The Ben Shapiro Show - August 29, 2025


How State and Medical Institutions PROMOTED The Trans Church Shooting


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 5 minutes

Words per Minute

191.91142

Word Count

12,567

Sentence Count

748

Misogynist Sentences

5

Hate Speech Sentences

25


Summary

In the wake of the mass shooting at a Catholic elementary school in Minnesota, many are asking the question: what was the real motive behind the attack? And why did a 14-year-old boy change his name from Robert to Robin in order to commit the worst mass shooting in American history?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 People, as new details emerge about the identity, thoughts, feelings, mental illness of this horrifying Catholic school shooter in Minnesota, it becomes clearer and clearer that we have an institutional problem.
00:00:13.000 Now, not every crime in a country of 330, 340 million people implies an institutional problem.
00:00:20.000 Sometimes you just have one off.
00:00:22.000 Sometimes you just have people who do things that are crazy or terrible, and there's really no way of preventing or minimizing that particular crime.
00:00:30.000 This is not one of those cases because what we are looking at here is symptomatic of a broader ideological ill that has afflicted our state institutions and our medical institutions and has massive downstream effects.
00:00:41.000 Those downstream effects aren't always school shootings.
00:00:43.000 In fact, only in rare occasions are they school shootings, but they are harming literally thousands of children across our country.
00:00:50.000 So one of the things that we have now found out about the school shooter, this trans school shooter named Robin, again, I haven't used the last name because I do not believe that glorifying these shooters or giving a lot of attention to their names is worthwhile.
00:01:04.000 And the reason for that is pretty obvious from the actual guns used by the shooter, which were emblazoned with the names of other school shooters and mass killers.
00:01:13.000 There's a sort of bizarre transmission effect that happens.
00:01:16.000 when the media grant enormous attention to evil mentally ill people who go and shoot a bunch of school children.
00:01:23.000 But one of the factors here is that the transgender shooter, whose name was Robert and then legally changed it to Robin and was a biological male, confessed he was, quote, tired of being trans and wished he had never brainwashed himself in a manifesto posted online before he slaughtered two children and wounded eighteen more in a Minneapolis church, according to the New York Post in a twisted handwritten journal he shared on YouTube but before the massacre, much of which was encrypted in a homespun code of Russian Cyrillic script and English words.
00:01:51.000 The shooter groaned about his long hair and his decision to transition, quote., I only keep the long hair because it pretty much is my last shred of being trans.
00:01:59.000 I am tired of being trans.
00:02:00.000 I wish I never brainwashed myself.
00:02:02.000 I can't cut my hair now as it would be an embarrassing defeat and it might be a concerning change of character that could get me reported.
00:02:09.000 It just always gets in my way.
00:02:10.000 I will probably chop it on the day of the attack.
00:02:12.000 Hey, there's so many elements here that are astonishing.
00:02:15.000 Hey, number one, the belief that what would have put a red flag up is the removal of the long female like hair.
00:02:25.000 That's what would have thrown up a red flag to the Minnesota authorities is if a male could have grown his hair out to attempt to look more like a female had cut his hair to look more like a male again.
00:02:35.000 He was afraid that that would have actually thrown up a red flag to the authorities who might have said, there's something wrong.
00:02:41.000 So there was nothing wrong with a boy saying that he was a girl, his parents signing off on forms to transition him by name.
00:02:48.000 Nothing wrong with that in Minnesota as we'll get to, that's actually not only upheld in Minnesota, it is celebrated in Minnesota.
00:02:54.000 But if he had decided to detransition, he was afraid that the Minnesota authorities might take a second look at him.
00:02:59.000 Second of all, this was a person who was clearly suffering from gender identity disorder and was not satisfied with the solutions provided by the trans fake medical community.
00:03:12.000 Now we've been told by that fake medical community, the only way to prevent terrible things from happening to and from trans people, people who are trans identified, is to pretend along with them that they are members of the opposite sex.
00:03:23.000 And in fact, we are supposed to socially shame people who quote unquote detransition.
00:03:28.000 The shooter wrote, quote, I regret being trans.
00:03:30.000 I wish I was a girl.
00:03:31.000 I just know I can't achieve that body with the technology we have today.
00:03:34.000 I also can't afford that.
00:03:37.000 He said, I like to feel sexy and cute, but my face never matches how I feel.
