The Second Civil War Is Coming Into Focus, Reza Aslan Blames ALL Trump Supporters
The Second Civil War Is Coming Into Focus As Calls For Escalation Rock Social Media. We now have two major incidents in less than 24 hours where each person held an extremist ideology associated with far left or far right. Motivations are still mostly unconfirmed but many media outlets are operating under the assumption that the El Paso incident manifesto is legitimate.In Dayton we learned that the perpetrator was far left, in support of Antifa, the DSA, and even expressed the need to "arm train prepare" in response to Anti Trump Rhetoric. No motivate is known yet as to why he did what he did.In response to El Paso the rhetoric against Trump has dramatically escalated even as the president himself denounces the twisted ideologies. Reza Aslan tweeted one of the most frightening and dangerous calls to action and in the past Shaun King has tweeted praise for politically motivated incidents.Its starting to come into focus, with high profile people acting without repercussion and calling for escalation. It seems that while conservatives mostly have no issues condemning this, the media and many on the left are outright ignoring the calls for escalation on their side.
Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Funny, I'm sure there's going to be a ton of people who look at the title of this video and say something like, Tim's being hyperbolic and Tim's exaggerating, and I'm actually citing a Princeton professor.
Quote, we are in a cold civil war.
What we've seen over the past few days may not actually be Related to this potential civil war, except for El Paso, we assume that to be, for the most part, accurate.
The Dayton shooting, for those that aren't familiar, we had, I'm assuming you are familiar, but we had two shootings, El Paso, which was driven by a weird, white, identitarian, balkanization ideology.
The guy talked about splitting up the U.S.
into regions based on race or something, but it was a white, identitarian idea.
Now that group, the One Identitarian types, I don't think are necessarily dominant players in the culture war.
However, it doesn't matter.
It fuels the rise of the far left, which is more likely to be embraced by mainstream culture.
What we saw in Dayton, Ohio, was a guy who carried out an act which seemingly makes no sense.
We don't know his motivation.
We do know the guy was very pro-Antifa, very far left, pro-democratic socialists, and all these things, but we don't know why he did what he did.
I don't— I actually would lean towards right now saying it probably wasn't politically motivated.
We just don't know.
Simply because he had these ideologies doesn't mean he did it for any reason.
The attack was seemingly random.
At the same time, even though the guy in El Paso put out a manifesto, he went to a Walmart and shot a bunch of random people.
It doesn't seem to make sense either.
So I can't tell you why, what, I can tell you that the rhetoric emerging from this is showing us that it doesn't matter who did what or why.
What matters is that people are pushing their ideology, their fake news, their interpretation.
All of this is resulting in a divide that can never be mended.
And when you see two mass shootings, where the ideology behind both groups are elements of the growing cultural crisis, it starts to look like a civil war is coming into focus.
I don't know what a civil war in this era would look like.
I have said in the past, don't expect- I hate using the word civil war specifically because people imagine like two groups marching towards each other, fighting over the government.
Some kind of conflict is happening.
Some kind of civil war, at least according to this Princeton professor.
And I said before, what we're going to see is insurgency.
And I think that's where we're walking into.
I want to make a point before we get into- I got a ton of sources that I want to show you that freak me out.
But I want to make one important point.
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
When we look at history, we're looking at bullet points condensed into single pages.
When in reality, what led up to World War I and World War II happened over a long period of time.
And it's probable.
That when the wars first started, actually, it's a guarantee.
When World War II first started, people didn't know it was World War II.
They didn't call it World War II.
The United States wasn't involved for quite some time until after Pearl Harbor.
It's a very complicated situation.
So the war is raging in Europe, and what are people in the U.S.
But when we look in the history books, they talk about what the U.S.
was doing at the time and how it led to what we now call World War II.
It's a complicated process.
But we could be in the Great Conflict.
And in 50 years, they'll say, the whole thing started in 2014 with Gamergate, or in 2011 with Occupy Wall Street, or in 2008 with the Great Recession.
We don't know.
We don't know how history will look back upon us.
We can't see in front of us.
But in 100 years, they may be talking about this Great Conflict.
Now, it's entirely possible nothing happens.
I have no idea.
But it's starting to seem like the things I've been expecting to happen are happening.
People of various ideologies carrying out extremist acts.
One seems to be more cut and dry, one I'm not sure of.
But when you stand back, regardless of what these people are claiming to do, you will have people just looking at the El Paso guy and blaming Trump.
You will have people looking at the Dayton guy and blaming the left for refusing to address mental illness or for scaring this guy and freaking him out with left-wing ideology, of which he posted a ton of.
This Princeton professor is targeting Trump.
So I want to take a look at this, but before we do, I must stress, head over to TimCast.com slash donate if you'd like to support my work.
There's a PayPal option, a crypto option, a physical address.
The important thing here, YouTube has deranked independent political commentary.
I guarantee you this video will not be monetized.
It can't be.
You know, and it's ridiculous considering CNN will cover the same stories, CNN will monetize in the same way, but YouTube won't allow it.
And I will stress that I have actually... So I've asked you to share my videos if you like them, and I went... I tried one day without doing it, and I saw the numbers take a massive hit.
So I've actually done this back and forth to see, like, total number, trying to experiment.
So I'm greatly appreciative of everybody who does share these videos, because it really is solving the problem of YouTube de-ranking my channel and other channels.
Let's get into the news and talk about, here's what I want you to envision.
A year ago, I said I believe we are facing some kind of new civil conflict, some kind of urban crisis, a cultural crisis, whatever you want to call it.
And we're seeing street battles and street violence, we're seeing the rhetoric escalate.
And I don't know what form it'll take, but I think it's happening.
Now it kind of feels like, to me, we're starting to see the image become clearer and clearer.
When you have these two incidents in one day with two people who held specific ideologies.
I'm not talking about the motive right now.
I understand the motive isn't clear.
The one guy, it seems to be, although I don't think they've actually verified the manifesto, they believe it to be, for the most part, accurate.
The other guy didn't have it.
We don't know his motive yet.
The point is, however, people will take it one way or another.
That's the issue.
Perception is reality.
Let's read this story here about the Cold Civil War, and then I want to move on to the current news.
And trust me when I say I'm putting these pieces together.
Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr., responding on Sunday to the shooting deaths of at least 20 people in El Paso, Texas, said the U.S.
is in the midst of a cold civil war.
What happens when we use language like infestation?
Glaude said on NBC's Meet the Press.
You set the stage for people who are even more on the extreme to act violently.
We are in a cold civil war, and there are some people who bear the burden of it.
We have children in El Paso right now who just witnessed their friends and family members shot down because someone thinks there's a Hispanic invasion of the country, which is almost the exact same language of the President of the United States he added.
Now, this guy in El Paso was extremely lethal, and that's why fringe right-wing extremism is typically more dangerous and more deserving of government resources, and I've said it a million times.
Of course, I'm pretty sure the far-left doesn't care because I'm very critical of them.
The far-left engages in low-level violence frequently.
They're not very good at it.
It's not particularly lethal.
Though they do try, you know, they beat the crap out of people.
So they get the focus because people won't call them out.
This story is a perfect example.
Let's break down what this guy said.
He said, what happens when we use language like infestation?
Let me rewind.
What happens when we use language like concentration camp?
Tim Pool said on his channel, You set the stage for people who are even more on the extreme to act violently.
Sounds very similar to what I said a few days ago.
We are in a cold civil war, and there are some people who bear the burden of it.
Let's rewind now.
He said, or let's go forward to where he says, it's almost the exact same language of the President of the United States.
Rewind.
Concentration camp is also the exact same language of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and we saw a guy try to firebomb an ICE facility.
When that happened, I called it out.
Okay?
It happens frequently, so I call it the left frequently.
When the right stuff happens, I made three videos about what happened in El Paso, specifically about the ideology and the fear of escalation.
When the guy in Tacoma does the same thing, I made a video about that.
The issue is, the extremists on the right, while it is seemingly increasing in frequency, depending on which source you're using, I can't make a video about it every single day when nothing is happening.
But the left engages in a lot of low-tier stuff, and I'll absolutely call it out.
I don't believe this man is wrong.
I believe there is an issue with the use of language and how it leads people to become more extreme, absolutely.
But the problem is on both sides.
We can see people- like this guy in El Paso absolutely was listening to the rhetoric of conservative talking points.
Conservatives denounce the violence, reject identitarianism, however.
So, am I going to blame that person for pointing it out?
No.
When the left criticizes the far-right extremism, they're right to do so.
Far-right extremism is a bad thing.
However, the far-left is then radicalized by it.
The only thing I think we're missing in this debate is the mainstream left not calling out the far-left extremism.
Only rallying around the far-right extremism, even when Trump himself denounces white supremacy, they don't care.
They don't care.
And this is why I'm saying the Civil War is coming into focus.
Let's move on.
This story was published in November.
What are the chances that America's disunion turns into a civil war?
I don't actually care for the most part about the analysis of the story.
I just want to highlight that they did a poll and said a third of all Americans think a conflict could break out within the next five years, with 10% thinking it's very likely to happen.
Back in March, State Department official Keith Mines told Foreign Policy Magazine, That's the important takeaway.
Everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun.
He rated the odds of a second American Civil War breaking out in the next 10-15 years at
60%.
That's the important takeaway.
Now let's take a look at this guy Conor Betts briefly.
He was a leftist.
He posted about guns.
He actually had some interactions with the Socialist Rifle Association about the effectiveness of bomb stocks.
Andy Ngo referred to it as potential advice.
I think that's a little hyperbolic.
I can't tell you what it was.
They were having a conversation about gun rights.
This is a guy who was very leftist, using his pronouns, and we don't know what his motivation was or why he was killing the people he killed.
For all we know, it could have been him targeting the 1%, and his sister was an accident.
We don't know.
Well, let's move on.
I want to get more to the crux of the Civil War stuff outside of this.
