Michael Knowles analyzes the White House Correspondents Association shooting, identifying the shooter as a leftist donor and member of the Wide Awakes group. He critiques mainstream media denial and figures like Hakeem Jeffries for justifying violence, arguing instead for prosecuting radicals, deporting bad actors, and enforcing "right wing cancel culture." Knowles connects societal decline to secularism replacing religious values, citing a congressional candidate who froze and aborted embryos as proof that environmentalism now supersedes biblical commands to multiply. Ultimately, he asserts that mere debate cannot fix collapsing birth rates or political violence without restoring traditional family structures and strict legal enforcement. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Why Moderates Are Radicalized00:13:08
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A leftist teacher from California opened fire on the Trump administration at the White House Correspondents Association dinner Saturday night, which is barely newsworthy at this point.
After mainstream leftists have spent years calling for the murder of conservatives, attempting to murder conservatives at public events, nearly murdering President Trump, and successfully murdering Charlie Kirk, a leftist assassin at the White House correspondence dinner is barely newsworthy.
This is just what they do.
So now we've entered the five stages of leftist violence.
The first stage is denial.
They all deny that it happened.
Or they say it was staged.
Or they insist that something happened, but we can't possibly know the motive.
I've got all the receipts.
The second stage is anger.
They're angry that it didn't work.
The third stage is bargaining.
That's where they argue that the violence that they initially denied is actually justified as a response to President Trump's abstract violence against them.
He's not committing literal violence against them or particular violence, but you know, when you really think about it, man, like in the abstract, sometimes when he tweets, it's kind of like violence.
So therefore, their own literal violence is justified.
Then comes depression.
That's the stage when the leftists make themselves the real victims.
And then we get to the final stage, acceptance, when the left decides they just need to try again.
None of that is newsworthy.
It keeps happening again and again, more frequently, more brazenly.
The left has been doing this for years, and their political violence is only getting worse.
The only newsworthy question for us is whether we are finally now willing to do something to stop it.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
In other news, the U.S. fertility rate has fallen to the lowest level ever.
And not a lot of good news today.
There's one little silver lining in the storm cloud.
We'll get to that momentarily.
And we will get to what can be done because this is not a complicated issue.
People, even on the right, they're rending their garments.
They say, what can we do to stop the violence?
It's so complicated.
It's so complex.
It's not complex at all.
It's very simple.
As Ronald Reagan used to say, the answer might not be easy, but it is simple.
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Little silver lining in the storm cloud because this was a very, very serious event that occurred that the libs are already downplaying.
When the shots go off, White House Correspondents Association dinner, first time President Trump has shown up to it.
Since he has been president, he showed up as a guest before he was president.
This is the first time he shows up as president.
And gunshots go off bang, Everybody in the room starts freaking out.
I mean, you can see on the first lady's face total shock.
You can see the woman next to President Trump shock.
The guy standing up speaking to him.
I can't tell if that's Secret Service or shock, shock, concern, terror.
And then there's Trump.
And Trump just turns.
He's looking in the direction of the first lady.
And it's that James Franco look from Buster Scruggs.
First time?
Oh, this is the first time someone's shot at you?
It reminds me, there's a very famous picture, painting of Winston Churchill at the treaty where they're wrapping up World War I, and everybody's kind of jabbering with themselves, and there's Churchill just staring right out at you, light on him.
And it was a picture, actually, that was painted before World War II, but it's him saying, I just see it.
I've been through this.
I know how this is going to turn out.
Nobody seems to get it.
Reminds me of that other line from Churchill.
I think it's in my early life when he says that it was in Cuba as a student that he first had the thrill of being shot at to no effect.
There's Trump.
Handles it perfectly, holds a press conference after with the press wearing their tuxedos in the briefing room.
It's a very, very impressive response.
But what the libs did here is very, very serious, much more serious than they are letting on.
And it demands a political answer.
President Trump has this great personal response, which is I don't think about it much.
I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing.
I'm in a dangerous job.
They keep trying to kill me.
I'm going to keep doing a great job for the country.
That's the right personal response stiff upper lip, keep calm, and carry on.
But the political response is different.
We cannot ignore this at the level of politics.
We need to take a very firm stand against the people who increasingly support this because it's not just one fringe wacko.
It's not just one left wing California teacher.
It is a huge portion of the mainstream left, from the lady who sits next to you at work all the way up to elected officials.
They support this.
They want Trump dead and they want you dead, and we need to do something politically to stop it.
So, what happened?
This shooter.
Busts into the correspondence dinner.
It was so strange when this news broke because not 20 minutes prior, I turned to sweet little Elisa and I said, Should I have gone to the White House correspondence dinner?
You know, I get very severe political FOMO, and it's very rare that I decline an invitation to a big, fun political function.