00:03:40.000 I hate my face.
00:03:41.000 Maybe that's why I like furries so much.
00:03:42.000 You can give yourself a new body and face.
00:03:44.000 I want to be that black face mask on Beyonce's body, LMAO.
00:03:50.000 So was this person just a woman?
00:03:53.000 Because if you listen to the media, the answer is yes.
00:03:56.000 The headline from the New York Times, believe it or not, I mean, this is totally insane.
00:03:59.000 The headline from the New York Times yesterday was quote, Minneapolis suspect knew her target.
00:04:04.000 The motive is a mystery.
00:04:06.000 The amount of Orwellian double speak here is insane, totally crazy.
00:04:11.000 So respect the killer's pronouns preferred pronouns, but pretend that the motive is a mystery.
00:04:16.000 We know exactly what the motive was because it is spelled out in all of the journals, in the YouTube videos, on the guns themselves.
00:04:23.000 This is the media trying to cover up the reality of the situation, which is a mentally ill person who is not given proper treatment, who is told that his illusions were in fact a reflection of the evil patriarchy and a terrible traditional society,
00:04:42.000 whose parents were told by medical and state institutions the most important thing that they could do to minimize threat to their child and threat to others was to pretend along with this person that he was a woman, that any sort of corrective activity designed at alleviating gender identity disorder by saying,
00:05:00.000 no, actually you are a boy, and we need to deal with that in rational, psychologically tested ways instead of doing that., they decided to play along and the consequences were murder in this particular case.
00:05:15.000 It is also demonstrative of the fact that for a lot of people who have gender identity disorder, what they are actually suffering from is autogynophilia.
00:05:23.000 This is a person who obviously was turned on by the idea of himself as a girl, rather than believing that he was a girl.
00:05:30.000 But when I say this implies our institutions, I mean it.
00:05:32.000 It implies our schools.
00:05:33.000 It implies our medical institutions.
00:05:36.000 It implies state legislatures.
00:05:38.000 Begin with medical institutions.
00:05:40.000 Now, just by coincidence, over the course of the last couple of days, we dropped that story about the American Medical Association.
00:05:46.000 I'm the head of the AMA, Dr. Bobby McCamala.
00:05:49.000 We've been talking about it extensively on the show the last couple of days.
00:05:53.000 We recorded those shows before the actual shooting occurred.
00:05:58.000 It just so happened that the AMA has been promoting exactly the kind of fake medicine that leads to the abandonment of people who are truly suffering, truly psychologically suffering.
00:06:10.000 That fake medicine, which masquerades as empathy, is not in fact medicine.
00:06:15.000 It is in fact an ideologically driven crusade to pretend that men and women are identical and can switch bodies at will.
00:06:22.000 And it is a lie.
00:06:24.000 We know for a fact now that the shooter in this particular case was interested in detransitioning, didn't want to be trans anymore, but had been told by the medical establishment, by the state, by the influential authorities that that was an impossibility, that one's trans always trans, that a boy can become a girl but can't become a boy again, and that it would be shameful and somehow a surrender to do so.
00:06:50.000 And here is the head of the AMA, Dr. Bobby McConnell, saying that people literally don't transition.
00:06:56.000 It's just not a thing that happens.
00:06:57.000 We shouldn't worry about it.
00:06:58.000 And we certainly shouldn't leave the opportunity open for people with gender identity disorder or any other form of trans delusion to start to feel comfortable in their own biological body.
00:07:12.000 Instead, we ought to transition the body to meet the vagaries of the mind.
00:07:18.000 Yeah, but even so, so you're a doctor, you're a surgeon.
00:07:22.000 How can you justify doing surgery, the most radical surgeries that medicine has come up with on an individual who has an evolving or changing gender identity?
00:07:35.000 How, how, how can you write that, that possibility?
00:07:39.000 So, I mean, people that actually change.
00:07:40.000 back.
00:07:41.000 So are you talking about so when an adult after twenty years of feeling like they are a woman instead of a man is considering suicide and wants to do something about that, then they go to a psychiatrist, they get medicine, and then they would consider an operation if that's what really was going to keep them healthy.
00:08:06.000 And that doesn't even happen in kids in Michigan, by the way.
00:08:08.000 If you're talking about pediatrics, it's a totally different thing.
00:08:14.000 Now, again, this sort of delusional insanity from the AMA.