The Ohio gunman called himself a pro-Satanist leftist who supported Elizabeth Warren.
This article is an example of what's going to happen and why it's dangerous.
I made a video saying he was a confirmed leftist, his motive was unclear, and I try to stress in the video, we don't know why he did what he did, as I'll try to do in this video.
It doesn't mean that he was driven by ideology.
But it does mean you will see articles emerge where people will say he supported Elizabeth Warren, he was a leftist, motivation be damned.
They will simply say, hey, this is who this guy was, and this will make people— Look, there's going to be people on the right, militia-style people or just conservatives saying, I get it, we don't know his motive.
It's time to arm anyway.
Now, interestingly, this guy actually did tweet about arming because of civil conflict, so I can get a little bit into his motive and talk about this, and I'll show you this right here.
I want to come back to this tweet later.
Jack Posobiec tweeted, this is awkward.
We can see this man, Mehdi Ahsan, quote, After El Paso, we can no longer ignore Trump's role in inspiring mass shootings.
He said, My latest on the tragic carnage this weekend and how the shooter's white nationalism talk of invasion and approval of send them back fits a pattern.
Please read and share.
Jack then tweeted this from the Twitter account of the Dayton shooter.
Yet, Mehdi Hassan tweeted in March.
He said, quote, yes, let's defeat or impeach Trump, but what if he doesn't leave the White House?
My latest piece for The Intercept, an all too plausible and deeply dangerous and maybe violent scenario come 2020.
To which the Clayton guy said, arm, train, prepare.
At this point, we can see the danger of the rhetoric.
By saying Trump won't leave the White House, by saying Trump wants to kill migrants in their concentration camps, this guy was tweeting, arm, train, prepare.
Is it possible that the only reason he was armed and had guns and was tweeting with the Socialist Rifle Association is because the rhetoric drove him to that point?
Now, we don't know why he killed people in Dayton.
But perhaps we can say there's at least some circumstantial evidence that the only reason he had guns in the first place was because of the rhetoric of people saying Trump, you know, is a far-right extremist.
Trump won't leave the White House.
The rhetoric escalates.
I don't care what your opinion is on Trump for this video.
The point is the perception.
That the right is going to say, this dude is arming?
He's tweeting about arming.
Why wouldn't someone prepare?
The left has already been preparing.
They've been talking about the John Brown gun club.
We've seen what's happened in Tacoma.
Both sides are gearing up for a major conflict.
I would fail at my job if I didn't go back to the El Paso shooter and mention the criticism and articles from the New York Times, for instance.
They say, analysis, El Paso shooting suspects manifesto echoes Trump language.
And that's what we saw in the tweet from the guy, Mehdi, where he talks about invasions.
He talks about, you know, open borders and things like this.
But that's not necessarily Trump rhetoric.
That's just general rhetoric.
And I'll stress this right now.
Every conservative, including Trump, has condemned this guy.
He went nuts.
I mean, it's insane and extremely deadly and lethal.
Even the problem now is because Antifa is particularly ineffective, they're doing a bunch of small, I'll look at them like, I don't know, low blow haymakers.
Fast punches that do damage here and there, but aren't big enough to get people to stand up on their seats.
Not like a blinding uppercut that sends a guy flying back 20 feet.
What we see with the far right is that it's rare relative to the amount of violence on the left, but extremely lethal.
So I do think it is warranted to say we need resources to stop that from the federal government.
I'm wary of expanding executive authority, but hey, I'll agree with the left all day and night.
Yes, let's stop these people.
They're insane.
At the same time, we need the left to condemn Antifa more.
Sean King praised what happened in Tacoma.
We cannot accept this.
You need to stop it before it gets to that point.
But let's move on.
Copycat is arrested after making threats to shoot up a Florida Walmart because he was intrigued by El Paso, Ohio massacres.
Gibsonson Walmart in Florida received a call threatening to shoot up the store.
Wayne Lee Padgett, the son of an employee, identified as the threatening caller.
Hillsborough County Sheriff said Padgett was intrigued by recent shootings.
He was arrested and faces felony charges of a false report and making a threat.
Now, they call him a copycat.
Again, whatever this guy's motives was, I have no idea, but expect more of this.
There is something I talked about the other day called a standalone complex, where The guy in Dayton and the guy in El Paso are completely unrelated, but initially it seemed to be, it was possibly a concerted effort.
A standalone complex is when unrelated incidents, unrelated people do things in a similar way that gives rise to the impression of a concerted effort.
It turns out they actually had diametrically opposed ideologies, but that's the point.
It seemed to be that way.
This guy is a copycat.
When this guy in El Paso does this, he cited Christchurch.
My understanding is he talked about New Zealand.
Don't be surprised when more people hear about this and act in a similar way.
It's ideologically driven.
This is another example of the dangers of Far-right extremism.
And look, I don't know what the solution is.
I really, I really, really don't.
I can tell you, blaming the mainstream left as, you know, fascists, blaming the mainstream right as fascists isn't solving the problem.
If Trump condemns this, if conservatives condemn this, good.
It's the best we can do.
Now left, please condemn your extremists.
I'll be waiting.
Many have.
I'm not, I'm not, you know, don't get me wrong, but I just don't see it.
And the problem is, When this crazy guy echoes a lot of similar talking points we've heard from, you know, the far right, and it overlaps with what Trump is saying, they blame Trump for it.
They blame Trump to a rather absurd degree.
To where we see this guy, Mediasan, blame Trump, but literally, his blaming of Trump is what at least provides some evidence that the guy in Dayton armed because of it.
In this tweet, I want to talk about the truly scary thing that we're seeing now.
The propensity of fake news to drive the narrative and make people insane, and I don't see any way of stopping it.
This woman, Imani Gandhi, is an analyst for Rewire News.
Nearly 200,000 retweets.
The problem?
I was inspired by Trump.
Media, what could have caused this?
Shooter, look at this cool photo of the word Trump spelled out in firearms.
Media, he probably played too much Fortnite.
Shooter, it's like Trump said, Hispanics are invading us.
Media, we may never know.
Nearly 200,000 retweets.
The problem, it's completely fake.
The whole premise behind this tweet is completely fake, but extremely influential, for one.
The media is absolutely blaming Trump and Trump's language.
Fact check number two.
The photo of Trump spelled out with firearms is not from this shooter.
That's fake news.
That photo was from a long time ago.
Media is not blaming Fortnite.
The New York Times, the paper of record, is blaming Trump to an extent.
The media, we may never know.
This creates an image that the media can't be trusted.
It's not like, you know, I think the media for the most part can be trusted, but distrusted media pushing fake influence and allowing propaganda to spread.
What are you gonna do?
This is somebody saying it's Trump's fault.
Spreading fake news about Trump spelled out in firearms?
Again, going to radicalize people.
It doesn't matter who is doing the radicalization.
From a copycat who's agreeing with the message, to people spreading fake news.
Again, I'll say it for the millionth time, we've seen far-right extremists go nuts.
We don't know the motive of the guy in Dayton.
I don't think it's likely ideologically driven, but at least we can say there's some evidence to suggest he was armed because of it.
And here comes the more Look, it's coming into focus, okay?
Reza Aslan.
He said, after today, there is no longer any room for nuance.
The president is a white nationalist terror leader.
His supporters, all of them, are by definition white nationalist terror supporters.
The MAGA hat is a KKK hood, and this evil racist scourge must be eradicated from society.
Where do you think we go next?
The professor from Princeton who said, when you use words like infestation, It's the exact same language of the president.
Yeah, when you use words like concentration camp, it's the exact same language as Ocasio-Cortez.
When Reza Aslan says they must be eradicated.
They must be eradicated.
Wow.
I think we can see where this is going.
It's not stopping.
Reza Aslan, with his hundreds of thousands of followers, tweeting this out.
With no recourse, with no repercussion.
Sean King praising a terrorist.
No repercussion.
I think we can see where it's going.
So I was asked recently, how come I'm always ragging on the left?
This is why.
Show me the conservative cheering on any of this.
I'll be waiting.
I can show you the leftists who are cheering it on, who are blaming Trump and making the problem worse, even when the president condemns the violence.
Even when he calls it out.
I don't think the president is perfect.
I think that he's boorish, and I disagree with a lot of his policy.
But to act like Trump is making this happen is absurd.
Especially when, you know, you see this New York Times story which absolutely mentions the suspect wrote that his views predate Trump.
Of course they do.
Trump isn't the cause.
Trump is a symptom.
I think Trump may actually be slowing things down to an extent by making these people think it's not as bad or potentially—actually, you know what?
I think the best way to put this is how Will Chamberlain phrased it.
I don't have the tweet pulled up, but Will said what's causing this is the fact that Trump has scorned these people, and now they feel that the little hope they had is gone.
Will made the point—again, I think it was Will, forgive me if I'm getting this wrong—that when Trump first got elected, the media was saying all of these things that got white nationalists actually hopeful.
Until Trump came out and condemned them.
And then they got angry and felt they had no recourse.
Trump is a symptom, in my opinion, of a rise in this fear over immigration and these other issues.
But let's move on.
Because I want to make sure I stress, what I'm trying to say is, I would never put the blame on Trump for this.
That makes no sense.
It only makes things worse.
You can't honestly think every Trump supporter is a racist and contribute to this.
Are there a small portion?
Of course there are.
There are a small portion of anti-Trump people who are psychotic, you know, crazy people as well.
The point is, the solution to this is not to blame Trump or to blame Nancy Pelosi, But what am I going to say about Reza Aslan, who's literally saying that Trump supporters should be eradicated?
I don't know, man!
I don't know.
You want to tell me why I'm pointing the finger at the left and not Trump?
Well, Trump's condemning it.
I can't say that it's perfect.
I can't say it's going to solve the problem.
Reza Aslan's promoting it.
What do you want me to say?