That's why I'm everywhere.
I'm always traveling.
And I said, Look, I'm traveling too much.
My schedule's been too busy.
I can't justify going to the White House correspondence dinner.
I'm going to skip it.
And I turned to Elisa and I said, Should I have gone 20 minutes later?
The news comes in.
I was getting texts from people, shots fired at the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
And I thought initially that this was shots fired figuratively, metaphorically.
You know, okay, the whole point of the event is that people tell jokes about each other.
Oh, shots fired.
But no, it was literal shots fired.
And the shooter is a California teacher.
He's a self identified liberal, Kamala Harris donor.
He writes a manifesto explaining all the reasons that he went to shoot Trump and the rest of the administration.
He attended a No Kings liberal protest.
He is part of a left wing group called Wide Awakes, and he's just a huge lib.
There's just no denying it, though the libs are going to try that.
The most telling analysis I've seen of who this guy is the libs always tell us these shooters are white.
This guy's not white.
The libs always tell us these shooters, we can't know their political motive, or more likely, they're right wing.
We can know his political motive.
He's left wing.
They always tell us he's some fringe weirdo, out of society, basement dwell.
No, he's a teacher.
And here is what one of his students said about him.
He seemed just like a completely average guy.
I mean, I never would have expected anything like this out of a guy like this.
It's really just bizarre.
The guy can't believe it.
You seem like a completely average guy.
Everyone is responding to this clip of one of the shooters, the alleged shooter students, and saying, well, I guess he wasn't really an average guy.
You know, you thought he was just an average guy, but he's not.
He was a fringe, crazy, extreme weirdo.
The sadder reality, and people need to get this through their heads, and especially the right needs to get it through its head.
The sadder, more disturbing thing that we don't want to deal with, that we don't want to acknowledge, is the shooter at the White House correspondence dinner is an average guy.
That's the average guy now.
He's certainly average by the standards of the left.
We have a YouGov survey that came out shortly after Charlie was assassinated.
Most Americans across the political spectrum say that political violence is never justified.
But younger and more liberal Americans say, are more likely to disagree.
So we're still at the point where most Americans say you shouldn't engage in political violence.
But a disturbing number of Americans say it is justified.
28% of Americans overall say that political justice is justified or they would prefer not to say.
But then when you break this down by political ideology, the numbers get nuts.
One in four very liberal voters says that political violence is justified.
14% are not sure.
6% don't want to say.
So, 45%, almost half of very liberal voters are okay with political violence.
When you get to liberal, the number is 17% say it's okay, 12% are not sure, 4% don't want to say.
When you get to moderate, 9%, almost one in 10 moderate voters says that political violence is justified.
15% not sure, 4% don't want to say.
Then you get to the conservatives, and conservatives basically say it's not justified.
Only 6% of conservative people say it's justified.
Of very conservative people, it's 2% or 3%.
We get very, very low here, which means that if one in 10 moderates says that political violence is justified and many more moderates are kind of okay with it, and then the number of conservatives who say it's okay is much, much lower, what does that tell you about the moderates?
It tells you that the moderates are not moderate.
To come out and say it's okay to go shoot people you disagree with politically is by definition not a moderate position.
So that tells you that the moderates are no longer moderate.
In other words, what it tells you is that when a teacher goes out and shoots up the White House correspondent dinner because he wants to murder the president and everyone who's around him, and the student says, Well, he seemed like an average guy, the very uncomfortable conclusion is he kind of is an average guy.
This is why, by the way, the people who want to say, Well, it's a setup, it's not real, it's a government, it's a psyop, it's a foreign country, it's Israel.
I don't know.
It's always Israel.
It's whoever else, or it's the Russians, or it's the Chinese, or it's whoever.
I think that is a coping mechanism.
That's a coping mechanism for people who don't want to acknowledge that the left and the centrists and the so-called moderates are increasingly, quite notably, radical.
The Homeserve Solution00:02:04
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The problem is the people.
And not all the people, obviously, most people are normal, as the surveys show.
But a huge swath of the mainstream left needs to be dealt with politically.
So we'll get to the five stages of left wing violence in just a moment.
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Staged Shootings Explained00:15:35
First response, the libs deny that this is happening.
Here's CNN as the shots are ringing out.
The president, the vice president, the cabinet are rushed off the stage.
All we heard was plates fall.
Yes.
And then we all went down.
Yes.
Yes.
A cascading effect with the entire ball.
I thought a waiter dropped some plates by accident.
Yeah, yeah.
I thought it was just people dropping plates.
I don't know.
This reminds us of Butler, Pennsylvania, when President Trump was almost assassinated.
So loud sounds.
President falls as loud sounds occur.
Always trying to.
Maybe it was just plates.