00:08:18.000 the most important medical organization in America, it is embedded.
00:08:22.000 This trans ideology, this blight, this lie is embedded in our most important institutions, including medical institutions.
00:08:29.000 If you wonder why there is no trust in the CDC, if you wonder why there's no trust in the NIH, if you wonder why trust has been completely undermined in quote unquote science, it's because the ideological left infiltrated all of these organizations, took them over, and then wore their face around as a mask like Hannibal Lecter.
00:08:47.000 And then said, why don't you just trust the science?
00:08:49.000 And the answer is because you're not doing the science.
00:08:51.000 You're not interested in the science.
00:08:53.000 You're interested in the ideology.
00:08:55.000 This ideology has infiltratedated into our classrooms.
00:08:57.000 It's being taught to young kids.
00:09:00.000 Yesterday, a video emerged of a non-binary teacher.
00:09:03.000 Now, again, non-binary is another delusion.
00:09:05.000 There is no such thing as a non-binary human.
00:09:08.000 Human beings can be intersex that is still not non-binary.
00:09:12.000 Non-binary is the idea that you are neither male nor female in your heart.
00:09:17.000 The answer to which is who cares.
00:09:20.000 But here was a non-binary teacher named Nairobi Makiba Colon in Camden, New Jersey at the KIPP Hatch Middle School.
00:09:28.000 Now, first of all, I should point out, you know, how thoroughgoing this ideology is, how much it has infiltrated every part of American public life when this is infiltrating schools in Camden, New Jersey.
00:09:38.000 Camden, New Jersey happens to be one of the most high crime cities in all of America.
00:09:42.000 I know I visited there.
00:09:44.000 It's a horror show.
00:09:45.000 It's a true horror show.
00:09:46.000 If you want to see what it looks like, go check out our series from last year, Divided States of Biden.
00:09:50.000 We went to Camden.
00:09:52.000 It is awful.
00:09:53.000 It is a terrible place.
00:09:55.000 Instead of worrying about an enormous number of kids who don't have fathers in the home in an area blighted by crime, they're busy teaching kids that they must use the correct pronouns.
00:10:07.000 Good morning class.
00:10:08.000 My name is Teacher Roby.
00:10:09.000 I'm going to do a quick introduction before we get started.
00:10:11.000 Here's my teacher picture.
00:10:12.000 Everyone here will be able to take a picture this year, so I'm excited to see how those come out.
00:10:17.000 My pronouns are they them?
00:10:19.000 For example, they are a great art teacher.
00:10:21.000 They taught us how to draw stitch.
00:10:22.000 It is super important to get our pronouns right.
00:10:24.000 If you do make a mistake, I will politely correct you.
00:10:26.000 No worries.
00:10:27.000 That goes for me too.
00:10:28.000 So if I ever get your name or pronouns wrong, please correct me every single time.
00:10:33.000 The absolute insane narcissism of this and then cramming it down on kids.
00:10:37.000 This is happening at schools across the country.
00:10:39.000 This is not a sort of fringe thing happening at a few schools.
00:10:43.000 It is literally happening at public schools across the country.
00:10:46.000 Meanwhile, how about the state of the law in Minnesota?
00:10:49.000 So Minnesota in 2023 passed a law, chapter 28., HF number 16, section 1, 214.078, protection from conversion therapy.
00:11:02.000 Now, there have been a bunch of laws passed across the country with regard to conversion therapy.
00:11:06.000 When most people think of conversion therapy, what they think is that there is someone who takes a gay kid hooks the kids up, the kid up to electrodes and then zaps them until they're straight.
00:11:15.000 That's what conversion therapy is because that is like the old fashioned horror show that many people attempted back in like the 1970s, early 1980s, maybe.
00:11:24.000 Well, that is illegal, but that is not what these states now mean by conversion therapy.
00:11:29.000 What they mean by conversion therapy is that you are not allowed as I said.
00:11:32.000 as a psychologist, as a mental health care professional, as a parent, by the way, to bring your kid to a mental health care professional who tries to convince your boy that he is not, in fact, a girl that is illegal in the state of Minnesota.
00:11:47.000 So if the parents of the shooter had brought him to a mental health care professional or religious guidance professional, a priest, because this kid apparently went to a Catholic school.
00:11:58.000 who had said, you know, you might not in fact be a girl.
