Ep. 1855 - HORRIFIC: Libs Violently Attack Turning Point USA at UC Berkeley
Antifa bloodies Turning Point at UC Berkeley, Hasan Piker admits he hates America, and the new Toy Story villain is an iPad.
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Ep.1855
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A massive Antifa attack on a TPUSA event leaves attendees bloodied at UC Berkeley.
And the chaos seems absurd.
After all the leftist violence that has taken place specifically at Berkeley, do you remember the so-called Battle of Berkeley when Ben spoke there in 2017?
$600,000 worth of security protection?
Just two months after the founder of TPUSA was murdered by a leftist on campus.
How could the police not have prepared for this?
Well, one answer might be, I actually didn't believe this when I read it.
The chief of police in Berkeley is the same woman who ran the Capitol Hill Police on January 6th.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Toy Story 5 coming out with a big warning.
A really, really big warning that is totally timely and makes me think that Hollywood is not completely over.
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I guess the most surprising thing about the violence at the TPUSA event at Berkeley is that it came from an organization that doesn't exist.
Because I was reliably informed by Jimmy Kimmel and by left-wing cable news that Antifa does not exist.
Yeah, sure, Antifa has regularly attacked conservatives, specifically at campus events.
Yeah, Antifa threw an explosive at an event that I did.
There's a guy who is an Antifa member who's actually in federal prison for it.
But listen, if Jimmy Kimmel tells me that it doesn't exist, I guess it doesn't exist, right?
Antifa is just an idea.
Well, here is what that idea did at Berkeley.
So you can see, if you're only listening, they're setting off flares, masked people screaming, upside down American flags.
Sounds like gunshots going off.
That's actually a car backfiring multiple times.
You see, they weren't, happily, they weren't actually shooting conservatives this time.
They were just making conservatives think that they were shooting at them, just trying to terrorize them.
You've got the Antifa costume, the uniform, which is black with masks, with black hats, black glasses.
They've added a little something to their style.
They're now wearing kefias as well.
Makes sense.
birds of a feather flock together.
Andy No, who is probably the best reporter out there on Antifa, has been following this for years, has had his life threatened, has had to move all around, has been physically assaulted.
He reports that the specific Antifa group was a group called By Any Means Necessary, which has meetings, has cells, has members, but don't ever conclude that Antifa is a real organization.
It's just an idea, of course.
Some more reporting out of this event is from Cam Higbee.
A Christian man was there and he was wearing a cross necklace and he was attacked by apparently by a Muslim and the Muslim rips his cross off and is assaulting the man, repeatedly assaulting the man.
The Christian reportedly doesn't even fight back.
He gets really, really bloodied.
You can see he's wearing a Charlie Kirk shirt, a red freedom shirt.
And so what happens?
Well, of course, the Christian gets arrested.
Of course.
I think eventually he was let go.
I think eventually they might have gotten the Muslim attacker.
Pretty crazy scene.
Pretty crazy scene because we know to expect this at Berkeley.
We've been seeing this at Berkeley for eight years, just in the right wing speakers, campus events, TPUSA YAF style events.
We've been seeing that pretty consistently.
And we've been seeing crazy leftism at Berkeley for 60 years.
So then the question becomes, how did the authorities not prepare for this?
Forget about Berkeley specifically.
You had a radical leftist recently murder the most prominent promoter of civil discourse on campus on campus two months ago.
How were they not prepared for this?
Well, here's one answer.
The current UC Berkeley chief of police is the former acting chief of police for Capitol Hill.
This woman's name is Yogananda Pittman.
Yogananda Pittman was the acting chief of police, Capitol Hill, on January 6th, the worst day in the history of the world.
And so we're seeing here the confluence of two related phenomena.
One is the simple lack of desire on the left to police their own.
We're seeing that conservative Christians for the crime of wearing cross necklaces are arrested after being bloodied up.
And leftist radicals, violent people, terrorists, they generally get off the hook.
We've been seeing that through BLM.
We've been seeing that on campus.
We've been seeing that all over the place.
That's one of the phenomena.
The other one is a severe lack of competence.
And sometimes the incompetence is an excuse to get away with allowing the leftist violence.
In any case, the administration needs to come down hard on this because here, too, we're seeing the confluence of two major priorities of the Trump administration.