Show me the conservative cheering this on.
Let's move on.
In this story, I want to make sure I stress, the FBI said on August 1st that they were wrong about the Garlic Festival Shooters' white supremacy ideology.
The reason I highlight this is that among the left, they are saying that the FBI is defending them because the FBI are white supremacists.
There was a shooting.
It was reported that the shooter was a white supremacist.
The FBI is saying that's not true.
I highlight this to tie back to the idea of fake news.
These people are going to push their ideology no matter what happens.
They're going to claim it's true no matter what happens.
Facts be damned.
And now we can see that things will just continue to escalate.
This is actually from today, I believe.
Or at least maybe it was updated.
The Washington Examiner said Trump must name and condemn the evil of white nationalism.
And Donald Trump did.
Trump said we must condemn white supremacy.
What did Reza Aslan say?
He said that Trump and his supporters must be eradicated from society, even though conservatives called for the condemnation of white nationalism and Trump condemned white supremacy.
It doesn't matter.
This is why I think the left is worrying me.
Look, man, you get both sides to say, stop, enough, I'll be happy.
Trump said it.
Conservatives have called for it.
Maybe there are some conservatives calling for what I'm not seeing, but from where I'm sitting, I see Sean King, Reza Aslan, and other high-profile leftists calling everybody Nazis, calling everybody fascists, and calling for more violence.
Now people made fun of Trump because he accidentally said Toledo.
I'm just going to give you this update for the sake of giving you the update.
Joe Biden also incorrectly stated the locations as well.
And then we have this story where we go on to the final portion.
Just more of a news update.
Trump has blamed mental illness, the internet, and computer games following El Paso and Dayton.
You know, it's foolish to blame video games, but I will say this.
I think it's better to have the problem be mental illness or social media than for it to be the people.
Reza Aslan's rhetoric scares me.
This woman from Imani Gandhi scares me.
200,000 retweets with fake news blaming the president.
Reza Aslan blaming the president.
And then I look over and I see conservatives and the president condemning it.
The problem is coming into focus.
You want to ask me why I'm really concerned about the rise of the far left?
Well, they're identitarians.
They share a similar but conflicted ideology with the guy in El Paso.
They do.
It's true.
And it emboldens people like the guy in El Paso.
I don't care if you want to accept it or not, it's true.
Identitarianism, it takes many forms.
There's left-wing identitarianism.
They want identity-based policies.
They want people to be recognized based on their identity.
And you have a similar call from the white identitarians.
They are forming their group based on their identity.
It's a complicated thing to break down, but it all comes down to identity politics.
To the extreme.
I'll say it again.
Identity politics can be a good thing.
Civil rights for one.
But it can be an extreme thing.
Identitarianism is the extreme end.
And we can see it on the left.
We can see Kirsten Gillibrand blaming white people.
We can see the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ousting its top staff for being white.
And when you see these things, the equal and opposite reaction emerges on the white side.
Call it left, call it right, I don't care.
When the left blames white people, when Sarah Jeong tweets against white people, you radicalize people.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
It is wrong to blame people because of their race, and it is... Period.
And I think that statement should be clear.
It will condemn the white identitarians and the anti-white identitarians.
Period.
Unfortunately, while we aren't seeing, for the most part, anti-white identitarians engage in extreme violence, it's happened sometimes.
We had the guy in Dallas, We had a guy in Brooklyn, which was just outside of my house.
But you're seeing it on the left, and I think it's fair to point out, many people on the right say, if it comes to civil war, the right will win because they have all the guns.
But I will also stress, don't be surprised then when it's the far right extremists who are the ones who are coming out with the guns and being better, I shouldn't say better, but more effective, more lethal.
I don't want to say better because I don't want to imply any positivity.
No, it's nightmarish.
It's dystopian.
But of course the left is ineffective.
The guy who showed up to Tacoma, failed miserably and was killed and burned a car. That's a
point made by the right when referencing the Civil War, right? The left is increasingly
engaging in low-tier violence.
If they were more effective with their weapons, this would be a terrible nightmare. But the right
is better with guns. So when one of these people goes crazy and embraces identitarian ideology,
you can expect to see exactly what you'll see.
Left and right, I don't even know what it means anymore for the most part.
It's so confusing.
You know, this guy in El Paso espoused, like, pretty left-wing policy ideas, and you're gonna see people say, no, he was really left-wing, no, he was really right-wing.
I don't care.
They're identitarians.
That's what matters.
They are driven by an ideology where they, like, the guy in El Paso, let me make it absolutely clear, referenced dirty race mixers.
Yeah, he's talking about me.
I understand that.
He's talking about my family.
I get it.
These are not good people.
But I have never experienced this kind of sentiment among mainstream conservatives.
I've actually experienced it among mainstream left.
Kirsten Gillibrand type people.
White privileged elites who are telling me.
So I'll tell you this, man.
I don't think it's necessarily the fault- Well, you know what?
There's nothing I can do.
It's dominoes falling over.
I try to condemn identitarianism across the board, but the left is embracing it.
They are.
Kirsten Gillibrand on that 2020 debate stage with that nightmarish ideology, telling people she's going to go to white suburban moms and explain their privilege to them.
When you push this rhetoric, when the Democrats oust the top staff of the DCCC for being white, don't be surprised when you get your equal and opposite reaction.
So I don't see a solution to this.
All I know is it's going to get scary, and I just want to end by stressing this.
It's coming into focus.
What Reza Aslan said should be terrifying to all of us.
Will we see people on the left call it out?
I honestly think the answer is, for the most part, no.
Of course there are people on the left who call it out.
But in the mainstream, are we going to see John Oliver?
Bill Maher?
No.
Well, Bill Maher maybe.
Bill Maher's pretty alright.
Although he's got some kooky ideas and keeps calling for a recession, which, dude, chill.
But in the mainstream left, they're gonna play it safe and play to their base.
So it's starting to look like a civil war.
Anyway, thanks for hanging out.
Stick around.
Next segment will be coming up.
YouTube.com slash TimCastaNews at 6 p.m., and I will see you then.
So we've got some huge updates on the shootings that just took place in the past couple days, the first of which was the El Paso shooting, which appears to have been some kind of white identitarian, white nationalist kind of ideology.
The second shooting, however, is the biggest update.
Many of you may have seen this circulating on the Internet already, but it is now, to the best of our ability, confirmed.
That this guy in Dayton was a far leftist, pro-Antifa, all of that stuff.
He was, uh, my understanding is he was very pro-Democratic Socialist of America.
His Twitter profile shows that he has his pronouns in his profile, refers to himself as a leftist.
He was, uh, pro-Elizabeth Warren, things like that.
Now, what we don't know yet is his motive.
Some people are alleging that he was just some kind of misogynist who had a hit list, where others are saying it doesn't matter what we think his motive may be, he held this political ideology.
Look, let's be careful about the motive here because we do have two different incidents.
El Paso, this guy has a manifesto that people believe to be true.
This guy in Dayton didn't have that.
So, the main reason I bring this up is that I don't think it matters in the end.
The left is going to blame Trump, and they are, about El Paso, and they're going to ignore Dayton, and the right is going to highlight Dayton and say, regardless of what he was motivated by, this was the ideology he held and he was deranged.
I think it may be a reset-the-clock scenario, in a sense.
If you're not familiar, reset-the-clock is when a male feminist is found out to have abused women.
I think this may be similar to that because it's possible this guy was just some kind of misogynist, insult kind of type person who hated women and, you know, he ended up killing his own sister, right?
This is a very tragic story.
So it could be that he was pretending to be leftist or promoting this thinking it would get him social acceptance.
But in the end, I'm not going to make any assumptions.
I'm just going to tell you what we know.
This is heavy.com.
I want to stress one very important thing.
I use 99% of any story I will comment on or use as a source will be NewsGuard certified.
I do this on purpose.
I disagree with a lot of NewsGuard's assessments, but it is a check on my own bias, and it makes sure that I rely on a third-party service to determine what is or isn't credible, not my own personal opinion.
I don't use, like, random blogs or anything like that.
We can see here they have satisfied every criteria for NewsGuard.
Meaning, not only is this certified for standards of credibility and transparency, they've hit every mark.
There are some sites, like I think BuzzFeed doesn't even hit every mark.
Heavy does, which is impressive.
I also want to stress that Heavy says, Heavy confirmed the Twitter page through multiple verification factors, including a matching tattoo on both a page selfie and prominent news outlet's pictures of Conner Betts.
Several family linkages to the page, similar photos, including of him and the family dog on the page, and family members' verified accounts, including its name and references to college and growing up in Ohio and Dayton.
99.9% confirmed.
We can see here his Twitter account has been archived.
He, him, anime fan, metalhead, leftist, etc.
It was now taken down.
All of this, to me, spells verification.
If Heavy's throwing their weight behind it, I've done preliminary searches and found the photos as well.
I believe it to be true.
Twitter apparently does as well.
They've taken the account down.
Now, there's a really important thing that I want to point out here.
Again, making sure I stress, we don't know the exact motivation for why he did what he did.
But we can see here, Heavy is highlighting a couple posts By Cody Johnson, I believe.
Dr. Mr. Cody on Twitter.
The first of which says, this guy, Connor, said, effing watch this.
Even if you keep up with the news, hearing it broken down scared me S-less, which means it's working.
And in this photo, we can see this guy, Cody, with his hair all, you know, crazy.
And it says, hi, the president wants to shoot migrants at the border.
Now, I am definitely not one to blame a commentator for the actions of crazy individuals.
I will stress, though, that Cody in the past has defended Antifa and is putting out some pretty alarming rhetoric about, you know, saying the president wants to kill people at the border, when in fact the president is detaining people at the border.
I mean, you can make your arguments fine.
I'm not going to blame Cody for what this crazy person did.
But Cody himself on Twitter recently referenced something called stochastic terrorism.
