Amazon's futuristic "Just Walk Out" retail technology just turns out to be a bunch of Indians looking at computer screens, President Trump uses the UNO reverse card on his "bloodbath" quote, and Hillary Clinton tells young voters to get over themselves.
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Amazon has just announced that it is ditching its Just Walk Out technology for retail stores just six years after launching it.
For those who never made it into one of these stores, the technology was amazing.
There were no employees.
There were no cashiers.
You just walked in, picked some items off the shelf, and walked out.
That was it.
And somehow Amazon knew what you bought and charged you for it.
How did the tech giant do it?
According to Amazon, this technological feat was accomplished through a system of cameras, sensors, and AI.
But buried in the reporting on Amazon's pivot away from Just Walk Out is a little tidbit about how the program actually worked.
Apparently, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 Indians watching and labeling videos all day long.
It turns out AI actually stood for a lot of Indians.
In the words of Gizmodo, the cashiers were simply moved off-site and they watched you as you shopped.
Apparently the Indians were not meticulous or inexpensive enough, so Amazon is phasing out the technology.
And I love this story.
I love it because one of the most cutting-edge companies in history is affirming, is proving all of my conservative intuitions.
In an age totally enthralled to science and technology, we discover that so many supposed wonders are defective, even deceitful.
Nothing more than a facade held up by lots of little Indian Wizards of Oz.
In an age that worships novelty, we find out that things have not really changed all that much.
Clerks still operate the shops that sell us things, same as they always have everywhere on Earth.
And in an age of unprecedented centralizing corporate power, the everything store cannot reliably charge you for a box of cereal.
We have not really progressed so much, which means there's hope yet.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
The 28-year-old woman is bragging to the media that she is going to kill herself in about a month.
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Speaking of ethnic people, It's a little bit of a clunky transition from the AI Indians.
But this is a story I don't want to miss out on.
I meant to get to it on Easter Monday, but I really want to get to it because it's both a ridiculous story and also kind of an important story.
And it comes from CNN.
And the headline is...
This is from Easter Sunday.
Was Jesus a man of color?
Why this question matters more than ever.
And I think when it comes to this question about whether or not Jesus was a man of color, or what Jesus looked like, or looks like I suppose I would say, or even what Jesus' body appears to be.
There's an IQ bell curve, I think.
You know the IQ bell curve meme?
Where, like, the dumb guy thinks one thing, then the midwit guy thinks the opposite thing, and then the really smart guy agrees with the dumb guy?
I think that's kind of what's going on here with the, uh, what did Jesus look like when he walked the earth?
The really dumb CNN point of view is that it really matters what Jesus looks like.
And then the kind of middle point of view is it doesn't matter at all what Jesus looks like.
And then the smart point of view is, well, it kind of matters, actually, what Jesus looks like.
And it kind of matters not because we care all that much which shade of skin he has or whatever, but it matters because the central fact of the faith is the Incarnation.
The central mystery of Christianity is the Trinity.
The central fact of Christianity is the Incarnation.
That the second person of the Trinity becomes man.
That he takes on flesh and dwells among us and really lives on earth and is really crucified and really is resurrected from the dead.
So the body matters.
To quote Tertullian, the ancient Christian writer, the flesh is the hinge of salvation.
It matters because The Christian religion is historical.
It's not just poetry or something.
It's not just philosophy or something.
It's a real thing that happens.
The Gospels aren't either poetry or philosophy, exactly.
They're journalism.
It's about a man who is born in a specific place at a specific time, in the fullness of time, and then institutes a visible church that unfolds throughout history.
So it does kind of matter.
Obviously, when our Lord is resurrected, his friends don't immediately recognize him some of the time.
So his glorified body is a little bit different from the body that he had when he was in his first 33 years before the crucifixion and the resurrection.
But the physical stuff matters.
I mean, after the resurrection, after Easter Sunday, the first thing we see our Lord do is broil fish, cook breakfast for his friends on the beach, and then they eat fish.
They really eat it.
And then They, Thomas the Apostle, doubting Thomas, doesn't believe in the resurrection, and so he physically touches the wounds.
The story on the road to Emmaus, our Lord is walking with these two guys, and they're discussing scripture, but they don't recognize him, and only when they sit down to eat and he breaks the bread, they recognize who he is, they see him.