One is to stop the left-wing violence.
The entire top part of the Trump administration was present at and spoke at Charlie Kirk's memorial.
It was a beautiful show of strength from the administration and unity.
Unity is very important right now as there are increasing civil wars breaking out on the right.
I'll be speaking on that tonight at Belmont Abbey in North Carolina.
So the Trump administration obviously wants to put an end to the left-wing violence.
However, the Trump administration is also going after these universities because the universities, put the violence aside, are failing at their mission.
They're failing at their mission to educate students.
They're failing at their mission to form good citizens.
They're failing at their mission to form the proper morals and habits of students, which is and always has been a charge of the universities.
And they're receiving federal funding.
And you can't even say, well, it's just the bad universities.
You know, it's not the elite prestigious ones.
The elite prestigious ones, in many cases, are the worst offenders.
And UC Berkeley is considered a very good school.
So the one silver lining of this attack is it's very clear what the administration needs to do.
The administration needs to come down with an iron fist, specifically on Berkeley.
They started to do it at Harvard.
They need to do it at Berkeley.
They need to go in.
They need to round up all of the left-wing radicals.
They need to make a show of them, not out of vindictiveness, not merely out of retribution, but for the cause of justice.
This cannot go on.
We've been saying this since Charlie was assassinated.
We must restore order.
We all want a flourishing society where we can openly debate ideas and deliberate and have self-government.
We all want that.
You cannot have a marketplace of ideas or anything else when bandits keep shooting up the marketplace.
They're doing it.
They're still doing it.
Organized left-wing terror is doing it.
The universities are not doing anything about it.
So to quote George W. Bush, fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice.
Hey, hey, hey.
The point is you're not going to fool me again.
Now, the DOJ says they're investigating this.
We need a hard clampdown on left-wing violence, specifically at the universities, specifically Antifa.
I was down testifying before the Senate just a couple of weeks ago on this very issue.
I'm glad to see the legislators are looking into it.
I know the White House is looking into it.
We need action.
We need action now.
Now is the time to strike for the cause of justice.
Also, as a matter of pure electoral politics, people care about this.
People are very concerned with their safety.
People are very concerned with the disorder.
This is a winning issue for Republicans.
Let's be really crass about it.
Let's get real down into the nitty-gritty of elections.
We just suffered a bad election for a multitude of reasons that we've covered on the show in Virginia, in New York.
We now have a Muslim communist in New York running the city in New Jersey.
Now is the time.
One thing that the government shut down in the elections last Tuesday were able to achieve for the Democrats is they shifted the conversation away from where it should be, where it had been since the murder of Charlie Kirk, which is on the radical left-wing violence that they are inflicting on us, that they are justifying, that they are dismissing, and that in many cases they're celebrating.
Now the conversation is back there, and we need to see the legislators make moves.
That's great.
We need to see law enforcement come in, round these people up, make an example of them.
Government is a relatively simple thing.
It's not easy, but it's simple.
When you subsidize something, you get more of it.
When you punish something, you get less of it.
It's that simple.
I know some people have very abstract theoretical ideas about politics.
They say, well, actually, no, when you outlaw something, actually you get more of it.
You know, this is kind of the like squishy pothead libertarian argument on drugs.
War on drugs totally failed, man.
War on drugs didn't fail, by the way.
That's a conversation for another time.
You know, actually, man, when you legalize something, maybe you'll get less of it.
That's not how it works.
When you outlaw something and you enforce the law, you get less of it.
And the police, I'm not saying the rank and file police.
I'm saying the people who are running the police have failed to stop left-wing violence.
They've failed and failed and failed again.
How much more of this are we going to see before we clamp down on it?
You look at violent leftists, you see how far down the rot runs.
An amazing viral clip from popular left-wing streamer Hassan Piker.
We'll get to that in one second.
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You know Hassan Piker.
Hassan Piker is a very popular left-wing streamer.
He's the nephew of Chenk Uger at the Young Turks.
He's been around for a long time.
He and I have debated on TV and Charlie have debated.
He's out there.
He tortured his dog.
He suggested the assassination of Senator Tom Cotton.
He said the streets need to run red with the blood of capitalists.
He's out there.
Well, a clip of Hassan Piker has just gone viral that is really illustrative, not just of his psychology and psychosis and psychopathy, but of a broader character defect that you hear throughout the left.
