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Aug. 6, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:06
Two Shooters, One Choice: Mike Cernovich and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux here with Mike Cernovich.
So it has been a grim couple of days in America, a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, that seemed to be falling off both extreme sides of the political aisle.
And I was doing a lot of research this weekend, but...
A lot of the information, very salacious, unverified, but you've done some fantastic work teasing out some of the extremities that are going on in American thought, how they may have contributed to or manifested in these kinds of shootings.
Now, we've heard, of course, from the mainstream media about the right-wing leanings of the El Paso, Texas shooter, but you've been looking more into the Dayton shooter, and what have you found?
Yeah, the Dayton shooter, as reported by Heavy and others, they pointed out a Twitter account That was as on the nose of what you would expect a far left-wing person to be.
Regular retweets of people in left-wing media.
Regular retweets of people who have actually smeared you and smeared me.
This is a full-on, like, SPLC kind of guy.
And me, I'm so careful about not getting burned that I just said...
I knew it was him, but I said, I'm going to wait and see what happens.
So... I waited and other outlets reported that it was the shooter's account.
And then, of course, we got confirmation today when an NBC so-called reporter claimed that he had read the Twitter account and the Twitter account wasn't actually a far left-wing person.
And I thought, okay, well, that's all the confirmation that I needed that we had located the shooter's Twitter account.
So what are some of the indications that you found or saw in the Twitter account and other areas that would lead you to categorize him as a left-wing extremist?
This was – he would be almost a caricature – well, not a caricature because you and I deal with it all the time.
One of these people, they call them weird Twitter where they have all their – they're very glib about violence.
This was an account regularly retweeting left-wing groups, saying that – retweeting messaging that they didn't believe ICE agents were human beings, tweeting favorably to AOC, tweeting favorably to the Democrat Socialists of America, was a pro-Antifa account, was actually getting advice on firearms training was a pro-Antifa account, was actually getting advice on firearms training from what's called the Socialist Gun Owners of America in
So it would be exactly what you would expect a unilateral, singular, far left-wing account to look like.
All the telltale signs, retweeting all the Never Trump propaganda, retweeting the far left-wing propaganda, retweeting the violent rhetoric, calling everyone you disagree with a non-serial white supremacist, using the language of AOC that their concentration camps in America, all right on the nose.
And That was, again, whenever something is right on the nose, that is when I always pause and make sure that it isn't confirmation bias that had gotten the best of me.
And I looked for alternative explanations.
I looked for Snopes and Fact Check and all these media people that say that's not really his Twitter account.
And very often, as very often the case is, it was the media silence that To me was the biggest indicator the account was real because they weren't debunking.
When the Washington Times and Heavy and other outlets reported that the Twitter account belonged to the Dayton, Ohio shooter, there was no rush to debunk by Snopes and others.
And I said, okay, usually what the media will do is they'll just pretend it's not happening.
So if they can say this isn't really the account, they'll be right on it, all over it.
You've got to ban these people.
They're spreading disinformation. This isn't really the shooter's account, da-da-da-da-da.
But when it really is a shooter's account and it shows that the person was a far left wing activist type, then they go radio silent.
There did seem to be, and it seems fairly verified, that there were some efforts to change affiliation.
There were some efforts to make him look more like a Republican, though he was registered, it seems, as a Democrat.
What efforts do you think have been put into attempting to reshape the narrative based upon this, it's got to be one team or the other, and it's got to be an extremist?
Yeah, and that's what is troubling me and troubling you.
So when the El Paso shooting happened, people...
Here, there's a number of reactions that all show the glibness of our age.
They'll go, oh, this El Paso shooter did this, and they'll try to tie it to me.
And I go, well, I'm on record not only as opposing political violence, but opposing anybody who writes like that freak does.
This guy was a true what you would call bigot.
He believes what you would believe if you had actually pure hatred in your heart.
I'm like, well, you're not owning me.
First of all, the desire to own me is a problem.
Secondly, you're not owning me because I don't like him.
Then I go, why don't you ever disavow white supremacist terrorism?