So, the physicality of it all really matters, and it especially matters for us because we are the meeting of the physical and the metaphysical.
Man is kind of like the horizon.
Man, alone among the created things, has two natures.
We have a corruptible nature, which is our body, and our incorruptible nature, which is our soul, and they're joined together in a hylomorphic union.
And so, as the kind of horizon between those things, that intersection between the temporal and the eternal, that intersection between the physical and the metaphysical, really, really matters.
And so much of modern religion is kind of gnostic and says, oh, history doesn't matter, physicality doesn't matter, we're all just kind of, you know, a bodiless consciousness just floating in outer space or something.
That is not true.
I hate to give CNN a point, but it actually does matter.
All right.
Enough of that.
It's Wednesday.
Easter is over.
The Trans Day of Visibility is over.
But is the Trans Day of Visibility ever really over?
Is it?
I still see a lot of the rainbow stuff going on.
I still see a lot of the trans activism going on.
We're still talking about this ridiculous Trans Day of Visibility.
We're about to head into Pride Month, one of the multiple months devoted to strange sex stuff, that there was also October.
There will be other months.
But you're seeing a visible expression of this in the world.
On Trans Day of Visibility, I mentioned this on Monday, the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, big lib, big democrat, ordered that the New York landmarks would be lit up with trans colors.
So that included the Empire State Building, that included the World Trade Center, that included Niagara Falls, for goodness sakes.
The conservative response to this is, so far, has been, we don't need to elevate this crazy left-wing ideology in our physical spaces.
That's ridiculous, you know?
Get that stuff, what does that have to do with the government?
What does that have to do with public life?
And I feel you, but I think conservatives need to go a little bit further.
There's a picture that makes the rounds every few years of Easter Sunday, 1956, and it's a picture of Some of these same landmarks, the Empire State Building at least, three big buildings on the New York skyline on Easter, and they have their walls lit up with a cross.
They would turn the lights on in the office to be in the shape of a cross.
You have three crosses just like on Calvary.
This wasn't all that long ago.
This was 1956.
What changed?
In this case, you have one of the very same buildings now.
Gets rid of the cross.
Probably there would be a public outcry.
An outcry from our political elite.
The people would probably like it very much.
If you put a cross on there, now it's got to be the weird trans sex stuff.
But what changed?
What changed is not that we used to have No religion, and now we have a religion, or we used to have religion, but now we have no religion.
What just changed is the nature of the state religion, but states always have religions, and the government is always going to have some recourse to morality and to religion.
And not so long ago, we recognized that we're a Christian nation.
Even liberal New York is a Christian city.
That's the animating spirit of the country, and every country's got to have one.
We talked about Richard Dawkins yesterday, probably the most famous living atheist, who said that he's now a cultural Christian.
He doesn't believe in Christianity but he really likes the cathedrals and the parishes and he wants there to be parades and he wants there to be a public recognition of Christianity even though he doesn't believe it.
Okay, well that's better than 20 years ago when Dawkins and the other new atheists were lamenting any kind of religious aspect to public life.
But it's not enough.
It's not enough to play pretend.
You gotta actually believe it.
And then in the physical world, you gotta do stuff about it because we're creatures of habit.
We're physical.
We got flesh, man.
We can't erase the flesh.
Not even Amazon can erase the importance of the physical body and replace us all with robots and algorithms.
Even one of the most advanced technical companies in the world needs to get like a thousand warm bodies in a room to actually do things because we're people.
We're still the agents in this world.
Okay, speaking of New York, really disturbing story coming out of New York.
A week ago, we talked about a new law passed in Florida, which gets rid of so-called squatters' rights.
A lot of people saw that story, and they said, squatters' rights?
What even is that?
Is that a real problem that DeSantis is correcting here?
And the answer is yes.
It's a problem, especially in liberal cities, where these squatters, these vagrants, often criminals, usually criminals, I guess by definition criminals because they're taking people's property.
They'll go in to a house or an apartment and they'll just start living there.
And then the owner will come back and say, hey, what are you doing?
Get out of my apartment.
And the squatters will say, no, it's my apartment now.
And the crazy part is then the owners go to court and they say, hey, this guy's stole my property and he's in my apartment.
The court will say, well, you know, he actually has rights to your property.
And this is really happening in New York.
So much so that the local liberal news affiliates are reporting on the absurdity.