Maybe, I don't know, I'm not so sure.
And the fact that it was just plates, it wasn't really shots, very quickly turned into this theory that some on the right were embracing as well that it was staged.
It was just staged.
Trump staged this.
And in an age, in defense of that view, in an age when the major institutions have lied to you and were caught in egregious lies, especially during COVID, the left wing institutions lied to you during COVID, the NIH, the establishment media, they lied to you.
And they have increasingly lost credibility, especially the media, especially the journalists who were in that room.
And so it is natural that people begin to question everything.
However, just examine this for even three seconds.
You're telling me that a real man, a California teacher who donated to Kamala Harris, who attended No Kings protests, who was part of a left wing group that wanted to overthrow the Trump administration, who checks all these boxes.
You're telling me that he willingly did all of that for years and years and years as a setup in order to help President Trump by pretending to try to shoot him, even though he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison.
That's the people who say it was staged have to grapple with one of two possibilities.
Either a guy did what he and all of his comrades say that they want to do, either a guy did.
Is what he says he is, and really is the person that he has lived as for the whole history that anyone can find anything about him.
And he just did another version of what his fellow travelers keep doing that is, attacking conservatives.
And he has followed what his leaders have encouraged him to do by saying that Trump is an existential threat to democracy and you have to push back on Republicans and you have to harass them in public and you can't be civil with them.
He's just either he, this guy has behaved in a way that you would expect perfectly.
Or it was a decades long, long game to help Trump or something.
What is it?
I think he just did it because it's always the ones you most expect.
So that's the stage of denial that it actually happened.
Then the left starts denying the target.
Here's how MSNBC, now called MSNOW, covered the shooting.
We do not yet know.
What the shooter's intended target was.
Yes, obviously, this was an event that was well publicized that the president would be attending.
He has not attended this event since 2015, but it was a room of over 1,000 people.
There were reporters, there were lawmakers, there were business leaders, there were members of Congress, there were members of the administration, and yes, of course, there were the president and First Lady Melania Trump.
But we do not yet know who specifically was the target, correct?
That is absolutely right and really important to say.
Really important.
We just have no idea who the target is.
I mean, yes, it's Trump's event, and the entire Trump administration was there.
And this is the first time he's ever attended this event.
But I mean, look, maybe the shooter was trying to kill the deputy assistant editor of thehill.com, right?
I mean, that's totally plausible, right?
Maybe the real target was the production assistant from CNN, right?
Probably.
I mean, that's what the New York Times says too.
New York Times, here you go.
Search for motive of gunmen who charged press gala.
Search for the motive.
What could the motive be?
Gee, Sherlock, can we get you onto the case?
Barack Obama.
Posts.
Although we don't yet have the details about the motives behind last night's shooting, but this wasn't as it's unfolding.
This is the day after when we knew everything.
We knew that night.
I was on air at the Daily Wire.
I hope you were watching the coverage on the Daily Wire, which was a lot better than the coverage on MSNBC.
Told you a lot more facts.
I was on air.
The details about this guy came out.
Trump gave a press conference that night.
He told us who this guy was.
Although we don't yet have the details about the motives behind last night's shooting, I mean, sure, it was a left wing.
Teacher in California, liberal, who donated to Kamala Harris and wrote a manifesto saying he did it to shoot Trump and all of Trump's associates.
But we don't know for sure.
We don't know.
But it's incumbent to reject violence.
Oh, yeah.
Is it okay?
So that's the denial phase.
That's it.
That's the end of denial.
The libs did their best to deny it happened, deny that it was from the left, deny that we can know why the guy did it, but we know.
So then they move on to the next phase.
The next phase is anger.
They're really, really angry that it didn't work.
Here is just one representative.
Ordinary lib going viral.
Why can none of you aim across a grassy knoll in the back of a moving car?
We were real Americans.
Stop pulling the trigger unless you have the shot.
So, this is the same reaction you saw from countless libs throughout social media when President Trump was nearly murdered in Butler.
They said, ah, next time we need better aim.
Just to give an example, I'm not even, I'll get to the top politicians in a moment, but just to show you, just ordinary libs.
Here's some brewing company.
Here's Minokwa Brewing Company.
Well, we almost got free beer day.
Either a brother or sister in the resistance needs to work on their marksmanship, or he faked another assassination to get a positive news cycle.
We'll never know.
So there it is.
It's either totally fake because the left would never commit political violence, or it's really unfortunate that the libs didn't succeed at their political violence.
That's it.
It's one of those two.
They say, we just need free beer.
Free beer if anyone actually succeeds at murdering Trump.
But we definitely, no leftist tried to murder Trump.
He probably faked it.
Here's another, just random teacher, hat tip to libs of TikTok here, Andrea Hovis.