I go, one, I've disavowed all terrorism.
I held events countering what I viewed as a reckless movement happening in America.
So, like, I'm really clear on record.
You're in the White House press room asking the people there to, and I'll link to this below, but it's a powerful moment for me as a friend of yours, just in rank admiration.
You're really insisting that even the reporters in the White House press room disavow political violence.
Yeah, and I don't know why it's that hard.
And then when there's a shooting by a far left-wing person, immediately they say, well, you know, you aren't responsible for his tweets, or just because he retweeted a guy doesn't mean he was a left-winger.
Every kind of lie you could imagine, and there's two responses to that.
One is that I read an article in the New York Times about someone who is apparently radicalizing some guy who grew up in a single-parent household and And the thesis of the story was that if your fans adopt ideology counter to yours, but that's bad ideology, then you're going to be called like a gateway drug to extremism.
I remember the Washington Post tried to blame Ben Shapiro, Paul Joseph Watson, and a bunch of other people for—there was a shooting, I think it was in Montreal, I said Toronto earlier, and I think that was wrong.
It was a big—it was a terrorist attack, of course, against Muslims, which happened, and— They tried to say, well, anybody whose account he liked on Twitter was somehow responsible for this.
And I go, okay, well, then what about the Dayton, Ohio shooter and all the accounts he liked and all the rhetoric he repeated?
Is the left responsible for radicalizing violence?
And they answer that as they go, well, that has nothing to do with it.
How could you say that?
You're so wrong. This is terrible.
And then they'll claim that I'm harassing them by reporting on what a mass shooter read from their account.
And that is unfortunately where we are, is that there's people who are conservative or right-leaning or whatever people call me these days who just don't want any of the violence to happen, isn't cool with any of it.
And then the left-wing media continues to endorse tacitly or explicitly violence by Antifa and, in this case, the far-left-wing shooter.
Where are the think pieces?
Hey, did they radicalize by the left?
Calling people Nazis, saying that this is a concentration camp?
Is that radicalizing people?
No, think pieces like that.
But I guarantee you, if the El Paso shooter had had an active Twitter account and he was retweeting you and Shapiro and Crowder and you name it, that would be the number one story of the day.
Your email and phone would be going off the hook with people demanding that you be banned from social media.
It's like, okay, well, we now have a far left-wing person.
This is a far left-wing terrorist.
And the media wants to pretend it didn't happen.
It is appalling at almost every conceivable level that the people like yourself and myself and others who've consistently called for rational discourse for a cooling of the rhetoric, for a capacity to find common ground.
And there is common ground between reasonable people on all, I don't want to say like lines, but all areas of the political spectrum.
There are a lot of decent people who, you know, we want to help the poor.
We want healthcare to be affordable.
We want education to be better.
We want debt to go down.
We want underclasses to have more of an opportunity to drill their way up to the middle class.
The methodology of how we go about doing that is a very interesting, complex, and deep question that involves ethics and politics and economics in particular and so on.
So good-hearted people who are coming from particular perspectives, a lot of them have the same goal, and the question is how do we best achieve it, right?
I can guarantee you the way we do not achieve it is by shooting people, by calling for, you know, there was a guy calling for the eradication of people who are on the right.
This is half the American population, according to some data.
That is going to lead very, calling detention centers concentration camps and calling everyone Nazis.
This is, as you know, it's a dog whistle for crazy people to target.
People that the leftists disagree with.
It does happen on the right as well, but I don't find it to be nearly as vivid.
And certainly it's not as mainstream.
And it's not like all over CNN or the New York Times or other places where these extremities...
There's not a congressman or congresswoman tweeting out like AOC does about, you know, concentration camps and so on.
And so I do think that where we need to focus our attention is on the left.
And if... They continue with this escalation and they continue with this rhetoric.
It's going to be increasingly hard to call for moderation on one side if the other side continues to escalate.
I want to do it and I'm going to continue to do it no matter what, but it just gets tougher to be heard in that clamor.
Yeah, it's tougher to be heard.
It is, again, the radicalized language being used, the cheap language.