Take a listen.
I don't have any sort of patriotism in my heart for any.
Yeah, for America, but just in general.
I'm not like a very, you know, I care about people.
Okay, this is Hassan Piker in Tiananmen Square, I guess.
I guess he's in China.
And what he's saying here, I don't want to jump down his throat too much because what he's saying here is really honest and actually introspective, and it's worth paying close attention to to try to fix it.
He says, I don't have any patriotism in my heart.
And he doesn't even sound really angry.
This doesn't even sound like invective here.
This sounds more like a confession, an admission.
Oh, you know, I actually don't have patriotism in my heart.
And it's not just that I hate America.
I don't feel any kind of patriotism whatsoever.
It's just, that's just a feeling or a virtue that is lacking in me.
This is an honest example of a phenomenon that we saw come out of social science.
Do you remember?
It became a meme, actually, some months ago, maybe six months ago or something.
And it was this heat map of conservatives and liberals in-group and out-group preferences.
So for conservatives, conservatives feel the strongest connection to, loyalty to, love for, responsibility for people who are closest to them.
And it's not that they don't care at all about people who are distant from them, who are unrelated, who are on the other side of the world.
It's just that that feeling of loyalty and responsibility decreases a little bit.
For liberals, it's the opposite.
For liberals, they feel the least responsibility for, the least connection to the people who are closest to them.
And they feel the most care for people who are far away, distant, people that they've never met.
This is a social scientific proof of a dictum we've long said about the left, which is that the left loves humanity in the abstract, but they don't seem to love actual humans very much because charity starts at home.
The vice president talked about this, and it was one of the most beautiful articulations of moral philosophy that I've ever heard come out of an American politician.
And he was kind of made fun of for it.
He was pilloried for it, but it was a great point.
He said there's something called the Ordo Amoris, a phrase from St. Augustine.
St. Thomas Aquinas talks about it as the Ordo Caritatis, the order of love, the order of charity.
And this is biblical.
You see references to this in the New Testament, which and the Old Testament for that matter.
We have a greater responsibility for our family than we do for someone else's family on the other side of the world.
We also are called to care for them, but we have a greater responsibility.
A father, for instance, has a greater responsibility to protect and care for his family.
A child has a greater responsibility to care for and protect his parents than they do for people on the other side of the world.
This is natural.
This is good.
It derives from the natural law.
We all are called to have a proper love of ourselves, not an excessive love of ourselves and our excellences.
That would be pride, which is the queen of all vices, but a proper love of ourselves.
It would be disordered, for instance, to commit suicide.
So we have to have a proper love for ourselves, and this expands out first into our families.
And patriotism is an extension of love of our families.
It's an extension of filial piety.
And Hassan Piker's coming out there.
He says, I don't have that.
I just don't feel that.
That is a major character defect.
And it's not just unique to him.
This is something we see throughout the left, backed up even by social science.
And the problem with this is, because, as I mentioned, it derives from the natural law, this is not something that you can exactly argue someone into.
This is just one of those axioms.
You know, there are axioms, there are premises that we have to start with in order to reason about morality, in order to figure out what conclusions we should come to, what kind of policies we should live by.
You have to start with them.
They are not the conclusion, the asymptotic conclusion of endless debate.
They're what you have to start with.
I cannot exactly argue for you.
I can't prove to you, let's say, that good is to be done and pursued and evil is to be avoided.
What's the proof of that?
Show me the logical definitive argument for that.
You won't be able to do it.
It's a precept.
However, the one thing I can promise you is, if you don't accept as a moral premise that good is to be done and evil is to be avoided, then you can't reason about anything else.
I can't really convince you in a definitive way as a proof that you should honor your father and mother.
I cannot really convince you.
I cannot argue to you from purely natural reason that it's wrong to commit murder, to murder innocent people.
However, if you don't just accept these sorts of things, you can't reason about anything else.
It's just like in mathematics, which is I can't prove that A equals A.
I can't prove that if A plus B, that if that A plus B rather equals B plus A.
I can't really prove, you just have to accept that.
There are certain axioms to algebra and there are axioms to morality and to politics too.
And so this gets down to what we were just talking about, the universities.
