these damned Republicans who are trying to clutch defeat from the jaws of victory.
And who's supporting this?
The House GOP caucus chairman, Elise Stefanik.
Remember, we had Liz Cheney in there and she became a big lib and she started shilling for Nancy Pelosi.
And so we got Elise Stefanik and she was supported actually by Donald Trump and by other people.
And at the time, I said, watch out for this one.
She's actually more liberal than Cheney.
On the political matters, on the partisan matters, she tends to side more with the Republicans, but she's a big lib.
And it turns out she is a big lib, and there are 20 other Republicans who are supporting transgenderism.
Tone-deaf, rudderless, with Republicans like this, who needs Democrats?
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It's so simple for the GOP right now.
It would be so simple.
You've got Democrats pushing these insane racial theories, these insane sexual theories, telling parents they have no right to educate their kids, telling parents that they have no right to determine their kids' medical decisions, whether it's the Fauciouchie or transing the kid through mutilation and surgery. whether it's the Fauciouchie or transing the kid through mutilation It's so easy.
All the Republicans need to run on is, hey, just be normal.
We're not going to allow the weird stuff and we're just going to do the normal stuff.
We're not going to let criminals out of prison.
We're actually going to have law and order and a peaceful, normal, good, orderly society.
And they just can't do that.
Look at what's going on in San Francisco right now.
In San Francisco, just a couple nights ago, Three stores were ransacked and emptied out by mobs of looters in the same night.
So a mob of people armed with hammers entered a jewelry store in Hayward, which is about 35 miles from San Francisco, at 5.25 p.m.
on Sunday night, according to police.
Take a listen to the operation.
So you can see, they just, the bust in there is about, what, four or five guys in hoodies.
Oh no, more than that.
Six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Okay, there's a little more in the back.
So say about 10 or a dozen guys with hoodies, they're smashing open cases of jewelry and they're all running out of there with the goods.
Then in the nearby town of Walnut Creek, about 30 minutes outside of San Francisco, 80 people wearing ski masks and carrying crowbars robbed a Nordstrom on Saturday night.
They broke into the store.
They pepper sprayed and assaulted the employees.
They grabbed a bunch of merch and they drove away.
So this is, I want to be precise.
It wasn't all in one night.
It was over like a, I don't know, 36 hour, 36 to 72 hour period.
Eight people were arrested Friday after a Louis Vuitton outlet was robbed in San Francisco.
Multiple people broke the windows, emptied out the shop, according to Fox.
The people who are weak on crime, the compassionate people, the criminal justice reform people, they think this is fine.
They think it's fine to allow this to happen.
It's just stuff.
The store owners, they probably have insurance.
It's fine, and they got their windows smashed up a little, and they're going to have to close the shop for a week or two, but it's fine.
They actually, a lot of these weak on crime people, think that this is just to allow this to happen, in particular because the perps are black.
I'm not sure if they were all black in all of the instances, but in the one that we have video for, they're black.
And so, a lot of, especially white liberals, and a lot of people who are weak on crime will say, well, this is because of historic racism.
It's because of slavery.
They have to rob the jewelry store.
They have to.
And it's wrong.
They're the victims.
The people robbing the jewelry store, they're the real victims.
And the people who own the jewelry store, who might be black, who might be some other race, they're evil because they have property and they've got their lives in order.
And so, really, we should just let these criminals off the hook.
And if they are arrested, let's let them out on a really low bond.
And if they commit more crime, hey, that's justice, huh?
But it's not.
I'll get to that point that Rashida Tlaib mentioned when she was talking about how she doesn't really want to empty all the jails, but she does want to empty all the jails.
And she said, it's about rehabilitation.
Sure.
But in the jails, they don't have enough nice programs, and they're not playing enough games with the prisoners, and so they're not being rehabilitated.
Punishment is rehabilitative.
Just punishment.
Including capital punishment, by the way.
Hanging concentrates the mind.
The very fact of being punished for a crime is rehabilitative.
This is, not to bring up too many of my old dead friends, but this is what Plato talks about in Gorgias.
There's a great dialogue by Plato, and in it, Socrates, the character of Socrates, explains that it is actually cruel not to punish people for crimes.
Because it's not in their interest.
Because the people who are committing these crimes have obviously disordered desires and disordered habits and their vices and they're basically on the road straight to hell.
And it is an act of mercy and compassion to punish them and get them back on the straight and narrow.
You think it's good for these robbers to let them just continue in their life of crime?
How do you think that's going to end?
How do you think that's going to end?