If you're not familiar with this, it's a term that means you put out rhetoric and, you know, say things to the point at which it becomes probable someone will commit an act of terror, even though it seems to be unrelated.
I think Cody should, you know, take a look at his own content, and I think that's why Heavy is highlighting this.
This guy followed and shared Cody on more than one occasion, showing another video that says McConnell, Ryan, and why we need to vote Republicans out on November 6th.
Uh, Connor saying vote blue for God's sake.
Now, I will stress, we can't play the silly game of blaming the commentators.
We should all denounce political violence.
And more importantly, Cody's allowed to have his opinion and be hyperbolic and say these things without being at fault for what crazy people do.
I want to stress, Sean King, on the other hand, openly called for and advocated this.
So what Sean King is doing, in my opinion, is overt stochastic terrorism.
Actually, I think it goes beyond stochastic, and it's literally like... Sean King's calling for it.
He's inciting terror.
That's a different story.
We can see here, Cody's actually saying, go vote, which is respectable.
It's right, what you should be doing.
We need to change the system to the best of our abilities without hurting other people.
However, this one is where it gets kind of extreme.
You know, you can see in this one, it looks like, I don't know if he's trying to come off like, oh no, everything's crazy.
But this video scared this guy, you know, S-less, as he put it.
We don't know the motive of this guy, but I will stress, you take someone who's unhinged and you terrify them, and this is exactly what I've been talking about.
When you say the president is running concentration camps, don't be surprised when someone shows up in Tacoma.
When you say the president wants to shoot migrants at the border, don't be surprised when someone goes nuts and goes and shoots a bunch of people.
Stressing, please, I don't think Cody's at fault for this in any way.
I'm just saying, if you're going to push the idea that political commentators are encouraging this, which many left-wing individuals accuse me of even though I denounce all violence all the time across the board, well then don't be surprised when it comes back in your direction.
Cody recently tweeted about stochastic terrorism, so look man, if that's your opinion that this stuff does do this, then it's your opinion that you're contributing to it.
Now, Heavy could've highlighted a bunch of other things this guy posted, instead of just, you know, this Cody guy.
You've got tweets where he's saying, you know, share this post if you're ready for a cold boy winter, and it shows Antifa fighting some people.
Very, very pro-leftist tweets.
Now, I will stress as well, The archive of this guy's Twitter account only goes back maybe like a dozen or so tweets, but I have been able to archive around 2,872, I think, tweets of his, um, before this was taken down.
Granted, they're mostly just screenshots, uh, so, but I was able to capture a bunch of them, and this guy was going the full, you know, uh, straight for the Antifa narrative, you know, saying, punch Nazis, Far left, calling for violence, retweeting out the far left, defending them, and now we have, you know, he went to a bar and started, you know, shooting people.
So, again, gotta stress, we don't know the motivation.
And the difference between this and what happened in El Paso is the El Paso guy we seemingly do know his motivation.
It was ideologically driven.
This guy we don't know for sure.
However, I don't think it matters in the end.
I think we are facing, it's, hey look, let me say this.
It's starting to look more and more like a civil war.
I said, a year and a half ago, it's not going to be, you know, two groups marching at each other, you know, drawing lines.
It's going to be insurgency.
It's going to be things like this.
I told, you know, a couple months ago, I said, what you are going to see is extremists showing up and attacking people.
And I've had friends who are like, come on, man.
Like, you really think that's going to happen?
Was I wrong?
In less than 24 hours, we had one guy overtly driven by ideology go into a Walmart and just kill people.
Less than 24 hours later, a far-leftist, pro-Antifa guy, we don't yet know why, went around and tried and did kill a bunch of people and injure many others.
And he was killed.
So I'm telling you, it's gonna get worse.
It really, really is.
And, you know, it's funny because When I was on the Joe Rogan podcast, I mentioned, this stuff we're seeing, it's going to lead to civil conflict.
There's a lot of problems happening with the speed at which communication takes place and the ability for individuals to dig themselves into an ideological bubble.
It doesn't matter if you're left, right, top-down, religious, whatever.
Everybody is choosing their own sources and not being challenged on them.
So now we're hearing that, you know, Cloudflare is going to be removing services from 8chan.
People are calling for 8chan to be banned.
That will not stop anything.
They'll just make a new website.
You cannot stop the internet.
It can't be done.
And what's the alternative?
Curtail free speech?
I gotta say, I don't know what the solution is.
But the only thing that's gonna happen in response to all this is authoritarianism, which in turn will precipitate resistance, which will speed up the rate at which the conflict starts.
Imagine if you go the left-wing route.
You start shutting down websites, you start banning people.
Now they feel marginalized and angry, and the only outlet they have is to shock the system.
When people have a chance to stand up and yell their ideas, they can get that out.
When you lock them in a deep, festering corner, they radicalize themselves and go nuts.
Think about if you have a governmental solution.
Which is going to be more police, more surveillance, then you embolden the left, claiming that Trump is a fascist and all this, and it only will make things worse.
It's kind of like a Chinese finger trap.
I don't know what the solution is.
Maybe it's we gotta step back and stop banning people, let people have their stupid ideas, but centralize the conversation so that people can be exposed to other ideas.
Twitter is banning people.
It's putting people in dark pockets.
Maybe the solution is to let them be on Twitter so they're consistently exposed to other ideas.
Unfortunately, that's not what the left wants.
The left wants everyone banned.
And so long as those who are advocating for an open de-radicalization process are at a conflict with the left over how we should deal with this, there won't be a solution.
It will just be conflict in the end.
Because the left will blame people like me.
Saying that, oh, Tim's defending the speech of the extremists.
Like, I'm defending the right to free expression.
Inciting violence is against the law.
How Sean King got away with it, I have no idea.
Maybe he won't, we'll see.
The point is, we have knee-jerk reactions.
Something happens, and then they put out these really annoying, childish tweets like, We begged you to let us ban the Nazis, but you wouldn't listen!
And it's like, what makes you think that solves the problem?
You need to sit down and calculate.
God, I imagine playing chess against these people would be a walk in the park.
Because they're gonna be like, oh, I'll move this piece here.
Did you think about what happens after you move that piece?
Did you think about the pieces I had on my side?
And did you think about where my pieces will move?
And did you reinforce your piece before doing it?
I swear to God, we should make all babies learn chess.
To whatever capacity their brains can understand it.
So these people won't just come out and shriek.
I know what we do.
We ban everybody and ban guns.
Okay.
What happens after that?
Will banning guns stop the sale of illegal guns?
No.
Will it get rid of the hundreds of millions of guns that are already in circulation?
No.
Ah!
Then they say, mandatory buyback.
Okay.
And then what do you do about the hundreds of millions of guns that people won't give up?
Ah, then we send the police door-to-door.
Ah, so authoritarianism.
You think sending an armed police force door-to-door to seize weapons won't result in an escalation of conflict?
I don't know what the answer is.
All I know is that if we don't sit down and actually plan ahead, you get these knee-jerk reactions of people being like, ban everybody!
Great.
Then you segment society into, look, These people saying ban everybody, they're saying ban conservatives.
They're blaming conservatives for what the extremists are doing, and then blaming moderates for defending the right of free expression.
There's nothing we can do to stop this.
Because look, the people who are screeching ban, you know, ban, ban, ban, they eventually get their way.
And they have a right to express themselves, and what am I going to do about it?
I believe in liberty.
I have no idea.
All I can say is, it's going to escalate.
They're getting to look a lot more like a civil war.
A right-wing extremist, a left-wing extremist, however you want to define them, both committed these acts.
Motivation, it doesn't matter, because I assure you there are going to be people on the right who are going to say, Look, this guy held these ideologies and did this.
We better get ready.
This is going to accelerate things.
It's going to exacerbate the problem.
There are going to be a lot of people on the right, a lot of moderates, mainstream conservatives, and liberals who are going to fairly say, we don't know why he did it.
It might not be politically motivated.
But there are going to be a lot of people who don't care, who are either going to say, I'd be willing to bet it was, or it doesn't matter if it was or wasn't.
This is them getting violent.
Don't wait to get ready.
And then you're gonna see people start getting ready.
And you're gonna see distrust and fear.
I mean, I have to up security on the events that I'm doing now?
No joke!
No joke!
We can't trust that, you know, the more this happens, the more fearful people get.
The more fearful they get, the more lines are drawn in the sand.
Now, I want to stress one last thing.
It's really annoying because it's just another example of how this is going to get worse.
Trump calls for background checks after shootings suggests tying with immigration deal.
Now here's the thing.
Donald Trump tweeted out two things saying, we need background checks, perhaps we can tie it to the immigration deal.
I think that was a smart move.
Why?
He's basically saying we can compromise.
You give us this, you know, this new immigration deal and we can do a gun deal and both sides can be somewhat unhappy about it.
And what is the left saying?
Trump is exploiting the tragedy and scapegoating migrants.
No, I think Trump is talking about what Republicans want and what the Democrats want and trying to find a way that we can agree on something.
Instead, they just attack the president and accuse him of no matter what he does, it's wrong.
Look, I'm just gonna leave it there.
I'm not gonna do another segment where I just talk about the good and the bad of the president, but I will point out, you don't gotta like the guy, but can we please do something?
And that's funny because that was a viral trend, do something.
Okay, well Trump made a proposal.
Background checks and immigration will give both sides something they want to move forward, right?
Nope, not good enough, and there you have it.
So anyway, I'm gonna leave it there.
I'll end by saying one thing.
Um, this video will not be monetized.
I absolutely know that for sure because I'm talking about terror.
It is what it is.
Share the video if you like it.
Go to TimCast.com slash donate if you think it's important.
Thanks for hanging out.
I'll see you on the next segment at 1 p.m.
on this channel.
You know, following what happened in the past couple days, the entirety of news across the spectrum is just talking about the periphery to these mass shootings.