I'll pray for better aim.
She's a mom, a teacher, a community activist.
I certainly hope she loses her job.
I certainly hope she's ostracized.
I certainly hope we get some real cancel culture, some good cancel culture here, which is very much what we need, despite the unfortunate misunderstanding of many on the right.
We'll get to that momentarily, too, though.
So, That's the anger stage.
The anger stage is, darn, we missed.
It didn't happen, and also we missed.
Then we get to the bargaining, the justification.
Outside of the dinner, you had leftists holding up signs saying, Death to tyrants.
It's funny.
Death to tyrants is basically the line that John Wilkes Booth yelled as he murdered President Lincoln Six semper tyrannis, thus always to tyrants.
So the libs do this all the time.
They.
Echo these mottos, these slogans, they don't realize that they're the baddies.
They're quoting the bad guys.
They did this in Minnesota when Tim Walz was upset about immigration enforcement.
And he said, We need to go back to 1863 to revolt against the federal government.
Yeah, you're putting yourself on the side of the Confederacy, dummy.
I don't mean to.
Does he know he's doing that?
Maybe he knows he's doing that.
I don't know.
Death to all of them, says another one of the protesters.
So they defend the violence.
And this is where we get to the top leaders.
It's not just randos on TikTok.
We get to the Democrat leader in the House of Representatives justifying violence against Trump.
We'll get to that momentarily.
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It's just these fringe people on the left.
Stop.
You got to talk about our leaders.
Let's talk about the leaders.
Let's talk about the mainstream left.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat leader in the House, then gets to the bargaining phase.
This is where the libs, after denying, after their anger, they get to bargaining where they say, well, actually, you know what?
It's justified.
Actually, we're not the bad guys here.
America will not be lectured, says Jeffries, about civility by far right extremists in Congress, particularly those who provide aid and comfort to hundreds of violent rioters who brutally beat police officers on January 6th.
There we go.
There we go.
There will be ample time to vigorously debate the issues of the day.
Now is a time to unify.
To unify?
To unify with what?
You won't be lectured about civility by far right extremists?
I think you will.
I think you will.
The best he's got is January 6th.
January 6th, where the only person killed by political violence on that day was a Trump supporter murdered by a trigger happy cop.
January 6th, a day that was, we now know, thoroughly infiltrated by the feds.
And very likely, we don't have firm evidence of this yet, but very likely, given the Discoveries of the last week, very likely promoted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, by the left itself.
But that's the best they got.
Forget about the multiple assassination attempts against Trump, one of which blew part of his ear off.
Forget about the actual assassination of Charlie Kirk by a leftist, then celebrated by large swaths of the left.
Forget about the near assassination by a leftist of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Forget about the countless calls for political violence from mainstream leftists in Congress and in the Senate.
No, no, no.
The Horn Hat guy got a private tour of the Capitol.
On January 6th, five years ago, so we won't be lectured.
You know, really, when you really think about it, this is chickens coming home to roost.
Then, when we turn from the elected officials to just the political media on the left, you get this guy who goes by Destiny, Stephen Bonnell, who responds to Riley Gaines.
Riley Gaines says, Stop trying to kill our president.
Stephen responds, he says, I've never agreed with a statement more in my entire life.
And this is ironic because it seems like what he's disagreeing with is the idea that they need to stop killing Trump.
But what What he's really disagreeing with is the word trying.
And we know this because of the context of Stephen Bonnell, who has repeatedly called for violence against conservatives.
In fact, his reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk was that it is good that conservatives should fear for their lives when they go out in public, that we need to intimidate conservatives so they stop talking up in public.
So there's that response.
He goes, yeah, we need to stop trying to kill him.
We need to actually kill him.
Here's Hassan Piker, a more popular left-wing streamer, now feted by the New York Times, put on the campaign trail with multiple Democrat elected officials.
Here is Hassan Piker openly calling for the murder of the president.
And you actually wrote about this, and there's a great video where you talked about, you know, someone has to do it.
See, when I say that, everyone knows exactly what I mean.
Which is, I think that shows that there is a lot of anger, a lot of resentment, and untapped potential, untapped revolutionary potential, as a matter of fact.
And it's a great opportunity for organizing, I think, in these unprecedented.
So there, Hassan, I think he's sitting next to, I think that's Taylor Lorenz, who's a very mainstream left wing new media.
Journalist.
And he says, Yeah, you know, you said someone has to do it.
And they all kind of giggle.
He goes, And you know what I mean.
You all know what I mean.
I'm not going to say it, but you all know what I mean.
And what he means is someone needs to murder President Trump, which the left has then tried to do many, many times.
Here's Hassan Piker, as I remind you, feted by the New York Times last week, put on a big podcast from the New York Times, looked to as a thought leader on the mainstream left.