There's so much more to say.
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How are squatters doing in New York?
Last Wednesday, when police got a call about a man with a gun just footsteps away from a school across the street.
When they arrived, they chased 24-year-old Hector De Sousa Villalta, believed to be from Venezuela, into the basement of the home here at 3259 Hull Avenue.
Well, that's where cops arrested him, along with seven others.
Another man, 22-year-old Javier Alborno, tried to get away from the apartment with another weapon, Before he was also arrested.
Now, when a search warrant was in place, investigators recovered two more loaded guns, three loaded extended magazines, and a box of ammunition with a bag of ketamine mixed with cocaine.
Now, De Souza-Vilalta and eight others were charged with criminal possession of a weapon, criminal possession of controlled substance, and acting in a manner injurious to a child.
All but two were released without bail.
Now, De Souza-Vilalta was arrested with attempted murder for shooting someone else in the leg.
Now, this was all from another dispute that happened over in Yonkers.
As for these other suspects, they are also being investigated in terms of another robbery pattern that they're seeing in Bergen County.
Sure, but like other than that, you know, what did they, come on.
These are poor, beleaguered, asylum-seeking, dreamer, undocumented future American dreamers.
And you heartless conservatives, you want to arrest them just because they steal another man's home and bring in a bunch of guns and illegal guns and magazines and, okay, a little bit of cocaine mixed with ketamine and they endanger a seven-year-old a little bit of cocaine mixed with ketamine and they endanger a seven-year-old child while they're And that's it?
What happened to judge not lest ye be judged, conservatives?
Huh?
Come on.
Come on, man.
This is New York.
This is a local New York news affiliate.
This is not some right-wing outlet reporting on this.
They're giving you just the facts, probably with as much of a liberal spin as they could possibly put on it.
And still, it's obviously completely indefensible.
The owner of this residence knew that these criminals were living there, doing all sorts of terrible stuff.
But the owner was not able to evict them because we now live in a society that prefers criminality to following the law.
Simple as that.
We now live in a society where we will take the side of the criminals, even really bad criminals, even like murderers and people who endanger little kids and stuff.
We will take their side over the people who actually follow the law.
Because of a very perverse sense of right and wrong.
An inverted sense of right and wrong.
We now assume, I shouldn't say we, if you're listening to the show, you probably don't assume this, but the liberals now assume that if you're doing something wrong, it is necessarily because something wrong was done to you that would justify it.
Society failed you.
You grew up in a war-torn, crime-ridden country, probably the result of American imperialism.
Where?
When?
I don't exactly know, but if you break into our country, it's our fault.
And if you steal some guy's house, it's his fault.
How did he get that house?
Probably some unjust way.
And if you mix your cocaine with ketamine, well, it's...
Well, that's also society's fault, and you endanger little kids and you murder people.
The worse you behave, the more of a victim you are.
It's prima facie evidence that you have somehow been victimized, according to this very perverse way of doing things.
You follow the law, and you get married, and you have a family, and you thrive, and you just kind of live a life that is in accordance with the moral and intellectual virtues, and you flourish as a result.
This is taken to be evidence that you are the beneficiary of some unjust privilege.
Because that's the only explanation.
Why are you thriving when these gangbangers from Central America Drug dealers, murderers, and child endangerers are not thriving, huh?
It doesn't make sense.
Because we're all exactly the same when we're born.
There's no difference between cultures, obviously.
There's no difference between religions or anything like that, and so the only explanation Is that you benefited somehow in an unjust way, and that's why the gangbangers need to take your house, period.
Now speaking of the migration crisis, the RNC has just launched a new website, BidenBloodbath.com, and this is obviously playing off of a clip that
Trump went viral for when he used the phrase bloodbath in a speech and the media went nuts and the media said that Trump was threatening political violence, Trump was calling for a civil war and another insurrection and blah blah blah.
So the RNC reappropriates this word, says yeah there is a bloodbath under Biden, but what's really curious is the website is referring to Joe Biden's immigration crisis.
When Trump gave the speech where he used the word bloodbath, that was not what he was referring to.
Now if I don't get elected, it's gonna be a bloodbath for the whole, that's gonna be the least of it.
It's gonna be a bloodbath for the country, that'll be the least of it.
But they're not gonna sell those cars, they're building massive factories.