This story I want to cover now, I'm going to do a much bigger story in the next segment.
Things are getting pretty scary and I've got some stuff to talk about, but for now we'll talk about censorship.
And we have this story from the Daily Wire.
Founder of 8chan after mass shooting, quote, shut the site down.
Okay, well, that's not going to do anything.
And there was a piece written in BuzzFeed that actually made this point.
If you shut down 8chan, somebody will make like 20chan or something.
It'll never stop.
You can't stop the Internet.
The technology exists.
Nothing you can do can stop it.
There's no law.
There isn't one.
Now, we've seen, the update to the story, is that 8chan is flickering on and off, essentially, mostly, in my understanding, because it's being DDoSed, which is, it means Distributed Denial of Service attack, where people flood it with requests so it can't process everything and then becomes inaccessible.
However, it doesn't mean the site's down.
It just means activists are targeting it.
They lost their DDoS protection service, Cloudflare.
Who said enough is enough?
We don't want to get involved.
So the first thing I want to do is talk about why the founder thinks it should be shut down.
I want to talk about how censorship isn't going to solve this problem.
Shutting these sites down will not solve this problem.
They will move their servers.
They will find a way.
The internet, it's just, as of right now, it doesn't work the way they want it to.
They will find a way.
And even if it's not through A traditional website.
We now have the emergence of the Fediverse, a decentralized social media network that can't be shut down.
What is Google gonna do?
Ban every Fediverse app?
That'd be like banning browsers.
It just can't be done.
So let's talk about this.
Before we get started, check out TimCast.com slash donate if you'd like to support my work.
There's a PayPal option, a crypto option, a physical address.
I want to stress All of the segments I'm doing in the past couple days, they're not going to be monetized, right?
I did a video yesterday about more mainstream politics, but the news is definitely being dominated now by what's happened in these past couple days.
I want to stress something else as well.
YouTube doesn't like when I talk about this.
YouTube wants to sell, you know, ads that are, you know, rainbows and sunshine, family-friendly content is being promoted heavily.
And I've seen my views consistently just take hits, hit after hit.
And we know that YouTube is deranking independent political commentary.
So I want to stress something.
As we're talking about the idea of censorship and shutting these sites down being ineffective, A couple days ago, I tried something where I didn't say in any of my videos, share the video.
And I saw views take a huge tank, which means I know for a fact when I ask you guys if you like the video to share it, it has, it essentially repairs the damage from YouTube de-ranking my content.
It means you guys actually really do share it, so I greatly appreciate it.
But I want to point out, with or without me saying, hey, share my commentary, it's important we talk about this, we're headed in one direction, and that's censorship.
Either because companies are going to be terrified and say, I don't want to have anything to do with this, the press is too bad, and they cut them off, or because we're going to see authoritarian responses to extremism.
That won't solve the problem.
It will actually make it worse.
It'll cause a recoil.
It'll cause people to find holes where they will fester in.
But it's going to happen.
Either we're going to see government or corporate authoritarianism increase.
And they're both increasing.
And we're hearing people on the left call for more.
That's what we're going to get.
So I'll say this.
If you want to support my work, that's how you can do it.
I can't monetize videos talking about these issues.
I understand why, noting that CNN does, but sure.
Independent media has a massive disadvantage right now.
We can't monetize this stuff.
CNN can.
We are deranked.
CNN's not.
We all talk about the same thing.
I don't think we will win in the long run.
Now, look, I'm not a fan of 8chan, but I understand.
The internet is the internet.
You can't do anything about it.
We are facing a serious crisis of these festering holes on the internet where people share their ideology and radicalize themselves.
But radicalization doesn't have to happen online at all.
It just happens in closed quarters.
When you have groups that isolate themselves and only communicate among themselves, they radicalize each other because they're not being exposed to the outside.
So it's kind of like little whirlpools forming where they spin crazier and crazier, faster and faster.
So now we have this.
Let's read a little bit of the story and stop dilly-dallying.
On Sunday, following the shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, the founder of 8chan, where various shooters have posted their intention to harm others, called on people who currently run it to shut it down.
I'll make a point.
Isn't it better that we have them doing this because we can then stop them, perhaps?
If someone says, hey, you know, I'm gonna go do a thing, and they give people advance notice, can't you use it as a means to stop it?
Or at least know about it sooner?
Like, just because people are there saying awful things, I guess the argument is they radicalize themselves.
Sure, but you're not gonna stop it.
They're gonna go somewhere else.
They're going to use Tor.
They're going to use federated apps.
They're going to use, you know, blockchain technology.
You're not going to be able to stop it.
Isn't it better that you have some kind of means of accessing who these people are, where they're from, and potentially stopping it?
I would actually say maybe surveillance is an answer, but the idea of advocating for government surveillance just sounds more terrifying.
That we're going to give up this power to the government out of fear.
And I don't know if that's actually going to solve any problems either.
Frederick Brennan, 25, the software developer who started 8chan in 2013 as a free speech-friendly 4chan alternative, told the New York Times, Wait, what?
Shut the site down, it's not doing the world any good, it's a complete negative to everybody
except the users that are there and you know what?
It's a negative to them too.
Wait, what?
They just don't realize it.
The Times reported of Brennan's creation of the site.
He was upset that 4chan had become too restrictive, and he envisioned a site where any legal speech would be welcome no matter how toxic.
The site remained on the fringes until 2014, when some supporters of Gamergate flocked to 8chan after being kicked off 4chan.
They say 4chan was founded in 2003.
So, we get it.
But let's look at the latest update.
From the Daily Wire, 8chan went offline after a company protecting it pulled its support, report says.
Now, I saw this from the New York Times and from Fox News, but I have not seen any issue with 8chan.
I was able to load the website with no problems.
The Daily Wire says, on Monday, the online forum 8chan went offline when the company Cloudflare, which creates software that protects 8chan from cyberattacks, it protects any website, yanked its support, according to Fox News, which added that it took action at 3am.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince issued a statement calling 8chan a cesspool of hate.
Frederic Brennan, the creator of 8chan, who had publicly called for 8chan to be shut down, thanked Cloudflare on Twitter.
Brennan later pointed out something that indicated 8chan's move might not be permanent.
They moved?
He says, note to people in media, 8chan's administrators have voluntarily taken it down.
They've inserted what's called a null A record into their DNS.
It looks like it's going to come back soon.
Points to an IP address owned by Anonymize Inc.
Prince's statement read in part, Oh, is this the statement about... Oh, that's a long statement.
I don't know if I'll read the whole thing, but we'll read a little bit of it.
He says, the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio are horrific tragedies.
In the case of the El Paso shooting, the suspected terrorist government appears to have been inspired by the forum website known as 8chan.
Based on evidence we've seen, it appears that he posted a screen to the site immediately before beginning his terrifying attack on the El Paso Walmart, killing 20 people.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident.
Nearly the same thing happened on 8chan before the attack in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The El Paso shooter specifically referenced the Christchurch incident and appears to have been inspired by the largely unmoderated discussions on 8chan which glorified the previous massacre.
In a separate tragedy, the suspected killer in the Poway, California synagogue shooting also posted an open letter to 8chan.
8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.
BuzzFeed wrote an article saying HN is not the problem.
BuzzFeed is right.
They said America is the problem.
And BuzzFeed is right once again.
Now, I don't know the details they bring up in the article for the most part because I didn't read through most of it.
I just kind of skimmed it a little bit.
Fault on me, fine.
But I want to point out some things.
Guns are not the problem.
Mental illness is not the problem.
The problem is multi-varied.
There are many different factors which make up a culture in which this persists.
And I don't think anything is gonna... You can't stop it no matter what you do.
Authoritarianism will give rise to resistance, which will give rise to more attacks.
In Sweden, what do we see?
A lot of grenade attacks.
Albeit, Sweden has substantially less crime than the US, but their choice of weapon is grenade.
Why?
Why do they have grenade problems?
My understanding is that Sweden has more grenade attacks than any other non-war-torn region on the planet.
Like, for a country not at war, there are more grenade attacks in Sweden than any other country not at war.
Why is that?
Why is that in Sweden they don't use guns?
I mean, they do, but for the most part they have a choice weapon.
It shows you that comparing the U.S.
to other countries doesn't make sense.
Saying it's a gun problem doesn't make sense.
And what's really disconcerting to me is banning HN could potentially make the problem worse, and banning guns potentially just increase the conflict and escalate tensions.
I said this in my video earlier.
Like, what do you think happens when the government goes door-to-door to round up guns?
Do you think all of a sudden people are just gonna be like, yeah, sure, here, take my property, like, without compensation?
What if you do a mandatory gun buyback?
People are not going to give up their guns.
Going after law-abiding citizens who have never done anything wrong makes no sense.
Blaming a weapon doesn't make sense.
Sure, you can point out the speed and efficiency that people can carry these weapons, but I'll tell you what, man.
In a much more terrifying circumstance, people will use bombs.
You can easily make extremely dangerous devices buying stuff at Walmart.
You can make poison gases by going to Walmart.
So, I'll tell you this.
You ban guns, you will find, people will find a way.
And I think one of the main reasons guns are the culprit is because it's a contentious political issue.
When it came to Christchurch, the guy said he wanted the debate to trigger a civil war because he believed it would fall into racial lines.
I think it will fall on race-based lines as well.
I don't exactly know how it's gonna happen, but I find it all very disconcerting.
Calling for censorship won't solve this problem.
Calling for gun bans won't solve this problem.
I don't know what will, but I'll tell you this.
If you don't plan your moves ahead, you will make things worse.
You will walk, you know, you're walking straight off a cliff.
You gotta stop and think about where you are, and I don't know if we can.
I really, really don't.
So, long story short, 8chan, as I understand it, is still up.
Censorship won't solve anything, but that's what they're going for.
We're going to see calls for gun restrictions and more censorship online, and that will lead to resistance.