Hassan Piker, who had an op ed published in the New York Times.
Hassan Piker, who hits the campaign trail with mainstream Democrats.
They embrace him.
Here's Hassan Piker.
Calling for the murder of Charlie Kirk.
What about democratic mayors?
It's like, what the are you talking about, dude?
We're talking about socialized medicine, and you can turn around and you and you can ask a question about murderous cities and their democratic mayors.
I will, I want to kill him, dude.
I want to in a video game setting.
I want to own him in a video game setting.
Oh, Jesus, in a video game, yeah.
In a debate, I want to kill him in a debate in Minecraft.
There you go.
Yeah, there you go.
Ha ha ha ha.
So there he is openly calling for the murder of Charlie, which then one of his fellow travelers committed.
So he says, I want to kill him.
I want to kill Charlie Kirk.
I mean, ha ha, you know, in a video game or like in a debate or like in Minecraft.
Ha ha ha ha, but I want to kill Charlie Kirk.
And then one of his fellow travelers did it.
And you can say, well, look, he's just some random streamer.
He's obviously not.
He's being exalted within the last several days.
As a major thought leader on the left to be promoted by the most establishment liberal outlet, which is the New York Times.
That shooter at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, he is the average guy.
He is the average leftist.
That's the mainstream.
Hassan Piker campaigns with Bernie Sanders.
Hassan Piker campaigns with AOC.
Hassan Piker campaigns with the mayor of New York, Zorhan Mamdani.
He's as mainstream left as it gets.
He is one of the true thought leaders on the left.
The problem is he doesn't have any thoughts.
And so this brings up a question for us.
Why are we going to tolerate this?
Hassan Piker is an anchor baby who grew up on the other side of the world.
He grew up in Turkey.
He hates America.
He came back to America for college, I guess.
He's been stinking up our country ever since.
He's done no good for America whatsoever.
He said that America deserves 9-11.
He has openly called for the murder of Republican senators.
He called for the murder of Charlie Kirk.
He's called for the murder of President Trump.
He is nothing but a rot, a fetid rot on our body politic.
Prosecuting Violent Extremists00:08:07
Why do we tolerate that?
I can think of several reasons.
Several bases on which to prosecute Hassan Piker off the top of my head.
I've mentioned a couple of them.
He's called for the murder of U.S. senators.
He obviously violated sanctions in a very specific way when he was in Cuba.
He bragged about staying at the hotels that the U.S. government tells you you can't stay at.
He tortured his dog on camera, animal abuse, whatever it is.
There are many bases on which to prosecute Hassan Piker.
Why don't we do it?
Ideally, he would be deported back to the backwater in which he grew up.
In a wiser age, we did that.
About 100 years ago, under a Democrat president, we did have the Palmer raids when people like Hassan Piker, who were radicals, leftists, anarchists, were calling for and perpetrating violence against America.
We just got rid of them.
We arrested them.
We deported them in some cases.
We could do it again.
That wasn't even a Republican administration.
It was a Democrat administration.
If we were a proper country, this guy who has done nothing but add a fetid, nauseous miasma to our country by his very stinky presence here would be booted out of the country or at the very least put in prison.
But we don't do that.
We, in fact, allow him to be a major thought leader on the left, and there are no repercussions for anybody.
This is a big problem.
Big, big problem.
Because what the left is doing very openly is calling for and perpetrating violence against the right.
And what the right is doing in response is saying, you know, gosh, guys, can't we just have more debate?
You don't have to debate everything.
This is a major point I bring up on the show a lot, which is that politics is not just a debate club.
And the right, as long as it sticks with that view, is just not going to make it.
It's just not going to get it.
You don't have to debate Hassan Piker.
This is what I feel about a lot of the stupid theories that float around on the internet.
The reason I don't even talk about a lot of them is that not everything is for debate.
Some things require the law, okay?
When you make criminal threats, you need to be prosecuted.
When you defame people, you don't need to be debated exactly.
You need to be sued into the ground.
When you undermine the very political order, you need to be excluded from the public square.
I said this after Charlie was assassinated, when many of my very well intentioned friends on the right said, This just means we need to redouble our efforts for open dialogue and the free marketplace of ideas.
And I said, No, we tried that.
That was what Charlie offered to the left, and the left murdered him for it and then celebrated his murder.
So I think we need to try something else.
We just need to endlessly talk about all these people.
No, I don't think that's true.
I think we need to prosecute them.
I think we need to reestablish standards and norms.
I think we need to deport a lot of people, as we have done regularly in American history.
I think we need to enforce standards and norms and, yes, limits to speech, as we have done from the founding of the country until five minutes ago.
And we didn't even stop five minutes ago.
We just shifted the standards that we're enforcing.