And if they continue in their life of crime, they're either going to get killed committing crime.
They're going to end up in some gang shooting or some burglary gone wrong, and they're going to get killed.
Or eventually, they're probably going to get arrested, and they're going to end up in prison.
Or, even if they get away with all of the crimes in this life, they're going straight to the bad place once they die.
They have souls.
They actually do have souls, and the care of their souls is important.
There is nothing...
There is a false compassion in letting these guys off the hook because of whatever kooky racial or historical theories you have.
But it is a false compassion.
And it's cruel.
This is Adam Smith, actually, from whom we get much of our economic philosophy and the wealth of nations.
Adam Smith said, mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
It's a very stark way of putting it.
But there is some truth to that.
It's actually cruel to the victims of these people.
It's cruel to the shop owners.
It's cruel to the future people that these criminals are going to harm.
And it's cruel to the criminals themselves.
Speaking of mercy and charity, Catholic University of America seems to really get this victim thing a little wrong, too.
They seem to have abandoned mercy.
At least in the artwork they're putting on the walls, Christianity, their faith that's supposed to animate the university, for the rival religion of wokeism.
This is from Mary Margaret Olihan at the Daily Signal.
She pointed out that there are icons on the walls of the Catholic University of America that portray George Floyd as Christ, or Christ as George Floyd, and the Virgin Mary as George Floyd's mother.
There's a painting of a sort of pieta.
It's George Floyd.
Blasphemous, sacrilegious, incredibly stupid.
And yet, this is very popular.
Even in the woke Christian circles.
I just did an event at the Catholic University of America maybe a month ago.
I was there with Senator Cruz.
They put us in a green room and they had stations of the cross, you know, the depictions of the passion narrative all around the room.
So I said, that's nice.
And my eyesight from far away, it's not all that great.
So I said, oh, that's nice.
And I just sort of saw the blurs.
And my friend Liz Wheeler was there.
She said, Michael, look closely at those pictures.
So I zoomed in.
And all of the people, Christ, Mary, the apostles, were all Native Americans in headdresses.
I thought, this is blasphemous.
This is sacrilegious.
I don't have anything against Indians, but Jesus is not an Indian.
He's not.
And what all of this is trying to do, I'm trying to make the best argument I can for these people, is they're saying, look, Jesus is just kind of an idea.
Jesus is just like an idea, and it's just the idea of compassion for victims.
And so if we portray Jesus as a Native American, that's fine.
It doesn't matter.
If we portray Jesus as a black career criminal, that's fine.
Of course, an important fact about Jesus is that he is sinless.
But no, never mind.
He's a black career criminal.
Because it's just the idea of being nice to victims.
But it's not just the idea.
It's not.
If Christianity were merely the idea of being nice to victims, then it wouldn't be worth very much.
It wouldn't make a lot of sense.
It certainly wouldn't have shaped a civilization.
It certainly wouldn't be enough to overcome human nature and sin and death.
If Christianity means anything at all, it has to be a fact.
Jesus has to be a real guy.
He's got to actually look like somebody.
He's got to actually have features that are not just the features of whoever you want him to be.
He had to live at a real time and die and actually be resurrected.
It has to have really happened.
And we can't do that.
Before Christianity, before Judaism, you had myth, just myth, all these kinds of myths that maybe have some basis in historical fact, but they're really just kinds of legends, and you tell Norse myths and Greek myths and Roman myths.
Then you have Christianity, which is not myth, but fact, right?
It's a myth that happens to be true and hasn't really happened.
And then, now, in what the left wants to be post-Christianity, you just take these kinds of insights about Christianity, but you make it myth again.
It's not just myth.
Not compassionate at all.
It reveals wokeism for what it really is, which is an alternative religion, a rival to Christianity.
And not a rival to Christianity quite in the same way that paganism is, but a rival to, as Rene Girard says, a rival to Christianity on its left flank, trying to be more Christian than Christianity.
This stuff has real effects.
The killer in Wisconsin was allegedly posting talking points from the woke establishment media.
Heavy.com, which is a fact-finding website, along with a number of other journalists online, Andy Ngo pointed this out early on, highlighted posts that the suspect in Wisconsin had on his social media accounts that he allegedly had.
I don't know, I have to say, whenever you're talking about a story where all the facts have not been totally sussed out, you just have to say allegedly like 500,000 times.
So, okay, allegedly, allegedly, allegedly.
The posts appeared to express...
Anti-Christian sentiment, disdain for Republican politicians and conservative media.
I don't know if yours truly was included, but who knows, you know, the conservative media broadly.