A major point of education is to form these characters, to reinforce these axioms, which we all just kind of intuit because the natural law is written on every human heart.
But it's to really cultivate those loves, to form the habits that derive from those axioms, such that they become second nature, such that we just feel patriotism.
When I was a kid, my mother told me never let an American flag touch the ground.
And now when I see a flag touch the ground, I get, feel uneasy.
I feel an anxiety.
I have to pick it up.
Why?
Because I care about some piece of cloth?
No, it's because I care about what the piece of cloth represents, because I recognize that signs signify something, that symbols have meaning.
And I guess there are plenty of modern materialists who deny meaning altogether.
They say it's all just words, words, words.
That's the line that Hamlet uses when he's feigning madness.
But if we're going to live together in society, if we're going to do anything, if we believe that anything is better than any other thing, then we recognize there is meaning.
We have to cultivate these things.
Unfortunately, modern education tells you that that's all bunk.
That's not true.
We're not teaching students what to think, only how to think.
But it is, of course, not possible to teach a student how to think if you don't first begin with at least the basic premises of what to think.
You have to begin there.
You have to begin with a basic moral education.
You have to begin by cultivating certain loves, certain desires, such that you will pursue them.
You'll pursue what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful.
And you will do that long after you've graduated from school.
If you go to college, if you go to a college like UC Berkeley, you're there for four years.
If that's your whole education, you're going to have a very weak, paltry life.
So I feel for Hassan Piker.
He's admitting a kind of a psychopathy, a kind of a moral dullness, an emotional dullness even.
And so he deserves our pity, but he should recognize that he's got a kind of a bad life.
You know, he's sitting there on camera torturing his dog.
He's angry all the time.
He talks about, he talks about how he wants to murder his countrymen.
That's not good.
That's not conducive to flourishing, neither to his personal flourishing nor certainly to the flourishing of the country.
That's what we have to get back to.
And so part of bringing the hammer down on the universities is also bringing the hammer down on K through 12 education, is also bringing the hammer down on the way that we speak in public life, the way that the law and the culture, which are very difficult to separate because the law is a teacher, the way that they cultivate certain habits.
This brings us all the way back to that famous John Adams line, the Constitution is built for a moral and religious people.
The inescapable conclusion of that is that the political order has to cultivate morality.
It has to cultivate religion.
And a specific kind of religion, by the way.
Not all religions are the same.
We also fall into a kind of religious indifferentism that is part of the subjectivism, the relativism of our age that is supposedly value neutral.
Can't have that.
It's not going to work.
We're in the midst of the latest instantiation of the conservative civil war.
What is it that we believe?
What is it?
Who's in the team?
Who's not on the team?
Basic parts of this involve the foundations of society.
If you don't have the basic stuff, if you don't know how to behave, if you don't have the society teaching you the difference between good and bad and telling you that you should pursue the good and avoid the bad, if you don't have that, then none of that higher order freedom is possible, whether as a matter of individual liberty or as political liberty.
Okay.
Speaking of moral education and how to cultivate loves and habits of virtue, Toy Story 5 looks like they're totally killing it.
We'll get to that in one second first.
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You know, I love Toy Story.
I remember when it came out.
In fact, I was playing Randy Newman the other day on the piano and the ukulele.
You got friend in me.
Another great Randy Newman song is Short People.
Just not, it's not quite as like happy-go-lucky as it.
But it was a great movie.
One of the last really great kids' movies that was ever made.
And the franchise generally has been pretty good.
I haven't watched all of them, but that seemed to stay relatively true to itself.
It hasn't been completely gutted and wiped out as Hollywood has done to most beloved franchises.
Well, here is the trailer for Toy Story 5.
There's a package for- We're only listening.
All the toys are terrified.
They see a package has come.
They say it's over.
The age of toys is over.
Hi there.
I'm Lily Pad.
Let's play.
And what is the horror?
What is the horror that has destroyed the age of toys?
It is an iPad.
So true.
I'm really encouraged by this.
I don't know anything else about this movie other than that that point is totally right.
And what's so amazing about it is that it gives a thesis.
It kind of completes the setup that you had in Toy Story 1 of what toys are for.
What are toys for?
Toys are for cultivating the imagination, cultivating delight, cultivating what you do in your leisure time from the time that you're two years old or younger, all the way up until you're an adult.