It has a number of effects and we've talked about this for years and that's why When these shootings happen, they're very, they're simultaneously tragic, and they're also, unfortunately, predictable.
Now, some loser's gonna try to claim that I don't care because it says predictable, but a bad event can be predictable.
And when you refer to, like, there was a terrorist attack in ICE. Funny how that got buried, right?
Because that shooter was stopped by ICE agents.
He was trying to blow up a propane tank.
And that shooter He said he was inspired by the language of the left, concentration camps, dehumanizing language.
And we just can't seem to get the left to tone it down.
And the problem, and I don't know if this is because they're maybe young, they don't have kids or whatever, most left-wing activist reporters, I don't think they get, nobody wins in a civil war.
Nobody wins when you can't go to the Gilroy Garlic Festival and hold hands with your daughter and And wife and just walk around.
Nobody wins when you can't go to Walmart shopping.
Nobody wins when you can't go out to a club at night and have a couple of drinks with your friends because there might be an act of terror.
And the rhetoric on the left, again, it needs to stop.
And when people go, what about the rhetoric on the right?
I go, you mean dehumanizing language?
Yeah, I don't think we should call people things.
I don't refer to people as human beings and the kind of language that the left uses when they're talking about ICE or people on the right.
But here we are, man, and unfortunately it's only going to get worse.
What did you find in terms of the scramble by some reporters or commentators or quasi-reporters regarding ties to the shooter?
Yeah, he was – the shooter was a fanboy, regularly retweeting them, amplifying them, quote-retweeting.
The most disturbing thing that I found actually was – and this is one of those weird – Moments that it takes a while to process is the shooter was reading disinformation about me spread by a left-wing activist a couple hours before he went on a shooting spree.
So that was a dog whistle, I believe, to target me.
And a person claimed that I and another person had We didn't say or intimate that we had it at all, but by trying to falsely tie me to the El Paso shooting, that was like a dog whistle.
And then there was a tweet insulting me, falsely claiming that I was involved in something else that I wasn't actually involved in.
And that was one of the last remaining likes before the Dayton, Ohio shooter went on to commit his terrorist attack.
And I really sympathize with that.
He certainly was no fan of mine, but it was not quite, I think, as explicit as some of the hostility that was being directed towards you.
And, you know, as we know, and as we have been talking about for years, Mike, if we are called Nazis, if we are called white supremacists, if we're called this, that, and the other, that is a very clear signal for unstable people to go and believe that they are Acting for the greater good of humanity by taking out horrible people who just want the world to burn and so on.
That's incredibly dangerous stuff.
And, of course, if it was going the other way, people would be completely mental.
Yeah, and I'm looking for something right now which is even worse.
There was a tweet liked by the shooter which directly targeted Jack Posobiec in really no uncertain terms.
There was a person who said, raise your hand if you agree it's time to crush these vile little worms into dust once and for all.
And that was a person, quote, retweeting Jack Posobiec, and then the mass shooter had liked that.
And again, these were being liked just before the I don't think it was far left wing terrorism in the sense that they didn't target a gathering of conservatives.
I think it was... An angry, alienated, bitter left-wing person who is consuming bitter, angry, fake stuff about me, Posobiec, you, so many other people.
And then he just went into a rage spiral, and then he went out and committed a mass shooting.
And that's why, again, I want to be clear.
It's one of those—maybe it's a distinction that doesn't mean a difference.
I don't know. People could argue both ways.
But I would say that the attack was carried out by the far left— But I wouldn't say that it was far left-wing terrorism per se, because the goal was, on the shooter's mind, he just melted down from all this toxic brew that he had stayed in with the far left-wing media accounts.
Well, I think that's important because, as you say, he didn't have a political target in the way that the guy attacking the ICE facility clearly did and was clearly motivated by particular language.
There is a kind of hellscape that occurs in the mind where people just become nihilistic.
They have nothing to live for.
And I really do believe that if you pump people full of...
The Nazis are taking over and the world is going to end in a decade.
When you take away people's capacity to build step-by-step into a sort of better, stable, happy life, I think it does radicalize people because you have to have something to live for in order to suppress your darker instincts.