Now, if you say that a man isn't a woman, now if you say that a baby is a human being, you will be prosecuted in some cases for that.
But if you say we should kill the president, we should kill a senator.
America deserved 9 11.
You face no consequences whatsoever.
You're promoted because of a suicidal misconception of free speech that has taken hold on the right.
The way to fix this is repression.
To put it bluntly, to put it in a provocative way, that I know many on the right are going to say, well, we don't want repression.
Well, okay, then you're going to get left wing repression.
What we did in this country from the colonial era until at least, I don't know, the 60s or 70s is we said we need to discourage certain behaviors.
Obscenity, threats, burning the American flag, which was illegal until very recently.
You know, the thought that undermines thought, that's the only thought that ought to be stopped.
And then the right just gave that up because we bought a misconception of free speech that was ironically imported from the left.
But the left never even really believed it.
So we'll see.
Are we a serious country or not?
It's not just the fringe.
If it were just the fringe, you could sort of tolerate it as an eccentricity of politics.
This is the mainstream.
Do we have just a little supercut?
I think we have a little supercut of the mainstream of the left actively promoting violence.
Show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.
I'd like to punch him in the face.
I said if we're in high school, I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.
Punch some people in the face.
When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?
They're still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump.
And that's a fact.
Look as his character is stabbed to death.
Where is John Wilkes' booth when you need him?
I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.
A Missouri state senator is under investigation by the Secret Service after saying she hopes President Trump is assassinated.
I will go and take Trump out tonight.
And if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd.
And you push back on them.
And you tell them they're not welcome anymore.
I could fill up five episodes of this show with all the clips of the journalists, yes, and the entertainers, yes, and the elected officials, yes, and the thinkers, yes, and the pundits, yet on the mainstream left calling for violence against conservatives.
And so what are we going to do?
We can either respond and say, Could you imagine if the shoe were on the other foot?
It's not going to work.
We could either say, We just need more debate.
Why don't people debate more?
It's not going to work.
So we need the free marketplace of ideas and not going to work because you can't have a free marketplace. of ideas or anything else when bandits keep shooting up the marketplace.
Or you can enforce the laws that are already on the books.
You can deport the people that are deportable.
You can prosecute the people making criminal threats and inciting violence.
You can wield the law for justice and as the teacher that it is that will improve morale.
Those are the options.
And I just think the right is unwilling to do that.
What we need is cancel culture, but a good cancel culture.
Because all cultures cancel.
All cultures have taboos.
So we can either cancel the bad stuff and promote the good stuff, or we can live in the culture that we currently live in, even when Republicans are elected, which is very frequently that we cancel good stuff, virtuous stuff, and we promote really bad stuff that undermines our whole country.
That's up to us.
We know what can be done.
This is not all that complicated.
It's pretty simple.
But until people start losing their jobs, for promoting this until people start being ostracized from society, until people start being prosecuted where that is appropriate, then we're not serious about it.
So you know what's going to happen?
The left is going to shoot something else up pretty soon.
And it's going to have a chilling effect on conservative speech.
And the left is then going to amass more power at some point and going to prosecute ordinary, normal people.
And we're going to say, gosh, golly, can you imagine how unjust this is?
If only we had more debate, if only the shoe were on the other foot.
That's what we're going to do.
And it's going to be totally impotent.
Now, speaking of the future of our country, we might not have any future at all because we're not having any kids.
Saturday night, as the White House correspondents' dinner turned chaotic with reports of shots fired, Daily Wire reporters were already inside the event live as it unfolded.
Birth Rates and Religion00:11:15
We didn't just cover the story, we were there bringing you the facts.
The reason we can do that is because of our members.
If you're not a Daily Wire Plus member, join now at dailywire.comslash subscribe.
My favorite comment, I actually didn't pick this comment.
The producers picked it.
We'll see if I agree with it.
This is from 2Beto1234222, who says, Why does Michael Corleone from The Godfather Part 2? look just like Michael Knowles, true Italiano.
It's true, you know, it's the duality of man.
I have two doppelgangers in this world.
One is Michael Corleone from The Godfather.
The other one is Rachel Maddow.
Within each man, there are two wolves, and whichever one you become is the one you've most feed.
Are we leaning Godfather or are we leaning Rachel Maddow?
Today, I'm very much leaning Godfather.
No doubt about that.
The U.S. fertility rate has fallen to the lowest. level ever.
53.1 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44.
Not good news.
Now, why is this?
The New York Times are trying to explain this away.
So the New York Times reports on it.
Let's see.
U.S. fertility rate drops to another record low.
But then they say the fertility rate has been falling since 07, in large part because of a plunge among teenagers.
So they're trying to put a positive spin.
They say, yeah, we're not having any kids anymore, but it's just because we don't have 13-year-olds getting pregnant.