I just mentioned, coincidentally, as it is, that I love, you know, playing the piano and playing the ukulele.
I don't do that for work.
I'd love to, you know, it'd be amazing.
Someday maybe I'll retire from politics and media.
I'll retire from the cigar business.
I'll retire from all my jobs and I'll just go on a ukulele tour.
But I don't think that day is happening anytime soon.
It's just a love.
It's just a hobby.
It's something that gives me delight for itself.
I don't need to be that good at it.
Winston Churchill wrote about this in Painting is Pastime.
He said, if you're reading this essay to learn how to paint, you're too old to be a good painter.
But it's okay.
It doesn't matter.
That's not what it's for.
It's for giving you something to do in your leisure time to help you think, to help you see the world, to help you relax, to help you delight.
And that's what toys do.
And the age of toys is over.
Look around at little kids.
Go to a restaurant and look around at the kids at the restaurant.
I bet you a lot of them are going to be sitting there on their stupid idiot machines on their iPads.
And I know why parents do it.
There are going to be parents listening to this show right now who say, oh, yeah, because that's me.
How dare you, Michael?
How dare you criticize my parenting?
I get all the reasons because kids at restaurants are super annoying and they start swinging knives in the air and they knock over glasses of water and they yell and they cry.
And I know.
And when you put the idiot machine in front of them, they shut up.
They become comatose.
And then you can have a nice dinner with your wife or whatever.
I know, I get it.
There's a reason that works because when you just stick a kid in front of a screen, it used to be when you stick a kid just in front of a TV all the time.
Now it's even worse because it's an iPad that's all on demand, that never runs out, that's never boring, that's always glittering.
When you stick a kid in front of that, you mollify them, but you halt their education.
In some ways, you open them up to learning all sorts of bad lessons.
So in that way, their education continues, often in a bad way.
But in the sense of education as cultivating delight and loves and joys, that's over.
You just stick them there and you lobotomize them.
And if you do it long enough, you legitimately lobotomize them for the rest of their lives.
Really good stuff.
I'm excited.
This is the first Hollywood movie I've been excited for in years.
Good, good lessons.
What's the point of education?
What's the point of play?
What's the point of toys?
Oh, that's good.
Okay.
All right.
I know it's bad for conservatives to really have any hope.
I know it's bad to have any optimism, especially when it comes to Hollywood.
That's reacting to a major point.
It's another point that we talked about the other day, which is a lot of our political problems, we think of them as abstract ideology or just merely the violence of the left.
They come from somewhere.
And a lot of them are technological changes.
Get back to what Hassan Piker was saying.
Hassan Piker's saying, I feel no patriotism of any kind.
Well, why is that?
In part, that's probably the technological change of global interconnectedness, of streaming, of the fact that you can feel a greater affinity for someone on the other side of the world than you do to your own family.
Because when you go and you just stream all day, you're beaming yourself out of your community, beaming yourself somewhere else.
Sometimes that can be fine in its proper place.
Other times it can really, really screw things up.
Okay, speaking of entertainment, Charlotte Jones, who is a co-owner of the Dallas Cowboys and implausibly, the chief brand officer, just came out to defend Bad Bunny's halftime show performance.
Bad Bunny, the radical Puerto Rican leftist, occasional transvestite who apparently hates America, doesn't even want to speak English.
Here's why she thinks that's a really good thing.
What are your thoughts on Bad Bunny performing at this year's Super Bowl?
I think it's awesome.
And I think our Latina fan base is amazing.
And I think when you think about the Super Bowl, you want the number one performer in the world to be there.
We're on a global stage and we can't ever forget that.
Our game goes out to everybody around the world.
And to get the premier entertainer to want to be a part of our game, I think is amazing.
And I think that, you know, we have a mixed culture.
I mean, our whole society is based on immigrants that have come here and founded our country.
And I think we can celebrate that.
And I think the show is going to be amazing.
You don't think at a time when his comments were divisive as it relates to President Trump, when everyone is just seeking this political unification, that you'd want somebody who maybe didn't touch politics to be on that stage?
Yeah, I don't think our game's about politics.
I don't think people tune in to look at politics.
We do everything we can to avoid politics.