It's the old thing like the guy who's on death row who's got his last meal – Well, he doesn't really care about the carb levels.
He doesn't really care about the sugar content because it's his last meal.
And if you keep telling people that the world is about to explode and the climate is about to turn everything into a fiery desert and there's nothing, it really does get tough, particularly for less robust people to sense that they have a future.
And I think that doesn't make people evil, but it gives them less ammunition with which to hold back the darker sides of their natures.
Well, he's probably using drugs.
He's in a dark room at night with nothing else lighting him but a laptop.
And he's reading things that are toxic and making him angry.
And he's creating a cycle.
He's just rage. And then he killed his sister, for example.
And he just went on some kind of uncontrollable rage spiral because the words that we read do impact our minds and do impact our thinking.
And everything he was reading was about rage, telling people that there's war for happening.
I remember, I mean, for example, I remember how much trouble Alex Jones got in.
This was used actually to ban him because he had said that...
Get your battle rifles ready.
And he even said, I'm being metaphorical, but there were a bunch of articles saying, well, he's radicalizing people for violence.
Well, what about these left-wing accounts, right?
People go, well, that's what about is, I mean, this is the Socratic method.
The Socratic method is that you're trying to discover the rule that governs human behavior by looking at discrete examples.
So if you're in the media and you're saying, Well, if some kid believes bad things because he watched Molyneux, even though the stuff the kid believes are different than what Molyneux even talks about, okay, you said then that there is something to look at.
Okay, well, if this Dayton, Ohio mass shooter, terrorist, what people want to call him, If he's reading all this left-wing anger bait stuff, then why is that different?
Why would you not say we need to have a conversation about left-wing rhetoric?
And then they go, what about ism?
Or they'll go, what about comment?
And what about all this other stuff?
I'm like, well, first of all, I never had anything to do with that.
Second of all, if one of my readers, a big fan of me, did something heinous, then...
You know what I would say? I would say I feel terrible.
I'm not responsible for what he did, but I'm willing to have a conversation.
I'm willing to look into my own language, my own rhetoric.
I'm willing to have a conversation.
I'm willing to do some soul searching.
But the left, this is not speculative.
Again, this is not hypothetical.
This is not a Twitter account followed 50 people and he followed everybody.
This was a Twitter account that followed left-wing accounts and He wanted agitation.
He wanted far left-wing propaganda, and it ruined his mind.
And we've had prior shooters who followed people like the Young Turks.
There was an attack that you have written about that was motivated by the SPLC, according to some reports.
Well, there was no – actually, that's not – Speculate that's a matter of public record.
There was an attempted mass shooting in Washington, D.C. at the Family Research Council.
And when the FBI interrogated him, they said, what are you?
He said, I'm a left-wing activist. And they said, well, how did you find this place?
And he said, I wanted the SPLC website.
And he had, I think, two or three other names written down.
And they were also groups listed as on the hate watch of the SPLC. So there's what you would call a direct nexus.
And then the nexus becomes a little bit less direct.
And here's what I mean by that. We know that Elliot Rodger was a big fan of the Young Turks.
That got scrubbed from the internet, but we all have the screenshots and we know that he was a subscriber.
Well, yeah, the Young Turks are kind of toxic, but is it really fair to blame Elliot Rodger on them?
There's an argument to be had there.
But if they say that you're responsible for what other people do, then you would have to say, well, why is one different than the other?
And then you have – there was a Seattle mall shooting.
I forget the – or stabbing, I think.
I forget the person's – there's so many of these, unfortunately.
It's becoming – you have to actually have an encyclopedia, unfortunately.
This person was also a big fan of the Young Turks.
And those are, again, well, fans.
What do you mean?
But in the case of the Family Research Council shooting, there was a direct nexus.
There's court records.
The Floyd Lee Corkins, the shooter, said, I went in there to kill as many people as I possibly could.
And I went there because I found them on the SPLC website.
Okay, that's as clean and direct a nexus as you can get from terrorism and incitement there too.