So there it is, you actually don't need any more context than that.
Trump is giving a speech in or around Detroit, and he's talking about car manufacturing, which is a very important issue in and around Detroit.
And he says, look, right now China's trying to move in, they're trying to steal our car business, and I'm telling you, if I'm elected, We are going to take that car business back from China.
Now, if I'm not elected, it's going to be a total bloodbath, all right?
But I'm going to be elected and China's not going to sell those cars.
The media then ran with this and said he was talking about violence and actual bloodshed, but one of the definitions of bloodbath is economic turmoil and economic catastrophe.
That is obviously the context in which Trump is using that word.
He's talking specifically about the car industry and losing profits and losing wages from the car industry and how he's going to fix that.
The word bloodbath was sandwiched in between a discussion specifically about car manufacturing in the United States.
Then the media run with that and they say he's talking about shedding literal blood and killing people.
And what's amazing then is the RNC ran with that.
Donald Trump ran with that.
It shows you the way that memes and language transform in culture, which we'll get to in one second.
First, I want to tell you about Crossing the Line.
You got to check out the latest episode of Cross the Line.
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Check out this clip.
Hundreds of people came in, they filled all the seats, and they were polite for almost the whole time.
I'm standing here now, a biological male, wearing a dress with a pair of leggings.
Do you sincerely believe that I should be subject to punitive justice on the basis of what I'm wearing?
And if so, are you willing to turn yourself in for wearing women's panties in your gay college film?
I say almost the whole time because a couple students, one who called himself transgender and another who called herself non-binary, became a bit more pointed during the Q&A.
I was happy to answer their questions.
So happy, in fact, that we all decided to sit down and have a conversation after the event.
This series is about finding one or two students who are not only going to scream and shriek and burn me in effigy when I give these speeches, but who oppose my views and are willing to sit down and have a discussion face-to-face.
Watch the full episode now on YouTube if you are planning to come protest my YAF speech at the University of Utah next week and you want to discuss our difference in viewpoints.
Just find producer Mr. Ben Davies and yell at him.
Simple as.
So Trump starts out, he uses bloodbath to mean economic turmoil.
The RNC now launches this website, Biden Bloodbath, talking about the migrant crisis.
Trump then runs with that version of bloodbath.
I stand before you today to declare the Joe Biden's border bloodbath.
And that's what it is.
It's a bloodbath.
They tried to use that term incorrectly on me two weeks ago.
You know, it's all about misinformation.
That's all they do is cheat on elections and disinformation, misinformation, fairly closely related, those two words.
But they basically mean that it's all talk.
But it's a border bloodbath and it's destroying our country.
It's a very bad thing happening.
It's going to end on the day that I take office, which will be January 20th.
It'll end.
Now, I think this is a great idea.
Classic Trump, he says something, the libs unjustly attack him for it, he doubles down.
He actually builds on what the libs have done and he turns that what should be an attack on him into an even stronger piece of rhetoric.
He does that.
But it is amazing that Trump is now using the word bloodbath to mean something closer to how the libs misinterpreted The word, than it is to his original meaning of the word.
That is, and very few people are going to notice this, but it is how politics and rhetoric and memes change and move over time.
A word could mean something three years ago.
It means something totally different today.
And so when we're arguing about it, very often we're just arguing past one another.
The Libs did this too.
You remember in 2016, the Libs were the ones who introduced this phrase fake news to the national political discourse.
And they did it.
People forget this.
They did that specifically with regard to us at the Daily Wire.
They called us and a number of other conservative websites and networks fake news.
There was a list that was published.
It was going viral around the internet.
Some liberal activists said, here is a list of fake news sites.
Don't believe them when they're reporting on the election or Hillary Clinton or whatever.
Trump then took that phrase and pushed it back on them and he said, no, no, no.
The Daily Wire, Breitbart, Fox, Daily Caller, those aren't the fake news sites.
You guys are the fake news sites.
CNN, ABC, NBC, The New York Times, you're the fake news.
The right-wing media, they're much realer news than you guys are.
And then the libs got all angry, and they said, how dare Donald Trump?
He's attacking the freedom of the press.
He's calling the journalists, the brave intrepid journalists, fake news.
No, guys, you started it.
You called us journalists fake news.
And then Trump just flipped it on its head.
And now you're using the term in the way that he used the term, which is the opposite of the way that you use the term.