00:12:00.000 In fact, you are not a girl.
00:12:01.000 I know for a fact you're not a girl.
00:12:02.000 We need to work within the boundaries God gave you, drawing within the biological lines that could be illegal in the state of Minnesota because conversion.
00:12:11.000 therapy is banned in the state of Minnesota, but here is the definition of conversion therapy.
00:12:15.000 It means any practice by a mental health practitioner that seeks to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same gender.
00:12:34.000 Conversion therapy does not include counseling practice or treatment that provides assistance to an individual undergoing gender transition.
00:12:40.000 or counseling practice or treatment that provides acceptance, support, and understanding of an individual or facilitates an individual's coping, social support, and identity exploration.
00:12:49.000 and development.
00:12:51.000 As long as the counseling practice or treatment does not seek to change an individual's sexual orientation or gender identity, understand what this law does.
00:13:01.000 What this law says is that if your kid expresses gender confusion, says, Mommy, I might be a girl and he's a boy, and you bring him to a psychologist and the psychologist says, You're a boy, you're not a girl.
00:13:10.000 You should stop trying to claim that you're a girl because you're not.
00:13:14.000 That right there would violate the law in the state of Minnesota.
00:13:18.000 It effectively makes any help for a quote unquote detransitioner illegal in the state of Minnesota.
00:13:25.000 Illegal.
00:13:26.000 If you brought your kid, if you brought this shooter before he was a shooter, This troubled young man, deeply mentally disturbed young man to a mental health professional.
00:13:36.000 And he said, listen, I'm a boy.
00:13:38.000 I'm struggling with my gender identity, but I feel like a girl.
00:13:40.000 And he said, you know what?
00:13:41.000 You're not a girl.
00:13:42.000 You're a boy.
00:13:43.000 You might be violating the law in the state of California, in the state of Minnesota.
00:13:49.000 It's embedded in the law.
00:13:51.000 Again, it's also embedded in Minnesota law when it declared itself back in 2023 a trans refuge state.
00:14:00.000 Why?
00:14:00.000 Well, because that 2023 legislation signed by Governor Tim Walls, again, insanely enough, the vice presidential nominee for the Democrats, according to the New York Post, blocks out-of-state subpoenas, arrest warrants, and extradition requests for people who travel to the land of 10,000 lakes from other states for sex reassignment surgeries or homeown treatments.
00:14:18.000 So let's say that you are a parent and your kid absconds with another adult to the state of Minnesota for a gender transition and you say no, I want my kid back.
00:14:30.000 They will not extradite your kid in the state of Minnesota.
00:14:35.000 If you as a parent in the state of Minnesota say no to transition procedures or you wish to fight the insanity that is this ideology, you could have your kid removedoved from you under Minnesota law.
00:14:51.000 That is horrifying.
00:14:53.000 It's horrifying.
00:14:54.000 You have an entire delusion that is now being promoted by state legislatures, by governors across the country, particularly in blue states, reinforced by the lies of medical associations that are supposed to be all about doing no harm and instead are actively promoting harm promoted by an educational system completely honeycombed with members of the ideological left.
00:15:15.000 And the costs are very real.
00:15:17.000 This happens to be an over sized cost because it's not just about the person who had the mental illness.
00:15:22.000 It's about all the people that that person decided to harm.
00:15:25.000 Obviously, that's the main story here.
00:15:27.000 But the point is that this is part of a broader systemic problem.
00:15:32.000 Now, Democrats, of course, have decided that it's all about the guns, always and forever, because that's the formula.
00:15:38.000 If this were a white supremacist shooting up a mosque or a Jewish school or a Catholic school for that matter, then there might be some talk about the ideology, about the system of white supremacy, about the basic philosophy of white supremacism and the evil that it promotes.
00:15:54.000 But if this is clearly an outshoot of trans ideology, which it is, it was the targeting of a religious Catholic school for the murder of school children by a trans identified person who had in his journals many references to not only his trans identity, but also to the evils of Catholics and Jews, President Trump and all the rest.
00:16:18.000 Well, then it must be the gun.
00:16:19.000 That's the way this works.
00:16:21.000 So here is Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, who really should shut her face.
00:16:24.000 I mean Peggy Flanagan again, just a couple of months ago was wearing around a T-shirt that said protect trans kids with an actual emblazoned knife on it.
00:16:35.000 This is not a person with the moral authority to be speaking about this particular shooting, but here we go.