Now, with the Twitter account of the Dayton, Ohio terrorist, well, he was reading all this material regularly.
He was reading it just before the shooting.
He was embroiled in all of this negative, toxic mindset, toxic content.
So that's a really close direct nexus.
And again, if the El Paso shooter had a Twitter account and all he was doing was retweeting conservatives all day, I guarantee you we'd be having a conversation about that.
And it would be the number one conversation on the news.
Instead, they're saying El Paso, Trump, Fox News, just throwing out buzzwords.
And then you're like, well, what about Dayton? They go, well, what about Dayton?
Why are you trying to use whataboutism to distract from El Paso?
No. No, we're not trying to distract from El Paso.
We're trying to say that people are losing their minds.
And you can call them both sides, which is weird because I'm not on the side of people who believe like the El Paso guy.
He's not on my side.
But if you want to claim that there's a side and one side is far right and one side is far left, then you have to realize we just had a weekend shooting.
There's never going to be a better social scientific study that you could ever conduct.
Left-wing shooter, very active Twitter account, very easy to ascertain his ideology.
He said he'd vote for Elizabeth Warren.
He said he wouldn't vote for Kamal because she's a cop.
He followed all the Antifa bloggers, retweeted them, engaged with them, agreed with them, endorsed violence against all of us.
Okay.
El Paso shooter had a manifesto.
There you go.
Apples to apples.
It's right here, right at the same time, but Dayton...
Ohio, that shooting went away real fast once that Twitter account was prominently displayed and prominently shared.
Yeah, that's very true. And the fact that he disliked the people who call for rational discourse, I think is really important.
And if I were to sort of characterize this divide, Mike, let me know what you think about this.
The people on the right dislike particular ideas.
And they dislike collectivism.
They dislike postmodernism.
They dislike relativism.
And they dislike socialism, communism, and so on.
And they go hard against those ideas, which I think is what you should do if you consider ideas to be dangerous or bad and so on.
And they go hard against those ideas.
And occasionally, you know, there's some intellectual shadow or penumbra against particular individuals, but they're really focusing on the ideas.
The difference seems to be, I think, that on the left, they're not sure exactly what they're against, but they sure are angry at particular people.
And that to me is a very, so attack the ideas, not the person, I think is the way to have a civilized discourse.
And I don't think you should restrain or pussyfoot around ideas that are particularly dangerous.
You know, communism killed like over 100 million people in a century.
But don't go for individuals because individuals are complex.
Ideas can be attacked and there's going to be maybe some shadow cast on particular individuals, but go for the ideas.
Once you start advocating violence against particular individuals, and this is what, of course, I hated about the El Paso guy who obviously was racist and terrified of what he called the invasion and so on.
Okay, so really focus hard and work for immigration reform and try and support it and talk about the things that are difficult.
But you don't go and start shooting up people.
That is no longer attacking ideas.
That is killing actual individual human beings.
And that seems to me one of the divides, that to attack an idea is, to me, very civilized.
To attack human beings is really the height of barbarism.
Well, that's the end result of, and this is why the left doesn't want to have the conversation, is it The El Paso shooting is the end result of identity politics.
The Dayton, Ohio shooting, again, the shooter had those kinds of ideas where you just view other human beings as monoliths.
Okay, that person is a straight white male, therefore he's evil.
That person has another characteristic, therefore that person is another person.
Then they view each other as like little armies and then they attack each other.
Whereas the more conservative approach is grounded primarily in Christianity, which is the idea of like redemption.
Hey, you just believe the wrong things, right?
So hate the sin, not the sinner.
And, like, in modern Christianity, there are people who, they'll say, for example, they don't believe that gay marriage is Christian, but they would say you shouldn't hate gay people.
You should pray for gay people, and I personally believe being gay is a choice, and there are tough theological issues with all this, and I'm not going to get into, but the fundamental belief is that people are redeemable, and...
The left's fundamental belief is that other people who share certain characteristics by virtue of having those characteristics, such as being white or straight, are evil.
And then other groups now have adopted the identity politics of the left, and they're now targeting other people who have different characteristics to them.