It will lead to people panicking and saying, oh no, it's happening.
You will actually radicalize people who are not ideologues, not like identitarian ideologues, but people who are now like, oh my god, the government is doing it.
You will radicalize conspiracy theorists who think it's all a false flag meant to give the government more power.
Authoritarianism is not going to solve anything.
Stick around.
My next video is going to get more in-depth on a lot of this stuff.
4 p.m.
on the main channel, youtube.com slash timcast.
Stick around.
I will see you there.
Now, I have some criticisms of Rand Paul, his recent decision on the 9-11 first responders health care issue.
But you know what?
It's just that, a light criticism.
I think Rand Paul is a man of principle.
Disagree with him on some things.
That's kind of the way it should be.
Look, I stand fully behind the 9-11 first responders.
I'm very much in favor of the bill.
I think we as a country should make that our top priority, protecting those veterans, first responders, etc., because the only reason we have this beautiful, free, and wealthy nation is because of those who are putting their lives on the line to give us that.
I recognize that.
So, you know, I've got a disagreement with Mr. Paul, but you know what I wouldn't do?
Tackle him and cause him to have part of his lung removed.
This is the problem of political violence.
Now, I want to stress, this was more of, like, an at-home dispute.
Apparently the guy was mad at Rand Paul over, like, blowing leaves or something.
It's a silly story.
But this should be an example of why violence is wrong, okay?
And you should never, never underestimate the damage you can do from seemingly small
attacks or moments.
You know, there are people on the left who think a milkshake's no big deal until they
hit somebody who's allergic to dairy.
I mean, that's probably rare, but seriously.
Rand Paul got into a fight with his neighbor.
Now he's having part of his lung removed.
It's taking him out of, uh, you know, it's going to take some of his time up.
And although it's not an act of overt political violence, I just thought it was interesting
because, you know, look, it's political, it's violence.
It's not what we're referring to, but I think it's important to talk about.
So let's read the news from the Daily Mail.
Rand Paul has part of his lung removed after complications from a 2017 assault where his neighbor tackled him from behind for blowing leaves into his yard while mowing the lawn.
And I think what I really more What I want to talk about is how, look, I have a lot of stories where people thought they were just going to hit somebody, and they killed somebody.
Something like that, right?
We should take seriously why you shouldn't engage in violence, no matter what the issue.
Before we get started, head over to TimCast.com slash Dunnit if you want to support my work as a PayPal option, a crypto option, a physical address, you know the drill.
If you like these videos, share them.
I really mean it.
YouTube is de-ranking my content and others.
They're propping up CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc.
If you like independent commentary like mine, just share the video.
Because I seriously see it in my numbers when someone does share and when someone doesn't share.
So if you do like it, I ask you to do that at the very least.
Otherwise, don't.
You don't have to.
Let's read the news.
From the Daily Mail, they say...
Rand Paul had to undergo surgery over the weekend to address a series of health complications he suffered after he was attacked by his neighbor in 2017, including having part of his lung removed.
In a tweet on Monday, the Republican lawmaker said doctors discovered during surgery that part of his lung had been damaged in the assault.
Unfortunately, I will have to limit my August activities, Paul's post began.
Part of my lung damaged by the 2017 assault had to be removed by surgery this weekend.
The doctors, nurses, and staff at Vanderbilt University Medical Center were great.
I should be able to return to the Senate in September.
Paul was assaulted by Rene Boucher, 59, in November 2017 while he was mowing the lawn outside the front of his home in Kentucky.
He was tackled from behind and suffered six broken ribs in the attack, including three displaced fractures.
Now, I do want to point out, too, A lot of people have cheered for this.
While it's not in line with what we're used to in terms of political violence, it's certainly still playing a role to a certain extent in, you know, this conversation.
I've seen more than enough tweets from people saying, good, they're glad it happened.
No.
We should never be glad someone like this happened, even if it's a stupid at-home dispute, I guess.
Now, I guess one of the things, too, is they mention in the story that the media has framed it kind of like him and his neighbor were feuding with each other when he said they never even talked.
The guy just got mad and attacked him.
Let's read a little bit about this, but then I really want to talk about how, you know, like, people don't understand the power and danger of even low-level attacks.
They say the injuries caused a number of complications, including the buildup of fluid and blood around the lungs, as well as triggering a nasty bout of pneumonia.
Boucher, a retired anesthetist, told Paul in the wake of the attack that he hadn't been able to sell his house for 10 years because the congressman's trees were in the way and he had simply had enough of him.
What?
It is believed Boucher was referring to woodland at the back of Paul's property that blocks his views of the picturesque private lake that forms the centerpiece of their upscale gated community.
Boucher's alleged grievance was relayed to the media by another of Paul's neighbors, Alicia Stivers, the first person to see the bloodied and dazed lawmaker after the November 3rd assault in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Property records confirmed that Boucher had put his house on the market five times over the past decade without success, at one point becoming embroiled in a messy lawsuit when a prospective buyer pulled the plug at the last minute.
A look at boundary maps and overhead photographs showed many of the offending trees were on Paul's land, although one realtor pal told DailyMail.com the Boucher property probably didn't sell simply because it was overpriced.
The discovery contradicted initial claims that Boucher, a Democrat, had attacked Paul simply as a result of their ideological differences.
So this is good news.
It was initially reported that it was political violence, and now we're learning it probably wasn't.
Although I kind of question whether it was or it wasn't.
So I think we get it.
I think it's kind of a silly story when we look at this and there's trees.
There's a ton of trees.
You know, don't attack people.
But I want to point out a few things.
There's a story that I know from when I was younger, and I'm going to try and keep details thin because, for one, I don't want to get sued.
But there was, like, a party that happened.
One guy thought another guy was hitting on his wife, so he thought, I'm going to punch him in the face.
Guy who got punched in the face fell down, hit his head, and died.
Other guy goes to prison.
See, people don't seem to realize how serious a small attack can really be and how you will be responsible and how we should avoid these things.
That's why I think it's kind of screwed up when it comes to stories like this.
People cheer for this.
It's like, dude, getting tackled and breaking your ribs, he could die.
He's getting part of his lung removed.
These are serious complications.
But moving into the realm of more overt political violence, You have people throwing milkshakes, and I stress, like, you, like, I know it's silly, man, but you never know, like, people have dairy allergies.
Somebody might react negatively.
Somebody could hand you a milkshake, and you'll laugh and be like, haha, it's just a milkshake, and they put something in it.
Maybe it's got rocks in it.
You know, I saw, I filmed a video where a guy was walking out of a Trump rally, this video went viral, and someone smacked him in the back of the head with a bag full of, I don't know, we think rocks maybe, and it leaves the guy bloody.
You don't know if that could get infected, if that can result in someone truly being hurt.
And the point I'm trying to make is, because Antifa like bashes people over the head with bike locks, and things like that, or clubs people in Portland, or throws makeshift explosives, You have people on the left saying, oh yes, so what, the far right is much worse.
And my response is like, dude, of course, but so what?
Like I pointed out in the main channel video today, yes, there are people on the far right who engage in extremely lethal acts.
But people on the left are doing this frequently.
And a simple punch to the head with medium force can kill somebody.
You know, I think movies do us a disservice.
Because you always see like a movie or a TV show where someone gets knocked out, and then they wake up tied, you know, like 50 miles away.
It's like, no, man.
When you get knocked out, you go down for a few seconds.
If someone's knocked out for longer than a few seconds, they have serious problems.
I guess we'll read more about, you know, what's going on here.
Okay, so the guy pled guilty.
Boucher pled guilty to assaulting a member of Congress in March last year and was sentenced to 30 days in federal prison three months later.
He was ordered to serve one year supervised release, issued a $10,000 fine, and 100 hours of community service.
Boucher's attorney later revealed that his client's temper had boiled over on the day of the attack because Paul blew some leaves onto his property as he was mowing his.
However, a spokesman for Paul discredited the claim, saying, there was no long-standing dispute. The description is untrue.
It is impossible to have a dispute when no words of disagreement were ever spoken,
neither immediately nor at any other time before the attack occurred.
In January, he was awarded $580,000 in damages by a Kentucky jury, $375,000.
$375,000 were punitive, $200,000 for pain and suffering.
Paul's leave of absence now means that both of Kentucky's Senators are out of action as a result of health issues.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suffered a shoulder fracture in a fall on Sunday, and the 77-year-old Republican is now resting up at home.
McConnell incurred the injury after he tripped and fell on the outside patio of his Louisville home.
He returned to Kentucky on Thursday after the Senate began a five-week recess.
Now, in reference to Mitch McConnell, I will point out too, there was a video where he stumbles and Trump helps him up and a bunch of people were making fun of him.
And apparently, like, I guess Mitch McConnell had polio when he was younger.
I'm not a big fan of the guy.
I mean, it's fine.
But look, man.
I guess what I want to say is, there are people cheering on the violence against Rand Paul.
He's getting his lung removed.
It's not a joke.
Okay?
You can disagree with someone, even think they're bad people, and say, there's a line we don't cross.
And it's important we maintain that line.
Otherwise, everyone will start crossing it.
Okay?
When it comes to Antifa, when it comes to the far right, whatever.
We need to make sure we say, I don't care who you are or what you believe, we don't cross this line.
I don't care if you think Trump is, like, evil, you know, orange man, bad, whatever.
We recognize the line we don't cross exists for a reason, because, as I'll quote Noam Chomsky, he said, when we enter the arena of violence, the most brutal guy wins, and that is not us, referring to the left.
So I hope this is, you know, clear to most people.
It's probably not, but, uh, you know, I try to keep the segments short, so I'll leave it there.
Stick around, I got a couple more segments coming up for you in a few minutes, and I will see you shortly.
Now you may be saying, a story about straws?
Why would I care about straws?
In fact, this video will not entirely be about straws, but about the knee-jerk response we often see from people when some problem occurs, and how, for the most part, I think it tends to be people on the left.