And this does lie at the heart of a lot of our political miscommunication, but it's inevitable.
This is what happens in politics, and you got to keep up.
Because if you don't keep up, you're going to get stuck in the tired and dead, unpersuasive rhetoric of the past.
This is why politicians who were really hot stuff 10 years ago, I'm thinking of Paul Ryan, for instance, it's hard to remember this now.
Paul Ryan was hot stuff during the Tea Party days.
And he didn't grow with the times.
He picked his rhetoric, and it was locked in in about 2011, and he didn't adapt to new challenges, new problems that arose, the failures of certain policy prescriptions that his team was pushing for at that time.
And so he just gets stuck there, and now his rhetoric has no persuasive power.
This happens to a lot of politicians, even really good politicians.
I like Mike Pence, for instance.
I like him personally.
He's probably made some missteps in his public advocacy.
Obviously, the 2024 presidential campaign didn't work out very well.
But he seems like a nice guy.
He seems like a good guy.
So I like him.
But his rhetoric does not have anywhere near the persuasive power that it did 10 years ago.
When he was a fairly well-known member of Congress, governor of Indiana, it's lost some of that.
You see this especially, forget about immigration and the economy for a second, you see this when he's talking about the war in the Middle East, the Israel-Palestine conflict, specifically with regard to a potential invasion of Gaza.
Here's what Mike Pence has to say.
Whatever position the current administration or voices in my own party take, here's the reality.
Israel has no choice but to invade Rafah and hunt down and destroy Hamas once and for all.
The war should end when Israel's military goals are achieved and every hostage is home, and not a moment sooner.
And I believe the American people will stand with Israel in that fight.
Instead of demanding arbitrary limitations on Israel's military response, I believe our president should make it clear that Iran will pay a steep price as well.
I'm telling you this as a guy who likes Mike Pence.
I'm telling you this as a guy who is broadly sympathetic to the plight of the state of Israel.
Pretty much nothing he said there is true.
Let's work our way backwards.
He says, I'm confident that the American people will defend Israel in this fight.
Why?
Why are you confident of that?
I'm not confident of that.
You know why I'm not confident?
Because every public opinion poll, every survey right now shows that the American people have turned against the state of Israel in this war.
They think the war has gone on too long.
They don't see any likelihood that Israel will achieve its military objectives.
This is not just true among the radical left or even the fringe right.
It's just, it's broadly the American people.
It is simply a fact.
They do not, no longer do they support the state of Israel in this war.
Maybe you wish they did, maybe it would be good if they did, but they don't.
So, when Mike Pence says this, it doesn't resonate.
It's not persuasive.
He might sincerely believe it, he might sincerely desire it, but it doesn't resonate because while that might have been true five years ago, while that might have been true five months ago, it was true five months ago, it isn't true today.
Then, rewind a little bit further, he says, Israel needs to do every single thing it can to achieve its military objectives.
Yeah, sure, okay.
I think most people, certainly most reasonable people, would say that Israel was justified in going to war after the October 7th massacre.
But that was six months ago, and there's a difference between justice in going to war and justice in conducting war.
And when we're talking about the military objectives, we now have reports out from Israeli intelligence, anonymously and on the record, saying that they no longer believe that they will be able to achieve their chief military objective, which is the eradication of Hamas as the governing body in Gaza.
So, this is according to one anonymous intelligence source telling The Telegraph, a month ago I would have definitely said Israel can eliminate Hamas, but not now that the U.S.
has turned its back on Israel.
So you see, contingent on changing circumstances, namely public support in the United States for the Israeli war effort, because the United States funds the Israeli military, contingent on that fact, the Israeli intelligence source has changed his assessment of whether or not the State of Israel can achieve its military goals.
Then, according to an Israeli political analyst, Mitchell Barak, says Israel's twin aims of destroying Hamas and saving the Israeli hostages, which Mike Pence conflates here, quote, are clashing with each other and both can't happen.
That is an on-the-record comment from an Israeli political analyst speaking to the Wall Street Journal.
So you might say, well, but they should be able to defeat Hamas.
Yeah, but they're saying they can't.
So then, this gets back to the first claim that Mike Pence makes here.
Which is, Israel has no choice but to invade Rafah.
Rafah is this small town at the southern tip of Gaza, right near Egypt.