And black nationalist rhetoric.
Okay, and those are all big problems in America.
Those are all really big problems.
And we don't think about that.
We have big problems with anti-Muslim rights.
Islamophobia, that's a terrible evil.
We need to root that out of our society.
You hear all of the establishment liberal outlets, they'll say, we have to get rid of Islam.
Anti-Semitism, that's a little bit weaker because the Libs also hate Israel, but still.
But anti-Christianity, you're not allowed to mention that.
Disdain for Republican politicians and conservative media, that is encouraged.
If you ever say anything negative about a Democrat politician, you're called an insurrectionist or you're called a white supremacist or whatever, a sexist, racist, whatever.
But Republicans, that's totally fine.
And then black nationalist rhetoric.
Black nationalism is a very bad thing.
White nationalism, we're told, is the most evil thing in the history of the world and we can never even mention it.
But black nationalism gets a pass.
Malcolm X, he's kind of cool.
These are cool guys.
This reminds me of a problem that Republicans fall into as well, where everything we don't like is fascism.
You know, fascism, very, very evil.
The most evil thing in the world.
Nazism, I guess, is the most evil thing in the world.
Fascism, close second.
Often the two are conflated.
But communism is just fine.
Communism gets off the hook.
If you wore a t-shirt with Benito Mussolini's face on a college campus, you would almost certainly be expelled.
If you wear a t-shirt with Che Guevara's face on a campus, well, that's the ordinary flow of things.
Now, from the Daily Wire store, you can wear a t-shirt with Fauci's face on Che Guevara's body.
But that would be totally fine.
The same way that Republicans look at Antifa and they say, Antifa, they say they're anti-fascist, but they are fascist.
They're not fascist.
They're not.
They're communists and they're anarchists.
But they're not fascists.
There are more bad things in the world than fascism.
But because fascism is a movement that is sort of broadly on the right, that's the evil and it's the worst thing possible.
And because anarchism generally is on the left and communism certainly is on the left, that's totally fine.
And we only in this, we scapegoat only the things that are on the right.
And we never look at the evils that are on the left as well.
In our liberal culture, the other is always wrong, you know, to use left-wing language.
We always other the right-wingers or the Christians or whatever.
But the liberal establishment never looks in the mirror and takes stock of itself.
You can't avoid politics.
I think what a lot of the squishes want to do is they just want to back away.
The Squishers either want to use the left wing's preferred rhetoric, whether it's on gender or on race or on, you know, everything that we don't like is fascism or whatever.
They either want to go along with the left Or they want to avoid it and they say, you know, never mind, I'm going to retreat.
But you can't do that.
And actually, this is something that Kyle Rittenhouse is dealing with right now.
Now, Kyle Rittenhouse was exonerated in the court of law.
But that's not the end.
The kid's 18 years old.
What's he going to do for the rest of his life?
This is the defining event, probably, of his life.
So what is he going to do now?
And he's got two options.
Maybe three options.
He can become a conservative celebrity.
He already is a sort of cause celeb, so he could become a conservative celebrity.
He could just persevere and live his life and do whatever he was going to do.
Or he can change his name and try to start again.
And his lawyer has firm thoughts on the matter, and I'm not sure the lawyer is totally right.
Kyle Rittenhouse's lawyer just went on TV, was asked, what are we going to do about Kyle Rittenhouse?
What is this kid's future?
And he says, the best thing this kid can do, change his name and start over again.
I think there's a lot of people who want to use Kyle for their own means.
I think the way that Rittenhouse's name right now has trended on Twitter and that's what we live in as a Twitter society.
People want to use his name, get it out there so they can get some publicity.
I think it's cheap.
That's what I think.
My advice would be to change his name and start his life over.
He's very recognizable right now.
There's a lot of people who I don't think have his best interests at heart and probably want to make him a symbol of something I don't think he wants to be necessarily associated with.
And once you give up Your name and your likeness and you join those causes.
I think a lot of people will use you for their own purposes and you won't be able to control it.
We've had that talk with Kyle and it's going to be a fine line where he decides to go.
Ultimately, I hope he makes the right choices.
I would think his life would be a lot easier.
Being anonymous and going on with his life, as opposed to try and keep some of his fervent supporters happy.
So, the part that this lawyer gets right is, yes, there are going to be a lot of vultures who want to use Kyle for their own purposes.
And that's bad, and Kyle should be very careful, and his parents and his lawyers should be careful not to let that happen.
But...
He's even almost right that Kyle would probably have an easier life if he could just change his name and become anonymous and put this whole thing behind him.