And this was, again, all foreseeable, predictable.
For example, When the punch a Nazi meme came and they thought, oh, LOLs, that's so funny.
Violence and I would say, well, what happens when people view you as a Nazi?
Well, I'm not the Nazis.
The other people are Nazis.
But that is never how it works.
That's not the way – if you know anything about human nature, human psychology, if you've watched a History Channel special, you know you never just get to say, well, violence against Nazis is OK. But they're Nazis, and that'll never be used on us, and they won't see us as Nazis.
And of course, we're now seeing the normalization of political violence, the intersecting with identity politics, and that's what makes the times today dangerous.
And there was, I think, an interesting distinction between these two shooters as well.
So I won't get into details.
I'll put a couple links below. But the El Paso, Texas shooter came from, I think, what could be reasonably described as an extremely toxic and dysfunctional background.
Like his father was a therapist who seemed to have some significant issues.
He was a Self-proclaimed drug addict for 40 years.
And, you know, he was also treating people while being a drug addict himself, doing Lord knows how much damage to vulnerable people and so on, right?
And this is all in his autobiography that he published.
So this is not any kind of hearsay.
This is straight from the horse's mouth. So there's some significant indications of an extremely dysfunctional family.
I did look into the Dayton, Ohio's family, the Ohio Shooters family, You know, I mean, nothing that would stand out as untoward and, you know, history is people talking about like he was nasty in high school and so on, right?
But the family itself doesn't have any particularly obvious markers.
Now, it's early and this may change over time and it's really, of course, hard to stare through the fourth wall of a family home and know what goes on inside.
But if I compare these two evil people, one, you can sort of say, okay, you know, what he did was absolutely immoral, evil, and wretched.
But I can see some particular environment that might end up with him being really messed up.
And it's harder to see, or at least I don't see anything obvious with the Dayton, Ohio shooter.
And that seems to me, okay, well, if one guy is radicalized by an incredibly monstrous family life...
Where's the other guy going crazy from?
Now, it could be any number of things that we don't know about yet, but just from where I sit, one's pretty clear and the other one does not seem to be clear at all.
Well, people, I think, are being raised by the internet and that's fundamentally the problem.
I read a couple of tweets today that said most children won't grow up in a home where there's books everywhere.
And I thought, yeah, that's profound in a way where there were bookstores, right?
You would walk down the street.
There was a little local bookstore, used bookstore.
And parenting has been outsourced to the internet.
And that allows people to get into their little subcultures and engage in tribalism in a different way.
So one of the paradoxes of my thinking and lifestyle and choices are that the internet makes it if you're kind of a niche person and people just aren't interested in what you're interested in.
Then you can unite with like-minded people on the internet, whereas conventional living and conventional people can be maybe not always interested in the same things you are.
Now, the flip side though is that people are all finding their little tribes in their community and not being forced to interact with each other.
Now, in the case of the Dayton, Ohio shooter, he had threatened to kill people.
I believe he was expelled from school.
I haven't seen that confirmed yet.
As far as I've seen reported, he had both a kill list for the boys and a rape list for the girls.
This is according to his school mates and was pretty universally loathed and feared.
And I'm not sure how you end up just tootling around society with those kind of predilections.
Yeah, and where are the parents?
So there's a number of things.
Was he on antidepressants and mental health issues?
I don't know.
They all have a look.
There's something to it where there's a vacant stare in the eyes of these people.
Is that environmental?
I don't know.
I don't – and I'm happy to say I don't know.
Scott Adams had a good tweet, which was anybody with a univariable explanation for these shootings is just a hack and you dismiss them.
So if your explanation is, well, he was Republican or, well, he's Democrat or single mom or was on antidepressants or that or that.
It's like, well, if you're only in one variable thinking, then you're not actually thinking.
This is very complex. And it's okay, I think.
I wish more people would take this approach.
You just say, I don't know.
I don't know. We need to think about a lot of these things.
But we do know there's a pattern.
It tends to be First of all, almost all violence is male.
This is non-controversial.
The shootings happening in Baltimore, Chicago, and others tend to be by people of a different race.