And I think in that moment that people will be watching the game, they'll be celebrating music and nobody will be thinking about what's comments on the left side, what comments on the right side, that this is about bringing people together.
The delusion is jaw-dropping.
I don't think our game is about politics, you know?
It's about bringing people together.
It's not about politics.
It's not about left and right, which is why we hired for the performer, the halftime show performer.
That's why we hired someone who overtly and explicitly constantly attacks the president who won with the popular vote, whose every waking move is motivated by a radical leftist political agenda.
That's why we picked him because it's so unifying.
So she overlooks all the things he actually says, probably because she doesn't speak Puerto Rican or whatever.
But then also she goes in and she says, you know, look, he's an immigrant, kind of.
He's not really Puerto Rican.
But he, no, look, you don't understand.
Our whole country is about immigration.
It's all about immigrants who founded this country.
I like plenty of immigrants.
Okay.
We got too many of them, a lot, way too many of them, but I like them.
Some of my family were immigrants.
You telling me that the Nicaraguan day laborer who showed up under Biden, that he founded our country, you really believe that?
No.
I don't think you believe that.
Maybe you mean older immigrants, though you wouldn't say it.
Maybe you mean, I don't know, let's go to my, maybe you mean Italian immigrants.
Italian immigrants have contributed a lot to the country.
Antonin Scalia, for instance, they've done a lot of bad things too.
Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, you know, the mafia.
But okay, they gave us some good stuff.
Obviously, they gave us some good stuff.
You say Italians founded America?
Christopher Columbus might have discovered America, but that was a long way before immigration.
That's what our country is about?
How about the settlers who came here on the Mayflower, which is a great cigar brand?
How about the people who were here for generation after generation?
How about the whole swaths of American history?
What was it?
Half of American history, basically, we had zero immigration.
That, no.
This is an example.
I think she probably believes this.
She obviously doesn't know anything.
It's insane that she's the chief brand officer.
She doesn't know a thing about branding.
She probably really believes it.
This is an example of the left not knowing what it doesn't know.
You know, the old Don Rumsfeld line about known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.
She doesn't know what she doesn't know.
These are unknown unknowns or unknown knowns.
These are the things that everybody else knows that she doesn't know.
So it doesn't seem political to her.
And I think this is true of the left broadly.
When the left comes out, you know, and they try to cram some like fat, hairy man into the girl's locker room.
And they say, why are you making this political?
Why are you objecting to this?
This isn't political.
They really don't see it as political.
So, no, this is just a matter of course.
Of course, big, fat, hairy sexual deviants need to change in front of your daughter.
Of course, that's just, that's just an axiom of politics.
We can debate after that.
But that we have to begin with that premise.
So it's a mistake about even the axioms that we have to start with.
She doesn't know.
And what's so crazy about this is we're talking about the Dallas Cowboys.
We're not talking about some radical, extreme left-wing organization.
We're not talking about Antifa's group by any means necessary.
We're not talking about La Raza or BLM.
We're talking about the Dallas Cowboys.
That's how deep the rot runs.
Pathetic.
I guess this woman won't be fired because she owns the team.
But In one sense, it would be much better if they knew how terribly offensive and destructive it was to have some Puerto Rican transvestite who hates the president, hates America, come out and babble in Spanish during the halftime show.
If they knew what they were doing politically, you'd say, well, that's bad, but they have an agenda.
They don't even know.
They don't even know.
The task of conservatives is that much deeper.
We have to teach them, and we have to teach them in schools, in universities, in kindergarten.
We also have to teach them through the law.
And the longer you let this go on and the longer you take a feckless, laissez-faire approach to this, the worse the problem is going to get.
Okay.
Speaking of bringing people together, really insightful observation by a longtime liberal, Cheryl Hines, whose longtime Democrat, Democrat scion husband, Bobby Kennedy, is now working for a Republican.
She makes a very interesting observation about the Republicans and the Democrats.
We'll get to that in a second.
First, I want to tell you about St. Paul's Center.
Go to stpaultcenter.com slash America.
I had a marvelous time last Friday night at the St. Paul Center Gala listening to marvelous lectures by Scott Hahn, probably the best theologian in America, by Bishop Robert Barron, who you know, you know, Bishop Barron from the show.
They're just wonderful.
A real focus on biblical literacy.
America has reached a cultural and spiritual crossroads.