First of all, in our social media age, in our age of facial recognition, in our age of the internet where everything he ever did is recorded for all time, does anyone really think that this kid can just completely start over and change his name and he'll just never mind?
Forget about Kyle Rittenhouse.
I don't think that's ever going to happen.
And furthermore, Changing his name and starting this new life and trying to run away from his identity and his past implies that he did something wrong, implies that he was guilty, implies that he has something to be deeply ashamed of.
But he wasn't guilty.
He was exonerated.
He was exonerated in the court of law.
He's now being just threatened by the mob, the left-wing mob.
And what the lawyer is saying is, run away from the mob.
Give the mob what they want or run away from the mob.
That's a bad idea.
You can't do that.
You can't.
I know it would be easy if we lived in this ideal world where you could just run away from your problems.
I know that would be easy.
But you can't.
That's a fool's errand.
And it implies something that isn't true, namely that the kid was guilty.
I don't think this is the best advice.
I do think there's a middle ground here.
I don't think the kid...
I think he should cash in on slander and libel lawsuits, and I think he should sue...
Every one of those outlets, you know, CNN and the Washington Post and all the people who smeared him, it should sue them into the ground like Nick Sandman did.
But I agree.
I don't think he should become a new celebrity.
I don't think he should start campaigning for people.
I don't think he should start his own podcast.
I don't think he should do any of that.
A lot of people do that, and you can make easy money, and it's very attractive, especially to young people.
But the kid is 18 years old.
You shouldn't be doing that that young.
People I know who got very famous, very young, it has almost never, I don't know that in a single case it's ever turned out well for them.
So he shouldn't do that.
But he shouldn't run from it either.
He is Kyle Rittenhouse.
He went through a lot.
He overcame a lot.
He was exonerated.
He won.
Don't clutch a defeat from that victory.
I don't even think he can.
I don't think you can run from your past and your identity and from politics that way.
There's a political lesson here, too.
A lot of conservatives, the squishy, nice types, they want to fall into a kind of quietism.
They just want to, oh, just tune it out.
Let's retreat to the hills.
Let's retreat to the farm and never engage in politics.
You can't do it, man.
You can't do it.
We have a country.
We live in a society.
We're social animals.
We're the political animal, according to Aristotle.
You can't run away.
way.
You might not care about politics, but politics cares about you.
You might not care about the culture, but the culture cares about you.
Speaking of people disappearing, I got to get to this before we go today.
There was a Chinese tennis star who just me-tooed one of the members of the Communist Party in China.
She said that he sexually assaulted her and pressured her and all sorts of things.
And then she went missing.
She just got disappeared.
And CNN was talking about this on the air.
And as they started talking about this, they had a video of their feed in China.
The feed in China went blank.
The Communist Party censored the feed from CNN in China.
Take a listen.
The WTA says they simply don't have evidence right now that Peng Shuai is not being silenced, that she is not able to speak freely.
They say none of the proof that has been provided by Chinese state media, John, gives them any comfort that she's actually in a position where her interests are being best represented.
So, Will, I want to explain to our viewers what's happening on our screen right now, because underneath your face, they can see a box, which is the actual live feed of this broadcast in China, but it's all color bars.
And it went to color bars the minute you started talking.
So what's going on here?
Chinese censors, John.
I have lost count over the last eight years here in Asia covering China of how many times CNN's coverage of controversial issues has been censored.
It used to go to straight black.
Now they've upgraded and they go to color bars.
But nonetheless, it is a live, real-time example of the censorship that's happening in the mainland.
So American state media was criticizing Chinese state media because the Chinese state media censored the story about how they obviously disappeared this poor girl.
I think she just appeared on some video call, but I don't buy it.
She's obviously being controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
And it's a reminder, the political aspect of this story is this.
Today, I don't think you can hide.
I don't think there's anything like getting off the hook.
I don't think there's a free lunch.
Fill in whatever cliche you want.
You can't get something for nothing, okay?
You can't just let all the criminals out and expect everything to be hunky-dory.
You can't just run away from the mob or try to hide with the mob or try to placate the mob and assume that everything's going to be hunky-dory.
You can't just run for the hills and expect that your country will deal with its problems on its own and you'll be fine.
You won't be.
You can't get out of that.
We have got to stand up.
We have got to engage in these political battles.
We have to win them.
We can't.
There's no easy way out of this, okay?
And if we don't stand up, right, if we don't hold together and stand up now, we'll all fall separately.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, the leftist culture war against traditional masculinity continues to gain steam.