And then these big sort of wholesale shootings tend to be white males.
And the whole Republican, well, what about Chicago?
It's like, okay, can we...
Talk about these issues, too, though, right?
There's this game, and that's the problem.
The media feeds into it.
They rush so hard to blame conservatives and Republicans that the conservatives and Republicans are being falsely blamed.
And then they want to deflect and then say, well, you know, but Democrats are in Chicago and Baltimore.
And look at that. And then people like us are thinking, well, it's all well and good that you want to scream at each other and blame each other.
But wouldn't it be more productive and healthy for us to find out, or at least try to find out, what's going on?
Well, and we won't, as you say, as long as people try to reduce complex situations for...
For one particular variable, which usually is serving their political motives.
It is tempting, of course, when you have a particularly strong passion or mission to say, I'm going to try and find some way to use this tragedy to further my mission, right?
And, you know, if your mission is good, it's understandable, although it does reduce things down to one variable or two variables where it is very complex.
It is very complex.
Then people say, oh, well, you know, this means we've got to have gun control.
It's like, no, I don't think that's going to be the answer.
There were more guns per capita in America in 1900, and these kinds of shootings weren't going on.
As you say, there are different ethnic breakdowns.
I've heard different ways of looking at it, depending on how you define it, one race more than another.
It's very complex.
Yeah, there's a lot of single mom shooters, but you think of all the millions of people like myself raised by single moms who didn't become shooters.
Again, you're not going to get a lot of causality there.
I think it's going to be a whole bunch of overlapping circles and then we try and find...
I did a presentation recently on the destruction of America's mental health care system where people who had real issues were taken out of society, not put in prison, but put into areas where they had talk therapy, they were in peaceful, serene, beautiful environments, they had meaningful labor.
And then, of course, when the magic of the SSRIs came along and everyone was like, hey, we got a cure, they just dumped them out on the streets and gave them fistfuls of medication, which worked about as well as you imagine it would, which was terribly terrible.
And these are all very complex issues that we need to resolve, and we're not going to be able to resolve them if people just go to their collective corners and start screaming at everyone else.
And that's the problem.
It doesn't do us any good.
We have to live in a society that's sort of a banal statement you would think, but we have to live in a society where And with people yelling at each other, radicalizing more people, we're going to be less safe than we were this past weekend because people aren't learning anything.
People aren't coming together. People aren't having conversations.
It's more finger-pointing.
And we now know, again, this is not – this was not unknown to us before.
But we now know that the left-wing media just will not take any accountability or responsibility for what their little fans do.
And they're deflecting or – one NBC guy again, he said that the shooter was – well, he was kind of politically down the aisle on both sides.
No, he wasn't.
All day yesterday – Yeah, there's no maybe a little bit.
No, he was a far left-wing socialist.
DSA, he was probably a DSA member.
The media, I mean, if it were any other way, the media would be banging down the doors of the socialist organizations asking for comment and whatnot.
We're not saying that happened.
And what's also happening is there was an article by Quillette, Claire Lehman or something like that, Where they show the connection between left-wing reporters and Antifa.
And the response to that was, well, we're connected.
The response to that was, well, you're trying to get us, you know, incitement.
And now you're like, wait a minute, all these reporters who are connected to Antifa, they were all well-liked by the shooter.
But now they're going to try to say that I'm harassing them by reporting on them and literally just saying, no, I mean, here's who the shooter liked.
Here's who he retweeted. Here's the conversations.
And this is what they always do.
And all the media does is they radicalize everyone else more.
They make everything else more of a disaster.
And it's quite frankly disgusting.
So let's close with this, Mike.
You and I, I mean, I've done enough of these speeches.
I really want people to hear from you.
You and I have been working for, let's get facts, reason, and evidence.
Let's stop getting so hysterical.
Let's stop getting so enraged at particular individuals.
Get mad at ideas all you want, but don't target individuals.
We've been working on this project, I mean, for many years.
What is it that you would really like people to take away from these tragedies?
You can't make a tragedy a good thing.