Isn't that, that's a good thing, right?
Yeah, but it's not true.
The Institute for Family Studies points out falling teen births account for only 10 to 15% of the total fertility rate decline since 2007.
Even if you go all the way up to age 20, where, you know, 20 year olds can have kids.
It's probably good for 20 year olds to have kids.
But even if you include all the way up to age 20, that only accounts for 26% of the fertility rate decline.
The rest, 74 to 91%, is just because women over 20, 20s, 30s, early 40s even, are just not having kids anymore.
That's totally unsustainable.
We talk a lot.
We actually haven't had a moment, really, and there's so much going on, but we haven't had a moment to get back to the war in Iran, which is in large part about a geopolitical play to maintain American hegemony in the world against a rising China and other powers that seek to displace us.
And we talk about how we need to preserve a new American century and we need to preserve our hegemony around the world.
You're not going to preserve American hegemony if you don't have kids.
That's the most basic thing a country has to do to survive, much less thrive.
And we're not having kids.
So what happens?
Decline in birth rates.
Is used as justification for more migration because you can't prop up the social welfare system and you can't prop up GDP if you don't have people.
So you just import people from the third world.
Then more migration leads to more social breakdown because you're importing people who don't speak your language, who don't understand your civics, who don't assimilate to your communities.
In many cases, these are the least assimilable people in the world.
They have different religions.
So you have social breakdown, which then leads to a further decline in birth rates, which then leads to more migration.
Which leads to more social breakdown, and you're caught in this endless cycle.
So, what are we to do about it?
Some people, and I'm sympathetic to these calls, they say, well, we just need more economic support for people having kids.
You know, we need a bigger social safety net, or we need more industrial policy, or we need direct payouts to people to have kids.
We've tried a lot of these things.
In Europe, Hungary has tried a lot of that, and it's worked to a modest degree.
But really, really, the only driver of Fertility, the biggest driver of fertility is religion.
You need people to seriously believe their religion.
Conservative Protestants, traditional Catholics, Orthodox Jews, people who take LDS seriously, Muslims, definitely Muslims, have a lot of kids.
They come from various socioeconomic backgrounds.
They come from various geographies.
But that's the driver.
Taking religion seriously, theistic religion seriously, is the big driver of having kids.
Which means that if you consider this a national problem, I consider it the most important national problem and an existential political crisis.
That means that you need public support, government support for religion, which of course we had in this country until very, very recently.
Public support for religion only started to break down in the middle of the 20th century, really the latter part of the 20th century.
And now we pretend that America has to be a secular country and we need to keep religion out of the public square.
That is.
A novelty in America.
We used to have prayer in schools.
We used to have the Bible in schools.
We used to have Christian displays in the public square.
And then we had a lot of court cases.
And in some cases, in most cases, that was pushed out.
And we see the results of that.
Immediately, you see a collapse in birth rates.
So if you're serious about this problem, this is how I feel about political violence.
If you're serious about political violence, you need to prosecute the left.
You need to fire people who encourage it and sanction it.
You need cancel culture.
You need right wing cancel culture.
And you need to deport a lot of bad people.
Are you willing to do that?
Many people, even people listening right now, are going to say, I'm not willing to go that far.
Okay, then you won't fix the problem.
This is how I feel about the birth rates.
You want to fix the birth rates?
You need public support for religion, as we had for most of American history.
Well, I don't want to do that.
I want to live in a secular country.
I don't want, I don't know, I'm afraid of, I don't want no theocrats in charge.
Okay, fine.
You're not going to fix the problem.
First of all, that's not what theocracy is, but even whatever.
Use whatever language you want.
Okay, you're not serious about fixing the problem.
Okay, that's fine.
The other thing you need is strong communities.
Strong communities begin with strong families.
To have a strong family, you have to know what a marriage is, which means you need to overturn liberal divorce laws.
It means you have to re redefine marriage to exclude all the weird LGBT stuff that obviously isn't marriage.
Are you willing to do that?
Are you willing to overturn no fault divorce?
Are you willing to overturn so called same sex marriage?
No, you're not.
Okay, that's fine.
Fine, whatever.
I'm not, but you're not going to fix the problem.
You're just not going to fix the problem.
So that's too bad.
But then don't act surprised.
When I, you know, I hate how much I hate to say I told you so.
When I come out and I say, hey, you're not going to fix this political violence problem, Or these problems of defamation and radicalism and sensationalism with just like a lot more debate or a lot more podcasts or a lot more conversations or whatever.
That's not going to work.
You need something else.
When I say that, and then people say, well, that's not, we reject your view, Michael.
Okay.
And then the problem gets worse and worse and worse.
Then don't say you weren't warned.