And, of course Israel has a choice.
Of course an invading army has the choice whether or not to invade.
Now, Mike Pence might mean something broader, something different than what he's literally saying.
He might mean, well, Israel can't tolerate Hamas, Israel can't tolerate the security risk.
Yeah, sure, I totally agree with that.
But when it comes to Israel has no option but to invade, of course, any army has a choice to invade or not to invade.
And in this case, Given what we have already established, and it's not just we who have established it, it's Israeli intelligence that has apparently established this, according to an anonymous and on-the-record comment to the media.
According to them, the invasion of Rafah would not be justified.
Because in order to justify actions in war, you need to satisfy criteria of the long-established Just War Theory, which was developed, obviously, by the Church, in large part by scholastics, but there have been plenty of modern, non-Christian philosophers who have contributed to this, and it predates the Church.
There are ancient pagan philosophers who have contributed to this.
This is a universally recognized principle of war, and when we're talking about Just war theory.
In this particular case, we ought to focus specifically on proportionality, whether the violence being used is not excessive vis-a-vis the aims of the war and the reasonable probability of success.
So in this case, you got Mike Pence saying one thing, and you've got Israeli intelligence saying a totally different thing.
Who are you going to believe when it comes to the Israeli military position?
Probably the latter.
I really don't mean to beat up on Mike Pence here and I actually don't even really mean to focus so much on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
That's really more an example to prove a broader point.
One needs to adapt one's rhetoric and strategies and entire thought process in politics.
Two Changing Circumstances.
Because politics is not just eternal principles.
There are some really shallow thinking, whiny, prissy people in politics, the Squishes often do this, who seem to believe that politics is about eternal principles and that's that.
And often their eternal principles are just some slogans from 15 years ago, and they're not actually all that eternal, and they don't seem all that principled, but in principle even that isn't what politics is.
Politics has to do with certain eternal principles, truths that will stand the test of time, but also changing circumstances.
This is why so many people who got really comfortable with the rhetoric and circumstances of, I don't know, 2011, Or 2008.
Or 1995.
Or whatever.
Why they couldn't understand the rise of Donald Trump.
Donald Trump rose in the Republican Party because the leaders of the Republican Party were not meeting the moment.
They were not meeting the challenges of the moment.
They were not responsive to the Republican voters.
They weren't even aware that circumstances had changed.
And if they were, they didn't care.
Because they all had nice, cushy sinecures at Beltway think tanks, and they didn't want their nice lifestyle, their comfort, either material comfort or even intellectual and political comfort, to be disrupted by that.
It's not going to work though.
That stuff goes stale and then the persuasive power goes away and then people who are a little more of the moment take that power.
Now, speaking of radically changing circumstances and the next generation, there is an extremely distressing story coming out of the Netherlands.
And it's a story that'll probably find its way to America soon if it hasn't already.
It's a story about young people.
I mean young people.
I'm talking about people in their 20s who are killing themselves with the approval, with the endorsement of the political authorities and even the medical community because they just kind of feel the sads.
Not because they have some terminal illness, not because they're in some immense pain that will inevitably lead to their imminent death.
They just feel kind of sad and so they're killing themselves.
And the political order is permitting, facilitating, and celebrating it.
We'll get to that in one second.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from Baltazar Carduelis.
Who says, picking and choosing is the definition of heresy.
A racist means choice.
So true.
I assume this refers to Cardinal Gregory's observation yesterday.
This is a liberal cardinal who said, Joe Biden might be sincere in his faith, but he's a cafeteria Catholic.
He picks and chooses what he wants and therefore he's not particularly faithful.
And that's so true.
There's an observation from Chesterton too, which is that the modern world is not Evil because it's so bad.
In part, it's evil because it's so good.
It's too good.
It's not that the modern world promotes vice so much as it promotes one virtue to the exclusion of the other virtues.
It picks and chooses, and so the virtues don't work together as a coherent whole to lead to our flourishing.
They just kind of go off, and they all go mad on their own way, and then we end up, we think, as a result of as a As a consequence of following our charity, we need to open up our border and let a bunch of gangbangers come in here or something like that.
Or, as a consequence of following our moderation, we need to negotiate with people who want to slaughter little babies, for instance.
Or, as a consequence of our humility, we need to throw up our hands and embrace a radical skepticism to say that we no longer even know what a woman is.