00:16:41.000 We continue to hear people say, why does God let things like this happen?
00:16:46.000 Right?
00:16:47.000 And I would just say that God weeps, that we have tools, that we have elected leaders who want to move legislation that could truly make a difference.
00:17:01.000 And I think we just need to have that willpower to take those steps that are needed to protect our communities.
00:17:10.000 Well, I mean, I don't wish to hear lectures about God from you.
00:17:15.000 I do not wish to hear lectures about God's mercy or justice from a person who believes in T-shirts that have knives on them, talking about how kids need to be protected by promoting the idea that they can be members of the opposite sex.
00:17:30.000 Meanwhile, the American Federation of Teachers Randy Weingarten doing the same routine.
00:17:34.000 She says a national assault weapon ban would work, would it though?
00:17:36.000 Because it turns out this particular school shooter had a bunch of different weapons and there was an assault weapons ban in place from the mid nineties until the early 2000s.
00:17:45.000 Then it expired and it had no impact on school shootings by the measures.
00:17:49.000 But it's always fun for Democrats to invoke their own religious mantra.
00:17:54.000 Assault weapons are the problem.
00:17:58.000 We are Who those young people were, who saved other young people, who those teachers were, who saved other teachers, who those medical professionals were, who went with a CT scan with a child, who those law enforcement people are.
00:18:15.000 That is who I see, Chris, in America.
00:18:17.000 I'm all around America.
00:18:18.000 That is the best of America, but we have to have the national conversation around a set of belief or policy that we know will work and a national assault weapons ban would work.
00:18:33.000 Okay, you have no actual data to back that, none.
00:18:35.000 The idea that the national assault weapons ban would be the thing that stops this sort of thing.
00:18:40.000 By the way, I do know what would actually promote the end of this particular sort of shooting, and that would be that people identified as suffering from gender identity disorder not be allowed to purchase weapons.
00:18:52.000 How about that?
00:18:53.000 How about that?
00:18:54.000 Again, Democrats are all very much in favor of red flag laws until it applies to people who legitimately are mentally ill, who they believe are actually just victims of society.
00:19:03.000 Meanwhile, David Hogg, he gets to have another moment in the sun.
00:19:07.000 So David Hogg, who originally made his name by being a student who attended Parkland, he was there during the Parkland shooting, but he parlayed that into a leader in activism and then a slot at Harvard University with a below average SAT score.
00:19:21.000 And then he parlayed that into a very short-lived stint as the vice president of the Democratic National Committee.
00:19:27.000 And then he was thrown out because he was basically destroying everything within.
00:19:32.000 But don't worry, he's still here to be useless.
00:19:35.000 So here he was on CNN going off on all people, President Trump, after a trans person shoots up a Catholic church in the blue state of Minnesota.
00:19:42.000 It's President Trump's fault, of course.
00:19:46.000 Donald Trump has the power to do something about this.
00:19:50.000 After Parkland, he repeatedly said, you guys are cowards.
00:19:53.000 You're not going to do anything because you're afraidid of the NRA.
00:19:55.000 We need to do something about guns.
00:19:57.000 That is what he said.
00:19:58.000 And then he met with the NRA and did nothing.
00:20:00.000 Why?
00:20:00.000 Because he is a coward.
00:20:01.000 And my message to Donald Trump is that you are a coward, sir.
00:20:05.000 You are not going to do anything about this issue because you were terrified of the NRA, even though you have the power to save tens of thousands of lives.
00:20:12.000 You were the strongest president in modern American history with a chokehold over your party and both chambers of Congress.
00:20:18.000 You have the power to end this, but you are not going to because you are a damn coward.
00:20:24.000 Okay, again, this sort of ridiculous pandering by people like David Hogg, a complete career useless person is what he will become.
00:20:31.000 He already has been.
00:20:31.000 He's young, maybe there's time to change prediction.
00:20:34.000 Fifty years from now, he's just as useless as he is right now.
00:20:37.000 But the idea that Trump can single handedly snap his fingers and bam, all school shootings stop, that of course is an absurdity and a moral blind.
00:20:44.000 That is not true.
00:20:45.000 Stephen King is trying to shift the focus away from the identity of the shooter, saying, quote, whether he was transgender is beside the point.
00:20:54.000 The point is he had a gun.