People are looking for the truth in their search.
More and more people are turning to the Bible for answers.
Bible Across America is a nationwide Bible study, the biggest Bible study in the country, hosted by the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.
Seven-week Bible study exploring the personal challenge of affirming Jesus as teacher and Lord.
Join the movement, learn to share your faith confidently starting November 5th.
Very simple to sign up.
Right now, you go to stpaultcenter.com slash America.
I have two books on my desk at home.
One is a daily devotional.
One is the St. Ignatius Study Bible, edited by Scott Hahn.
In fact, I was opening it up just yesterday morning, looking up part of Zechariah, believe it or not.
So head on over right now to stpaulcenter.com slash America.
In one week, Friendly Fire returns.
Join Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Andrew Clavin, and your favorite, Wednesday night at 7 p.m. Eastern on Dailyware Plus as we do what we do best, look good.
Also debate, discuss, disagree on the biggest stories in politics and culture.
Plus, we are world premiering the first official trailer for the Pendragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin.
Do not miss it.
Friendly Fire Wednesday at 7 p.m. Eastern, only on Daily Wire Plus.
My favorite comment yesterday is from Hard Boiled Entertainment, Michael Jordan, Republicans by Nikes 2.
You remember that?
He said that in the 90s.
Nike.
Yeah, well, we'll fix that.
That's true.
Now, frankly, I don't even know that Democrats are going to buy Nikes.
Even the kind of moderate liberals who just want to play sports.
You know, not even the total gigachads, just like the regular kind of centrist, center-left person who likes to play sports.
Are they now going to want to wear Nike when Nike is associated with non-binary, furry video gamers, as Nike announced a couple days ago?
I don't think so.
Cheryl Hines, co-star to Larry David, one of the funnier but more insufferable leftists in the country, and wife to Bobby Kennedy, longtime Democrat, now works for Trump.
Here's what she tells Bill Maher, longtime Democrat, who is somewhat heterodox on the left, about the difference between the two parties.
The Republicans have been very kind to me from the beginning.
Even from the beginning when Bobby was running as a Democrat, they weren't mean.
No.
And they never have been.
No.
And I can't say that for the Democrats.
I agree.
It's sad because it's not the Democrats we grew up with.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's the difference that people don't, I think, see.
They're like, why did you turn on the Democrats?
Well, first of all, I didn't.
Like I said, we voted for the same person.
But I'm not going to pretend I don't notice how different they are.
How mean they've become.
Very mean.
There you go.
This is not some right-wing echo chamber, obviously.
These are two Democrats, long time Democrats, long time liberals, just observing.
They say, you know, it's weird.
The Republicans are nice and the Democrats are mean.
And there's a lot of political power to that.
There's a lot of political power.
Do not underestimate how behavior, comportment, style, care, charity can affect a political order.
It can have amazing effects on a political order.
It can shift things overnight because people notice that because we're social creatures.
And one of the pitfalls of our age, of our age of iPads and streamers and abstraction and disconnection is that we forget that we're social creatures and we're loyal.
This is part of the Republican Civil War that people don't seem to understand is there are friendships and alliances and loyalties that do matter because we're not just ideas floating in outer space.
We're creatures who are living in community.
That's what politics is.
Then you have to ask, or maybe you have to explain it to Bill Maher and Cheryl Hines.
Why are the Democrats mean?
Why do they celebrate political violence?
Why do they commit political violence?
And the Republicans generally don't.
Because the Republicans know to love our enemies, because the Republicans know to pray for those who persecute us, because the Republicans know that there is a transcendent moral order.
And I'm not even just talking about the real devout practicing religious people on the right.
Because we're social creatures, because we're mimetic, because we imitate the people that we are closest to, because we're the average of the five people we spend the most time with, even the Republicans who would say, I'm agnostic, I'm not that religious, I don't know, I don't go in for organized religion, whatever, even they are much more likely to behave in an appropriate manner than the Democrats are.
Frankly, even than the Democrats who pretend to be religious.
Because it just, these kinds of behaviors are just, they get into our bones.
They get into our muscles.
We see them all the time and we emulate them.
That's how human beings work.
We've talked a lot about René Girard on this show, you know, the French writer, Catholic writer who talked about the theory of memetic desire, that you want the fancy wristwatch, not because you know anything about watches, but because the other guy wants it.