Now here it comes, the left saying, Tim's criticizing the left.
Well, of course!
If the left stopped having knee-jerk reactions, we might actually solve some problems.
At least the problems I care about.
The really simple way to put this is, I want to solve environmental issues, the left has a knee-jerk reaction making things worse, maybe that's not the right thing to do, and of course I'll criticize you when you're affecting things that I care about, like the environment.
For those that don't know, I worked for, I think, three, maybe even four environmental non-profits.
I say maybe four because it's been a long time, and one of them may or may not have technically been environmental, but yes, I was working for non-profits specifically on environmental issues.
So here's the story.
McDonald's new paper straws aren't recyclable, but its axed plastic ones were.
Isn't that the... You see what you've done here?
Let me explain something to all of you.
When you want to recycle something, it can't have food contamination.
Plastic straws can be cleaned and recycled.
Paper ones can't.
When they're contaminated with food, they have to go in the trash.
So what happened?
Everybody started complaining about plastic straws.
And for good reason.
There's a lot of pollution from plastic straws.
And then, they started implementing these really awful paper straws, which, to me, these paper straws are nails on a chalkboard.
Putting them in my mouth, just like, ugh, it just, ugh, it's just really, I can't even think about it.
God, it gives me that weird, like, ugh, it's like, it's like scratching styrofoam or just like, I don't know, man, that really awful feeling you get.
So this is a good story about how good intentions backfired.
McDonald's has reportedly admitted that its new paper straws rolled out last year to help protect the environment can't be recycled, unlike the plastic versions they replaced.
The straws were introduced to all 1,361 McDonald's restaurants in the United Kingdom and Ireland after a trial last year, so it's about the UK, I guess.
But the fast food giant acknowledged on Monday that the new versions are too thick to be processed by its recyclers.
While the materials are recyclable, their current thickness makes it difficult for them to be processed by our waste solution providers, who also help us recycle our paper cups.
They say, the issue was first revealed by the Sun newspaper, which published an internal McDonald's memo saying that the company's paper straws are not yet recyclable and should be disposed of in general waste until further notice.
A knee-jerk reaction, which has made everything worse.
Now you're taking paper, which comes from trees, which means you're cutting down trees, and you're making something that can't be recycled.
Congratulations.
You wanted to help the environment.
You hurt the environment.
Can we please understand how strategy works?
I think we should make it mandatory for all schools to have chess class.
Or at least checkers.
Because this at least gives you a fundamental understanding of, when you do a thing, something else can happen that might be bad.
Let's look at the very basics of chess.
For those that aren't familiar with how the chess rules work, don't worry, I'll make it simple.
Let's say, There's a piece.
And you're like, oh man, if I move right in front of him, I'll be able to capture him next turn.
Except when you do that, they capture you instead.
That's what we're seeing here.
It's like someone playing chess but they're three years old and don't understand they just made a move and had their piece captured because they don't understand the concept of a thing comes after the thing you do.
You know what else comes after this thing?
Donald Trump sells recyclable straws!
I cannot believe this is the timeline we are in.
Okay, let me just stress, Donald Trump rolled out straws, they've sold out, and his straws are recyclable.
I feel like, okay, I was reading these stories, and I want you to imagine this because this is what I was imagining.
I was imagining that it was November 9th, you know, election day, I believe it was the 9th, all over again, and I'm sitting in this room, and I'm like, how did Trump win?
And how do we get to this point where nothing makes sense and everything is insane?
That McDonald's, trying to protect the environment, gets rid of a plastic straw that could be recycled in exchange for a paper straw, which can't be!
Meanwhile, it's the Trump administration that is selling the recyclable straws, picking up the slack for what McDonald's screwed up, and they actually sold out!
This seems like a joke!
It doesn't seem like real life!
So here's what I want you to imagine.
I'm imagining, like, this is what I saw in my head.
I'm sitting in this office in DC.
Uh...
And they're announcing the election when all of a sudden I'm just imagining there's like a mad scientist who triggered some kind of quantum device which pulses out and forced everyone into the mirror timeline where Donald Trump wins.
And it's actually Trump and his plastic Trump-branded straws that are better for the environment than the environmentalist McDonald's straws they rolled out which can't be recycled.
How is everything backwards and upside down and inside out and nothing makes sense?
I gotta admit, it's kind of funny though.
I mean, the way I see it is plastic straws can be a problem.
I understand that.
But with McDonald's rolling out substantially more straws than Trump, at the very least we can say, okay, maybe Trump's straws are recyclable, but people won't recycle them.
Oh, well, McDonald's is doing worse.
So it's like everything just got worse, but Trump made things a little bit not worse and kind of fixed the problem for McDonald's.
Can someone please explain to me what happened in 2016 where like a massive solar flare hit an EMP and then the multiverse shifted and Donald Trump won and he wasn't supposed to and no one thought he would and he did and now we're seeing story after story that like look people say clown world for a reason.
Let's read a little bit more.
more.
The government's ambitious plans, combined with strong customer opinion, has helped to
accelerate the move away from plastic.
And I'm proud that we've been able to play our part in helping to achieve this societal
change, Paul Pomeroy, CEO of McDonald's UK in Ireland, said in a press release at the
time.
The plastic straws previously used could be recycled, but the British government has moved
to ban plastic straws by 2020 and encourage chains to ditch the products.
Then-Environment Secretary Michael Grove congratulated McDonald's on making this significant contribution
to help our natural environment when the initial move was made last year.
Ah, I'm just imagining.
Just, please.
Imagine all of these, like, okay, okay.
You watch Rick and Morty.
If you don't watch Rick and Morty, you won't get the reference.
But there's an episode where this character named Jerry puts on a helmet which creates an idealized version of his wife.
So his wife has it on, and he comes to save her, so a bunch of big buff guys come out, because that's how she's seeing him as a savior.
But then, when he starts acting all bold and arrogant, a bunch of Jerrys come out, all start shaking each other's hands and patting each other on the back.
That's what I'm imagining.
I apologize if you don't get the reference, but let me just give it to you in, like, a way you can imagine.
A bunch of politicians, smiling, signing papers and going, Ha!
We've done something good!
No, they didn't.
It's completely backfired.
They have now put out something damaging to the environment.
Meanwhile, Trump, who's supposed to be Orange Man Bad, defying the environmentalists by putting out plastic straws with his name on it, they're still recyclable.
So they say, uh, Brad Parscale had just boarded a JetBlue flight earlier this month when the paper straw he was using ripped in half.
Not only are they not recyclable, they're terrible!
Have you ever tried using these things?
They melt, like over time, like they absorb water and then turn into mush!
As he tried to keep his iced tea from spilling onto his suit, the annoyed Trump campaign manager tweeted that he was so over paper straws.
Prodded by his wife, not to leave it at that, Parscale emailed his staff from the air with an idea.
I gotta say, I think Brad is more in tune with how people feel than these big corporations and these journalists in their ivory towers.
I hate paper straws!
So he sold plastic straws and it worked.
In short order, the campaign sent an email to supporters with the subject line, Making Straws Great Again.
By the time Parscale landed in Florida, the presidential straws were already in production, and an advertising campaign was up and running.
The first batch sold out within hours.
Let me tell you why this is so absurd.
It was like a gag.
He was making a joke about how paper straws were bad, and he sold a very silly product, Trump plastic straws, inadvertently creating a better situation for the environment.
Look, I get it.
These can't be recycled.
Maybe plastic in the long run is still worse than the paper mush.
But they're not recycling the paper mush.
They're cutting down trees, burnt, like using it up.
I just don't understand it.
I saw a meme once where it said, when we were younger we were told to use plastic bags because paper bags were bad for causing deforestation.
Now we're older and told not to use plastic bags because they pollute and to use paper bags which still cause deforestation.
Isn't it hard to be an environmentalist?
I swear.
So the straw sold out within hours.
The ploy was part of a strategy to stoke and validate the grievances of Trump's base, and then turn them to cash.
The effort centers around novelty merchandise items the re-election campaign has been hawking on its website include pencil-neck Adam Schiff t-shirts, lampooning the Democratic congressman, and Trump antagonist as a clown I spy Trump Ts in tanks, depicting the Commander-in-Chief being snooped on by former President Barack Obama.
And most recently, the plastic straws the Trump 2020 online store has marketed the offering as an alternative to the more environmentally friendly liberal paper straws that don't work.
No!
See, here's the thing.
They say the paper straws are environmentally friendly.
They aren't.
That's the inadvertent mistake.
Straws are soggy, they don't work, and they can't be recycled.
Trump accidentally did good.
Environmentalists advocating for paper screwed everything up, and it can't be recycled.
And now here we are.
Trump getting the credit because you can recycle his straws.
I don't know.
I thought it was funny.
I hope you enjoyed this random segment about Trump's plastic straws.
I wanted to do something about the straws, but I just didn't think it was that big a deal.
Like, I think it's funny.
But then this news comes out from CNN about McDonald's straws not being recyclable, and I'm like, there you go.
Now we are truly seeing the bizarro world reflection and something insane is happening.
The fabric of reality is breaking down.
We're in a simulation.
It's a comedy game.
I don't know what to tell you.
Welcome to 2019.
Nothing makes sense.
And stick around because I got one more segment coming up for you in a few minutes.
Isn't it funny though?
It's the rare Tim Pool agreeing with Vox.com.
I'm not a big fan of Vox.
I'm actually okay with BuzzFeed.
Not a big fan of Huffington Post, but I will give them credit because, believe it or not, Huffington Post actually had one of the most accurate articles about me ever written.
Much respect for doing it right.
But I'm critical of their slant, their bias, injecting opinion.
BuzzFeed does this too, but Vox?
Vox bad.
You know, yellow leftist site bad.
We'll call it that.