I mean, that's... There's a kernel of a virtue in there, but because they're all disconnected, they go totally crazy, and we live in an age that is...
Certainly heretical and very, very disordered.
Turning to the Netherlands, which is even more disordered than America is right now.
Really, really distressing story.
It's published here in the Free Press, Barry Weiss's paper.
Headline, I'm 28 and I'm scheduled to die in May.
Some right-to-die activists want everyone to have access to euthanasia, which means good death, even though it's ironic because it means the opposite of a good death.
It's the worst kind of death, which is a suicide.
Even young people with mental illness, are they making suicide contagious?
The answer is obviously yes.
Here's the story.
I'll just read a few sections.
It's a good article, though, and you should read the whole thing.
Zaria Turbik, 28 years old, expects to be euthanized in early May.
Her plan, she said, is to be cremated.
I did not want to burden my partner with having to keep the grave tidy.
Turbeek texted me, we've not picked an urn yet, but that will be my new house.
And then she added an urn emoji after house.
Very depressing.
First thing that stands out, this woman has a boyfriend.
But she doesn't want her boyfriend to have to go visit her, her grave, her remains.
She wants, her boyfriend can just forget about her.
And then she makes this dark kind of joke, teehee, that'll be my new house.
She said she was hobbled by her depression and autism and borderline personality disorder.
Now she was tired of living despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend.
Of course she's not in love with her boyfriend.
Something that struck me about suicide is it's a breaking up with everyone that you love.
If one were to commit suicide, it would be like going up to every single person that you love, or like, or even have a passing affection for, and saying, hey, I hate you.
I hate you.
So, I hate you, mom.
I hate you, dad.
I hate you, husband.
I hate you, wife.
I hate you.
I don't want to be with you anymore.
Go away.
I'm going to remove myself from the situation by killing myself.
She says, oh, I love my boyfriend.
Obviously, she doesn't.
Or she feels her boyfriend doesn't love her back.
Or her Intellect and our will are totally muddled up by psychiatric and almost certainly spiritual problems.
They're living in a nice house with their two cats.
She recalled her psychiatrist telling her that they tried everything and there's nothing more we can do for you.
It's never going to get any better.
Okay, if that's true, that means this woman has been failed by her psychologist, who is very perverse.
If the psychologist believes that suicide is in any way acceptable, that is a very perverse psychologist who is not living up to the Hippocratic Oath.
She's been failed by the other physicians who are allowing her to do this, who are violating the Hippocratic Oath.
She's been failed by her political community, which is now embracing something totally, totally contrary to the natural law.
She's been failed by her boyfriend.
Why aren't they married?
Why are they living together, but they're not married?
That's a failure of her boyfriend.
She's been failed by her boyfriend and her whole community in the political order because they've got cats instead of kids.
They should probably get married and have kids.
That would probably be a little bit more fulfilling.
Goes on.
The doctor really takes her time.
It's not that they walk in and say, lay down please.
Most of the time, it is first a cup of coffee to settle the nerves and create a soft atmosphere.
Then she asks if I'm ready.
I will take my place on the couch.
She will once again ask if I'm sure, and she will start out the procedure and wish me a good journey.
Or in my case, a nice nap, because I hate it if people say safe journey.
I'm not going anywhere.
Then the doctor will administer a sedative, followed by a drug that will stop Terbeek's heart.
This is the most ghastly scene.
Maybe not the most ghastly scene I can imagine.
Because abortion clinics exist.
But it's pretty close to the most ghastly scene I can imagine.
In a way, it's more ghastly.
Because at least in abortion clinics, sometimes the mothers don't realize what they're doing.
Even maybe sometimes the doctors don't realize what they're doing.
In this case, everyone is so totally conscious of it.
And the doctor who took an oath to help people and to cure people is going in to murder people.
and to exploit and prey upon people's depression and sadness and despair.
She's asked her boyfriend to be with her to the very end.
There won't be any funeral.
She doesn't have much family.
There again, failed by the community, failed by family, failed by the boyfriend.
She doesn't think her friends will feel like going.
Failed.
She doesn't seem to have friends.
She is despairing of that.
Failed by her friends.
Instead, her boyfriend will scatter her ashes in a nice spot in the woods that they've chosen together, she said.
Okay, really gory, awful stuff.
The story comes up.