And you admire that person and you desire the things he desires.
You behave in the way that he behaves.
And there are very complex things that come out of that.
That's why.
And if I'm looking at the two political parties today, I have two temptations.
One is from the left, which gives me a dubious justification to vent all my worst impulses, my wrath, my lust, my pride.
They have a whole month dedicated to pride, really more than a month at this point.
All the gluttony, the body positivity, really all of the deadly sins.
They give me a justification to pursue that.
And that is tempting.
That's tempting to the Hassan Pikers of the world.
But then I look to the right and I see that they have relatively good lives and they tend to have families and they tend to not be angry all the time and they tend to not be on drugs all the time and they tend to be relatively balanced and happy and they smile more and they're nicer to people.
And that's very tempting too.
And the question now is, which temptation are people going to follow?
Because virtue and vice are temptations.
You can be tempted to virtue just as you can be tempted to vice.
And so part of our job politically at a higher level is to is to cultivate the desires that will give in to the good temptations, which is what that's kind of what grace is.
Grace is a temptation to the good, just as evil tempts us to all sorts of vices.
Now, speaking of big Democrat flip-flops, Jasmine Crockett has come out.
This is maybe my favorite, favorite story of the whole day.
Jasmine Crockett, the new AOC, she comes out out of the blue and she says, hey, looking ahead to 2026, 2028, you need to stop trusting those Dominion voting machines.
We do know that one of his friends has purchased Dominion.
So it's going to be really important for us to educate all states that we can to make sure that their Secretary of States are like, we don't want the Dominion machines because I personally believe that that ally purchased Dominion so that he could potentially play with the machines because we know that they're trying to cheat by changing the lines for the midterms.
And I think that they're trying to solidify their cheat potentially with the voting machines.
Hey, welcome to the Republican Party, Jasmine.
Man, this Republican Civil War is really weird.
And now we got Jasmine Crockett joining the ranks.
You know, maybe we do need to gatekeep a little bit.
Maybe, whoa, we do need to delineate the boundaries of this coalition.
Because I recall, I'm old enough to remember, when Fox News got sued for zillions of dollars, had to settle for $800 million over those exact claims.
Almost precisely what Jasmine Crockett's saying.
Remember, Fox News hosts went out.
They said these Dominion voting machines are corrupt.
They're hackable.
They could throw an election.
And Fox News got sued into the dirt for it.
Fox wasn't the only one.
Tucker Carlson got fired over it.
Now, Jasmine Crockett's saying the same thing because apparently, I didn't even know this.
I learned this from Jasmine Crockett.
I guess a Republican owns Dominion now or something.
I don't know.
Who knows?
I don't believe really anything she says, but let's say that's true.
What the Democrats are going to say is there's no hypocrisy here.
They're going to say, no, no, no, Dominion used to be great.
You used to be able to trust the voting machines, but now that someone else owns it, you can't trust them.
They don't seem to understand.
They don't know what they don't know.
They don't seem to understand that by making that argument, they are implicitly accepting what the Republicans were saying during the 2020 election.
Because if the integrity of the voting machines depends upon which guy happens to be the CEO or whatever at the time, then the voting machines are insecure.
Then the voting machines themselves are vulnerable to fraud.
Not my line.
Don't sue me for $800 million.
That's what this very prominent Democrat Congress lady is saying.
So that's great.
I want that clip to be played everywhere.
I want, I really hope that the administration, the government pushes this one out.
She's a member of the government.
You can push that one out.
I want right-wing media to blast this everywhere.
And I want Dominion, if Dominion's owned by Republican now, I want them to sue this woman down into the dirt.
At the very least, the conclusion could be that maybe these voting machines are just by their nature, not because of any nefarious activities of the companies, but by their very nature, by their digital nature, for that matter, getting back to a broader theme of the show, more vulnerable to fraud and abuse than the old-fashioned way that we used to do it, where you'd put your vote on a piece of paper and you would count them and there would be ballot watchers who were looking at the counting.
And you can't hack a piece of paper.
It's much more difficult to.
That's good stuff.
This realignment's doing all right.
Okay, there's much more to say, especially on technology, the AI boom, the economic turmoil that we could be facing could really screw up Republicans in the midterms and in 2028.