00:20:56.000 Well, actually, no, that is incredibly stupid.
00:21:00.000 I own multiple guns.
00:21:01.000 I am a threat to no one except a criminal who breaks into my house.
00:21:05.000 In fact, there are millions of Americans who own guns who are not going to shoot up at school.
00:21:10.000 If what we are doing is identifying the most likely causal factor that is correlative with school shootings, and it goes mental illness or gun ownership, I promise you that significant mental illness has a much higher correlation with school shootings than just gun ownership alone.
00:21:31.000 The gun didn't do anything on its own.
00:21:33.000 It had to be in the hands of a deranged human being.
00:21:39.000 The struggle to avoid the obvious here from the left is pretty incredible.
00:21:44.000 Former Homeland Security official, Danell Harvin, he added his voice to the mix over on CNN saying the same sort of thing.
00:21:53.000 This individual appears to be what we call a nihilist.
00:21:56.000 And not to get into too much detail about their ideology, they believe that no lives matter.
00:22:02.000 I believe that calling this or investigating this as an attack against Catholics, I believe, is a little disingenuous and it plays into the far right's narrative about Christians being under attack in this country.
00:22:14.000 Clearly, since this person went to this school, it appears to be, and we don't know their background.
00:22:20.000 But I think that we're starting to see the creepingsing politicization of the tragedy.
00:22:30.000 It is a politicization when you blame the tens of millions of gun owners in America who have nothing to do with the school shootings for the crimes of a deranged individual who was ideologically driven.
00:22:40.000 And we can see the connection between A and B already coming up.
00:22:44.000 The Republican response to this horrifying shooting.
00:22:47.000 Plus, we'll get into the latest from Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, up the ante once again.
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00:24:45.000 Consider diversifying a portion of your savings into gold.
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00:24:53.000 Again, it's a great way of protecting yourself against vicissitudes, future.
00:24:57.000 You know, things could go sideways.
00:24:59.000 You've got to make sure you're protected.
00:25:01.000 That's what gold is for.
00:25:02.000 Text the word B Ben to the number 989898 to get started today.
00:25:05.000 Meanwhile, the Republican response obviously seems to be significantly more tethered to reality.
00:25:09.000 The Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, he points out we have a pretty significant mental health crisis in the country, which of course is true.
00:25:17.000 The first lady, Melania, who really has a very big heart for children, obviously as a mother herself, she put out a statement earlier today that I think is really worth taking a look at because this happens too much in our country.
00:25:30.000 And if you look, we really do have, I think, a mental health crisis in the United States of America.
00:25:35.000 We take way more psychiatric medication than any other nation on Earth.
00:25:38.000 And I think it's time for us to start asking some very hard questions about the root causes of this violence.
00:25:44.000 And I'm going to be part of that.
00:25:46.000 And the first lady and the president are going to be part of that.
00:25:48.000 But that's going to be an American conversation that we're going to have together.
00:25:53.000 Hey, that does need to be a conversation that is, in fact, had.
00:25:57.000 Now, there is something else that's been happening across the country, and it is connected to this school shooting.
00:26:03.000 And that is the radical heating up of rhetoric that we have seen.
00:26:06.000 Obviously, this has been ongoing.
00:26:08.000 It is not relegated solely to the left.
00:26:10.000 It would be dishonest to claim that it is.
00:26:12.000 It is ratcheting up very, very high from the left right now, obviously.
00:26:16.000 And that is particularly true when you consider that literally.
00:26:19.000 zero percent of Democrats are happy with the direction of the country right now, according to the latest Gallup polls, zero percent.
00:26:28.000 Pretty astonishing.
00:26:30.000 And when you look at those numbers, what you see is that independents are somewhere in the thirty some percent range, Republicans are in the seventy six percent range, and Democrats are at zero in general.
00:26:39.000 Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States?
00:26:42.000 What that does is it creates a political wave on behalf of Democrats who use extremely, extremely polarizing and extreme language.
00:26:54.000 If you are a Democrat and you want to capture the democratic Zeitgeist.
00:26:57.000 You have to understand, everyone is fighting mad on the democratic side of the aisle.
00:27:00.000 And that means you're going to keep racketing up the rhetoric over and over again.
00:27:03.000 You're going to claim that your opponents are the Gestapo.
00:27:05.000 You're going to claim that the President of the United States is an incipient dictator who is going to overthrow all the mechanisms of constitutional government and we're on the order of something truly horrifying.