The best you can do is try and get good out of the tragedy.
It doesn't bring anyone back to life, but it means that their deaths can hopefully bring us together in some sort of rational discourse.
So what is it you'd really, really like for people to take away from these kinds of horrors?
Well, one is that you have to be vigilant now.
You should have an everyday carry kit with a tourniquet.
And when I go, for example, to a movie theater, I carry a high-lumen splash light because if you're in an environment where you can't carry a firearm or where shooting a firearm would be reckless...
If there's an attack in a theater, you can actually blind people with the high lumens light.
So the number one lesson is everybody should know how to use a tourniquet, be more vigilant.
And this is unfortunate.
One of the great privileges of living in a Western society is that if you and I met at a cafe and had some espresso, there wasn't going to be a shooting.
There wasn't going to be a car exploding.
And we're now learning that Western civilization could be a blip.
Something that happened for a minute or two in the grand course of human history or it could be something that we're going to preserve.
The bigger message beyond that even is...
Don't let them radicalize you.
That's what the media is trying to do.
They're not going to radicalize me.
They attack me. They smear me.
They attack you. They smear you.
Because they're hoping they can radicalize us so that they can create a bigger problem for them to solve.
And they create a bigger problem for them to solve.
So I know that when these groups like the SPLC target me, I know what they're trying to do.
I know about Floyd Lee Corkins.
I know what they're trying to do.
But they're not going to radicalize me and anybody listening here Don't let anyone radicalize you.
And by the way, that means people in your friendly little chat rooms.
There was a person in, I believe it was Ohio, actually.
He painted a swastika over by a synagogue in a building.
And I read all the police reports.
And there was agitprop there.
There was somebody saying, oh, you're, you know, go do that.
Go do that. It's funny. LOL. You better be careful who you're hanging out with.
So don't let the left radicalize you.
And don't think people in the chat rooms who are trying to get you to do things or telling you man up, take act, right?
There's always these, like, codes.
Oh, you know, why don't you just keep talking, quit talking, do something about it.
Be a man or something. Don't let anybody radicalize you.
There's a battle for our minds now.
And it's happening by extremists on both sides.
And frankly, I don't believe Russia is competent enough to pull it off.
But I wouldn't be surprised if there's like Chinese intel or something finding these isolated lone white men and then radicalizing them into taking acts of violence.
Yeah, I mean, there is this constant undertow when you're out there in the public sphere calling for conversation and dialogues.
There's this constant undertow.
And I see it in my feeds as well.
People are like, oh, the age for arguments is past.
The time for conversation is past.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
We have the greatest communication tool in the history of the planet.
And it's going to be used by evil people.
But it's also available to good people like you and I, and we simply cannot surrender the necessary dialogue to hysterical action which will brutalize.
And man, I don't know if it's like people just like, well, you know, we haven't had a war in a while.
I'm sure it's just like it is in the movies.
It's like it's really not.
You know, this is not a superhero situation.
This is going to be people who don't have water and have crying babies.
This is going to be people they turn on the light and nothing happens because someone sabotaged the electrical grid or someone took a shell in some power generator or something.
This is when people look at the fridge and say, okay, how am I going to live for the next two weeks or more because the grocery store has been cleaned out or set fire to?
I mean, this is like, it's a thin line, man.
It is a thin line. Between civilization and chaos and, you know, I'm going to fight to the very, you know, bitter end and I'm sure we can turn these things around but it really gets nasty, unpleasant, brutal, vicious and life gets very, very short and cheap when we lose this civilization and all the people who are trying to goad people into action...
You know, man, I hope that you never get what you want, and you better hope it too, because what you're going to get if you get your way is going to be something that you will regret for probably only a very short time.
All right. Well, thanks very much for your time, Mike.
People can go to cernovich.com for more of your work and your articles.
We'll put a link to Guerrilla Mindset, Mike's great book, and really, really appreciate your time today.
I hope your family is well. Yeah, I hope yours as well, too.
And to echo your message, just know that they're bad actors trying to radicalize minds.
Don't let them do it. All right.
We'll keep that in mind.
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