On the seven year anniversary of a Netflix show that promoted suicide.
I won't even promote the show by saying what the name of the show is, but it was a show that promoted suicide specifically for teenagers.
That show launching was associated with an increase in suicide rates among U.S.
children, U.S.
kids ages 10 to 17.
And not just a little increase, That show comes out and suicide rates among kids and teenagers jumps 28.9%.
Almost a 30% increase.
That is, by the way, accounting for ongoing trends in suicide rates.
So even if you say, well, the suicide rate was already ticking up.
Yeah, accounting for that.
That show coming out seven years ago.
Ticked the kids' suicide rates up almost 30%.
This is according to a study published just this week in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
And there are still people on the left and on the right who, when you mention a social problem, a strange new social pathology, will say, Yeah, but how does it affect you?
Hey, how does it affect you if we allow people to do a bunch of drugs?
How does it affect you if we, as a matter of law, encourage deviant sexual behaviors that will probably lead to more depression and anxiety and suicidality?
I'm specifically talking, obviously, of course, of the trans issue.
But how does it affect you?
How does it affect you if we legalize suicide?
It doesn't affect you, it's just someone else.
It affects me because I'm a social creature.
I'm the political animal like everyone knew for all of history until we lost our minds five minutes ago.
And we are all susceptible to trends.
Virtually every behavior is vulnerable to social trends.
Even the ones that we're told are totally innate and cannot possibly change.
They're totally immutable.
Like I just mentioned the transgender issue which always seems to crop up because it's so novel and bizarre.
The rates of trans identification are up many multiples in recent years, specifically among young people who are the most impressionable, who have the most malleable minds.
Is it because there's something in the water?
Is it because there's some genetic defect going on?
Or is it because virtually every behavior is subject to social trends?
There's two kind of virtues.
I mentioned them earlier, the intellectual virtues and the moral virtues.
Intellectual virtues you can gather through book learning, through teaching, which is great.
You need to do that.
Science, wisdom.
Yeah, that's great.
That's wonderful, too.
But the moral virtues you can only gain through habit, through behavior, and we learn our habits, and we cultivate our habits, rather, through interactions with other people, because we're a social creature, and by imitating other people, and by living in society, and we copy what other people are doing, we copy what we see.
And then that just becomes part of our identity, among the most important parts of our identity.
And so if our culture becomes totally selfish and says, do whatever you want, forget about it, and ignores specifically the moral virtues, then a lot more people are going to kill themselves.
Depressed 28 year olds and even kids watching a TV show.
Okay, before we go, Hillary Clinton.
Is she's doing her best to campaign for the Democrats.
But it's very hard because Joe Biden is a terrible president who is personally very embarrassing and who hasn't achieved anything.
So young voters are coming out.
They don't really like him.
He's not doing well with young voters.
Here is Hillary's message to the young voters.
It's Biden versus Trump.
We know that.
It is.
What do you say to voters who are upset that those are the two choices?
Get over yourself.
Those are the two choices.
Yeah, I love that.
And, you know, it's kind of like one is old and effective and compassionate, has a heart and really cares about people.
And one is old and has been charged with 91 felonies.
Yeah, OK.
I mean.
Okay, first of all, the fact that a former president, current leader of the opposition, is being charged with any felonies... The higher the number, actually, the more I think it proves my point.
The fact that that is happening to a former president, current leader of the opposition, is evidence to most Americans, according to surveys, that he is being persecuted for his political views.
If it were one felony, maybe you could say, well, maybe he committed a crime.
The fact that it's 91 only reinforces that belief that it's just a political persecution.
So that part doesn't really work.
And what her argument is, it's the principal Skinner argument.
Hillary's argument for why young people need to get on board with Joe Biden comes to us by way of The Simpsons.
Boy, there are no children here at the 4-H club either.
Am I so out of touch?
No, it's the children who are wrong.
It's the children who are wrong!
No, it can't be!
The people don't like us, and we're not doing well in the polls, and especially the young people really don't like what we're doing.
Is it possible?
That we, the Democrat Party, the Progressive Party, where the median age of its leaders is about 152, where we haven't changed our rhetoric in quite some time, and in as much as we have changed our rhetoric, it's to adopt views that are completely absurd and repugnant to most of the American people.
The notion that a big man should go into a little girl's bathroom, for instance.