00:27:15.000 Does that promote violence?
00:27:16.000 Now, as I've said before, the connection between rhetoric and violence is there, but we have to be pretty calibrated in how we analyze that.
00:27:25.000 There's a difference between somebody getting up and saying go shoot the president, which is illegal, right?
00:27:30.000 That's incitement to violence.
00:27:31.000 And somebody saying the president is a terrible person.
00:27:34.000 He's a tyrant.
00:27:35.000 He's a Nazi.
00:27:36.000 Okay, the latter is wrong, but it's not terri technical incitement.
00:27:40.000 What the ladder does is it raises the temperature.
00:27:43.000 I've used this metaphor a lot because it happens to be a good metaphor.
00:27:46.000 The metaphor is that the American body politic is essentially a pot of water.
00:27:52.000 You can raise the temperature on the water.
00:27:55.000 You can increase the temperature on the stove and the pot starts to boil.
00:27:59.000 The higher you hit the temperature, the more the pot is going to boil.
00:28:01.000 And the more the pot boils, the more there's a chance that it boils over.
00:28:05.000 And so you are increasing the chances in this metaphor of the pot boiling over, meaning violence, when you use unhinged rhetoric.
00:28:12.000 And again, this is nothing that is relegated solely to the left.
00:28:15.000 You've seen it from the right as well as well.
00:28:17.000 You can see it in a wide variety of countries.
00:28:18.000 It's not relegated to the United States alone.
00:28:22.000 And so if you're a Democrat and the incentive structure is for you to say extreme things to get attention, you're going to keep saying more and more extreme things to get attention.
00:28:29.000 And then there's going to be some unhinged people who look at what you're saying and take it absolutely literally, absolutely seriously, and then they go do things about it.
00:28:37.000 So it's a bad thing when you have, for example, Democratic representative John Larson of Connecticut comparing Ice to the Gestapo and saying to rise up.
00:28:44.000 That is a problem.
00:28:47.000 This is a time for good trouble.
00:28:50.000 This is a time for Americans to rise up.
00:28:53.000 This is not Germany, that's the SS and the Gestapo.
00:28:58.000 This is the United States of America.
00:29:01.000 Unmask yourselves.
00:29:06.000 So, you know, again, the Gestapo, I mean, if somebody does an act of violence against a member of ICE, well, based on the fact that you're saying that they're good, they're Gestapo and it's time to rise up.
00:29:17.000 I mean, to pretend that there is no connection there is kind of crazy.
00:29:21.000 Gavin Newsom is playing this game as well, the governor of California.
00:29:25.000 Hey, he is so radically dishonest.
00:29:27.000 So here he was at a politico event the other day suggesting that Donald Trump does not want another election.
00:29:33.000 that he is legitimately a Hitlerian figure who is going to cancel all future elections and essentially take total power in the United States.
00:29:40.000 First of all, if Gavin Newsom believed this as the governor of the largest and most populous state in the Union, economically the largest, most populous state in America, then he would have a duty to probably lead an insurrection.
00:29:53.000 If he actually thought that were real, he does not think that's real.
00:29:56.000 Of course, he does not believe that President Trump wants to cancel all future elections.
00:30:00.000 It's ridiculous when people claim this sort of stuff.
00:30:02.000 There will be an election in 2028 and then there will be one in 2032 and then there will be one in 2036.
00:30:06.000 We can hope Gavin Newsom does not make the finish line in any of those elections.
00:30:10.000 But there is a market for this sort of rhetoric on the Democratic left.
00:30:14.000 Here is Gavin Newsom saying a lie.
00:30:16.000 I mean, this is a lie.
00:30:18.000 I don't think Donald Trump wants another election.
00:30:23.000 You think for a second, you want, I have two dozen Trump 2028 hats.
00:30:29.000 His folks keep sending me.
00:30:33.000 And you think he's going to run again.
00:30:35.000 Don't give me, you don't, who spends $200 million on a ballroom at their home and then leaves the house?
00:30:43.000 This is serious, guys.
00:30:44.000 This is serious.
00:30:45.000 So it'll be Newsom Trump in 2028.
00:30:47.000 No, no.
00:30:47.000 This is, there's no., this guy doesn't believe in free, fair elections.
00:30:51.000 He could, he's tried to wreck this country.