However, in the wake of what's happened these past couple of days, which I won't get into specifics, many people have been blaming video games for violence.
It's not true.
Can we get over this?
Can we stop talking about this?
Even, I'm pretty sure it's even Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire who is saying we can criticize video games, fine, but the issue of violence in our culture is a cultural issue.
I think kind of has to do with the root of how our nation came into existence.
Pioneers, men.
Aggressive.
Going off and taking land and setting up new and taking risks.
So we have a much more aggressive personality than those who stayed behind in Europe, I'd imagine.
For the most part.
In the end, you can talk about Japan and Korea.
Yes, they have way more video games and they're way into it.
You can talk about all these other countries that have guns.
Germany, Switzerland, whatever.
They don't see the same thing we do.
We have a culture problem.
It's not just mental illness.
It's a little bit of everything.
But Vox comes out and says video games don't cause violent crime.
If anything, it's the opposite.
I would have to agree.
Let's read.
Kevin McCarthy blamed violent video games for mass shootings over the weekend, and Donald Trump did the same at Monday's press conference, singling out the gruesome video games that are now commonplace to blame for creating a culture that celebrates violence.
No, I'm gonna have to say it's long-standing.
This is a bit rich coming from a man who ran on a promise to bomb the S out of him, and has repeatedly floated the idea of pardons for accused war criminals.
It also flies in the face of the basic reality that the United States has a much higher murder rate than any other rich country, even though video games are widely available in Europe and Japan.
Hey, here's some what-you-need criticism for Donald Trump.
Beyond foreign policy stuff, let's call him out for saying that, you know, video games are causing this.
He's wrong, okay?
Orange man bad, at least in this regard.
Now, of course, I'm being silly.
I don't think orange man is as bad as the media makes him out to be, but we can criticize him when he's wrong.
Criticize his foreign policy, for sure.
Indeed, America's overall crime rate is only a bit above average, but our homicide rate is sky high because assaults featuring guns are much more likely to turn lethal than assaults committed with knives, bludgeons, or fists.
The issue is guns.
Kind of.
The issue is kind of, when you, there are other countries that have high gun ownership that don't experience this.
And there are other, there's countries like Honduras and Guatemala and Mexico which also experience gun violence.
So, you can't say it's guns either.
Because, like what, 99.9% of gun owners are legal and follow all the rules?
So, no, Vox.
I can agree with you on the video games, but guns don't make people violent.
Guns exist.
They're a thing.
People use them.
It's a problem.
I don't know what the solution is.
He writes, but since violent video games do strike lots of people, myself included, as kind of intrinsically repugnant... What?
Look, you know what game I play all day?
It's a game, like you've probably played it, where you get these blocks that are shapes, and you try to line them up in clear lines.
It's kind of like Tetris, but like an overhead Tetris.
That's not repugnant.
It's just a casual, silly phone game.
It's natural for people to wonder if video games aren't contributing to the problem.
So it's critical to understand that according to the best research available, a quasi-experimental study by Scott Cunningham, Benjamin Engelstadter, and Michael R. Ward, it's just genuinely not the case that video games lead to violent crime.
If anything, it's the opposite.
Time spent playing video games reduces the amount of time that young men can get into mischief.
One of the most important things we've always advocated for in Chicago is skateboarding for young people.
Kids who got into skateboarding were substantially less likely to join gangs and commit crimes because they had a purpose, a mission, a goal.
The same is true for video games.
Video game addiction can be bad.
Addiction in general can be bad.
But I think video games overall are really, really good things for one reason.
That drive you have.
In a video game, to accomplish something, to get that new tool.
It's a hollow purpose, but at least it's a purpose.
Now, maybe you'll go pro.
Good on you.
There is an industry for you.
You can make money doing this.
Maybe not be the richest person in the world.
Maybe be a low-tier pro.
Maybe be a streamer online.
But that mission is what people need to avoid dangerous ideologies and violent crime.
With skateboarding, we call it a mission.
Every day that's what we called it.
We'd be like, where do you want to go skate?
We would seek out a location and it would be a mission.
We'd go and film and the goal was to conquer that spot.
I'm using that sort of metaphorically.
The idea was do a new hard trick no one's ever done before.
That's the mission.
And so me and all my friends, nobody wanted to do anything like, for the most part, people didn't want to join gangs, commit crimes.
No, man.
Because that would hold you up and you wouldn't be able to skate anymore, and that was the mission.
The other thing about skateboarding was that there was a common way to gain attention and recognition.
When you did something good, other people praised you for it.
The same is true for being a good gamer, going online, streaming.
I'd be willing to bet any kind of activity, any kind of, like, perceived hobby, I call it a perceived hobby because you can go pro at these things, will help keep people away from dangerous ideologies.
And it's why it's so weird we see the left say that, like, video games are a gateway to the alt-right, or the alt-right is trying to recruit through video games.
Please, spare me.
That's just not the case.
People who play video games are addicted to the game.
They want to beat the game, they want to be the best, they want to play Smash Brothers, COD, Destiny, you know, whatever.
Let's re-run.
The study.
Popular new game releases lead to less crime.
The basic study method is fairly simple.
Compare the volume of sales of violent video games in a week among the top 50 best-selling video games from 2005 to 2008, and relate it to a marker for violent behaviors.
Weekly aggregate violent crime incidents from the National Incident-Based Reporting System.
Now, I kind of want to point out, could be a spurious correlation.
Spurious correlation.
Causation is not correlation.
They use time series modeling and also instrumental variable modeling, and either way you slice it, when a very popular violent video game comes out, violent crime goes down, not up.
So maybe it's repeated so often they do see a link here.
I will also stress too, There are a lot of people who vent their frustration by playing video games.
I can't remember what game it was, maybe it was Witcher, maybe you guys know better than I do, but there was a setting that said, instead of easy mode, it was called, I just want, I had a tough day at work, I just want to feel powerful for a few minutes, or something like that.
And I think it's a great way to explain one of the ways people play video games.
To just vent your frustrations.
Go in, go haywire, give yourself, you know, a cheat code super strength, play Skyrim with console commands, fly around, just having fun and controlling the environment how you see fit.
The researchers believe the method is what criminal justice scholars call incapacitation.
If you are sitting on your couch playing video games, you are by definition not out on the street making trouble.
When it comes to ways to spend time that mainstream society finds uncontroversial wholesome, this mechanism is widely accepted.
If you have teenagers doing summer jobs, attending after-school classes, or participating in recreational sports leagues, this keeps them off the streets and out of trouble.
It happens to be the case that video games are a more stigmatized pastime than playing sports, but the basic mechanism is exactly the same.
If you're busy gaming, you're not committing crimes.
And more importantly, if you're busy gaming, you're not joining fringe ideological factions that are going around doing crazy things for crazy reasons.
So all in all, video games are good.
In fact, I'd love it if we had a bigger culture around video games, Um, it seems to be the case that gaming is growing, becoming more popular.
Great!
It's something you can do at home, it occupies your time, triggers dopamine, addiction's bad, but at least it's giving people something to do.
Gordon Dahl and Stefano Della Vigna used a similar methodology in an earlier paper to study violent movies and found the same thing.
Because the audience for violent movies skews toward younger men, and younger men are also much more likely to commit violent crimes, when popular violent movies come out, crime goes down, not up.
An earlier paper by Ward also showed that areas where there are more video game stores have less crime and fewer deaths.
Let me give a round of applause to video gamers and game stores for reducing crime in their area.
That said, the paper with Cunningham and Engelstadter does indicate a potentially constructive role for regulation to play.
Non-violent games are better than violent ones.
Ward's original paper simply shows that wide availability of video games in general reduces crime.
Similarly, the basic causal mechanism of the newer paper doesn't say anything in particular about the virtue of violent video games.
It's just that playing games reduces crime.
An earlier strand of lab-based psychological research tends to indicate that violent video games do increase aggression levels.
However, it incapacitates people, right?
So the incapacitation impact could be masking some kind of more crime-conducive impact on player psychology.
Under the circumstances, to the extent to which you can nudge game makers and players away from violent titles towards non-violent ones, you might be doing some good.
You just wouldn't want to crush the overall popularity of video games as an enterprise, since gaming time will be swapped out for crime as well as more innocent pursuits.
But fundamentally, While this research is interesting and worth talking about, it really can't be said enough that the homicide rate in the United States is well out of line with what you see in peer countries on a scale that totally dwarfs any possible gaming-related effects.
Okay, let me point something out.
With cultural problems.
In Chicago, a lot of people, a lot of racists like to point to the South Side and the black neighborhoods claiming the problem is race and they are wrong, wrong, wrong.
Okay?
And this is really, really frustrating for me and it's one of the reasons I absolutely detest the racists.
Listen, the problem is cultural.
Poverty?
Well, it's cultural, and it's poverty, and it's gang-related.
It's drug-related.
It is cultural problems.
And I can't stress this enough because I come from a mixed-race area on the south side of Chicago.
It wasn't predominantly one race or another.
And I assure you, for one, the police brutality we witnessed wasn't only on black and brown people.
It was just on us for being poor.
The gang-related violence wasn't just one race or another.
It was on everyone because people were poor and being in a gang is what people did.
People sold drugs.
They joined gangs.
So it's frustrating to me.
When people talk about the escalation of violence, and they talk about video games and movies, and then the racists talk about race, and I'm like, no dude.
It's culture.
Okay?
There is a cultural problem in the South Side of Chicago that is more predominant in certain racial areas that are non-white, but that's not the reason.
The race isn't the reason.
It's the culture.
And the culture needs to change.
And I'm talking about culture that includes white people, mixed people, Asian, Mexican, I'm talking about everybody.
America as a whole, when it comes to this violence, it's not guns, it's not games, it is a cultural problem.
Period.
It is multivaried.
There's a bunch of different things that contribute to it, and I don't know what the solution is, but I'm sticking tight to the scapegoats.