Same thing goes with religion and public life.
Same thing goes with families, strong communities.
That's how it goes.
You're only seeing the problem spiral out of control.
There's now a congressional candidate on the left.
Who is bragging about how she used IVF to create two of her children and then left five of her children on ice indefinitely, only later to be killed, and then aborted the children that she didn't conceive through IVF?
Both of my abortions were very early.
So it was like before the first one was definitely like, I would say, eight weeks.
And then the other one was at five.
You know, it's like, It's very, like, very early, but you make a decision for yourself.
And that's obviously different from the decision I made when I was 41 because I already had two kids and we had done IVF.
So we have, I don't know how controversial this is, but like we have five other embryos on ice right now.
It's, it's really crazy because I think back to that moment where my husband and I looked at each other and we know that for us, we've only wanted two kids, a boy and a girl.
We got, we got one of each.
We were like, we're done, but we're big environmentalists for us philosophically.
We don't want to overburden our footprint like on the world and we're not the kind of people that are like, I just want a lot of children and I don't know how to explain it.
Like, I know exactly why we just wanted to.
We wanted just to replace ourselves and not overburden anybody else or the world.
So, everything she just said is wrong and most of it should be illegal.
But I don't mean to laugh at it.
It's really a tragic story.
But even getting to the point that we were just talking about public support for religion, that woman has a religion.
It's not a theistic religion, but her religion is environmentalism.
She says that the way that I make even the most important decisions in my life is based on what it means for the environment.
So that's the thing that's most important to her.
That's the lens through which she makes sense of the world or doesn't make sense of the world in this case.
I don't want to burden the environment, so I was going to have two kids.
The God of the Bible tells you to be fruitful and multiply.
But the God of nature, not the real God of nature, the God of, I don't know, the various lower nature gods, they tell you to only have two kids.
We have public support for that religion.
Kids are taught that in school.
We celebrate Earth Day.
We have all sorts of public campaigns to promote this particular version of left-wing environmentalism.
We support that kind of religion, but that's a false religion.
It's not helpful to our society.
It's led to our society literally dying.
It's not even that complicated a religion.
It's just nature worship.
We had nature worship in the ancient pagan world.
We have nature worship in the modern pagan world.
That's all it is.
There are different religions.
There's Buddhism.
There's nature worship.
There's Christianity.
There's Shintoism.
There's all, there's Baalism.
There's all sorts of religions.
And that's the one that that lady follows.
And that one has a lot of public support.
So she comes out and she says, I was only going to make two kids, which is actually technically below replacement rate because to account for early deaths, you need a replacement a little above two kids per person, per couple.
But she says, yeah.
So to start out, I killed two of my kids.
I sacrificed them to my nature gods.
And then I did IVF, which.
Is more popular, but IVF has radically increased the abortion rate, the rate of killing kids, because she says, I have five kids on ice that are going to be killed later on.
But I got two kids out of it.
And then I got pregnant again and I killed it.
Not going to make it.
A society that permits that stuff and encourages that stuff and exalts religions that promote that stuff, the most extreme form of political violence, killing your own kid.
That society is not going to make it.
This is why Mother Teresa said, what was it, 30 years ago now, somewhere around there, she said that abortion is the greatest threat to world peace because if a mother can kill her own kid, there's nothing that people will not do.
But we allowed that.
Even after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, we still have legal abortion because we make these procedural arguments based on originalism or textualism or whatever.
We don't make substantive arguments to just ban abortion.
Fixing a Broken Society00:01:34
So we allow that.
And it's just a fact that a society that tolerates and even in some cases encourages.
Killing its own kids is not going to thrive.
A society that doesn't know what marriage is is not going to thrive.
A society that commoditizes human life such that you can go to the store and buy a baby or custom order a baby is not going to thrive.
A society that calls for the political violence against people that you disagree with is not going to thrive.
A political society that seeks as the only remedy to those problems endless blabber and blather and debate and podcasts.
I know it's kind of ironic because I'm on a podcast right now, but I'm offering an alternative to the endless debate, free marketplace of ideas kind of podcast conversation view, which happens to be the view that.
Politics has always rested on, which is you have to do things through the law.
You have to set limits because the law is a teacher.
And the ultimate goal of governments is to make the country better.
And the way you make the country better is you make the people better.
And we believed that until relatively recently.
And then we flipped it on its head and we've said our goal is going to be to encourage license.
We're going to make autonomy the highest possible good.
We're then going to encourage the worst temptations of the autonomous will.
And we're going to make as our ultimate end product making people worse.
And that's going to make the country worse too.
And you might not want to deal with the uncomfortable conclusions that one has to draw to fix the problem.
But we can't say that we weren't warned.
Okay, much more to get to, but we don't have time.
Today's Music Monday.
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