00:30:53.000 I wonder, were we, were you there, January 6?
00:30:58.000 Okay, so notice that the audience itself is laughing at this, literally laughing out loud at Gavin Newsom.
00:31:04.000 He's pretending that he's serious about this in the audience because it's a political audience, so presumably they know something about politics.
00:31:10.000 They're laughing.
00:31:10.000 The host is laughing.
00:31:11.000 Gavin Newsom's like, no, it's perfectly serious.
00:31:13.000 There will never be another election if Donald Trump has his way.
00:31:16.000 Okay, if you believe that, if you truly believe that Hitler is on the move, then you have a moral duty to stop it.
00:31:24.000 This sort of ratcheting up is terrible for our constitutional republic.
00:31:28.000 Truly a bad thing.
00:31:30.000 Truly a bad thing.
00:31:30.000 Now, do I think Gavin Newsom believes anything?
00:31:32.000 Of course he doesn't.
00:31:33.000 Gavin Newsom doesn't believe a single bit of this because you know what you don't do?
00:31:36.000 You don't troll Hitler.
00:31:38.000 That's not something that people generally do when they are worried about incipient Hitlerian fascism.
00:31:43.000 But that's what Gavin Newsom is doing full time because again, he's just seeking attention.
00:31:47.000 He's a little child who's screaming in the other room and kicking his feet desperately hoping for attention.
00:31:51.000 So yesterday he released a video of himself doing a fake Trump conference.
00:31:56.000 So he looked at President Trump.
00:31:57.000 President Trump has these long pressers where all the members of the cabinet are there praising him and talking about how great he is.
00:32:03.000 And Gavin Newsom decided that he was going to mock that and then talk about how crime rates in red states are really bad, neglecting, of course, the fact that the crime rates in red states, the ones that are bad, it tends to be because of blue governed large cities in red states, like, say, New Orleans in Louisiana.
00:32:17.000 But here is Gavin Newsom mocking President Trump.
00:32:19.000 This is why I say I can't take him seriously when he says there won't be another election if Trump has his way.
00:32:23.000 He doesn't believe that.
00:32:25.000 He doesn't know.
00:32:26.000 Again, no incipient dictator gets mocked this way.
00:32:29.000 If he is to invest in.
00:32:34.000 in crime suppression I hope the President of the United States would look at the facts.
00:32:40.000 Just consider Speaker Johnson's state and district.
00:32:44.000 Just look at the murder rate that's nearly four times higher than Californians in Louisiana.
00:32:52.000 This is Speaker Johnson, four x higher.
00:32:56.000 I'm just offering this again, you've not seen this on Fox News, so the president may not be familiar with these facts.
00:33:02.000 So I want to present some facts to the president of the United States and imagine this is alarming to the president to learn these facts.
00:33:10.000 Mississippi leads the nation as the number one murder state in America.
00:33:16.000 Imagine this in particular may resonate with the president of the United States.
00:33:21.000 It's got a murder rate 180% higher than Los Angeles.
00:33:27.000 Interesting.
00:33:28.000 LA has more people.
00:33:29.000 These are all per capita numbers.
00:33:31.000 More people than Los Angeles.
00:33:33.000 Perhaps the president could deploy the National Guard in every corner of Mississippi.
00:33:38.000 And the fact remains, if the president is sincere about the issue of crime and violence, there's no question in my mind that he will likely be sending the troops into Louisiana and Mississippi to address the just unconscionable wave of violence that continues to plague those states.
00:34:00.000 I mean, he is so gr incredibly cringy.
00:34:03.000 He's just a big ball of cringe, Gavin Newsom.
00:34:05.000 By the way, it should be mentioned that the number one murder city in Mississippi, just to take an example, is Jackson, Mississippi.
00:34:10.000 The mayor of Jackson, Mississippi is John Horne, Democrat.
00:34:14.000 In fact, I decided to ask my sponsors over a comet, a new web browser by perplexity, a question analyzing the top ten highest crime major cities in red states, right?
00:34:23.000 The red states would be Newsom's select group over the past thirty years.
00:34:27.000 What percentage of that time have those cities been governed by Democratic mayors?
00:34:31.000 Most of the top ten highest crime major cities in red states have been governed by Democratic mayors for a significant majority of the past thirty years, often exceeding eighty percent of that period or more.
00:34:39.000 This trend is clearest in cities such as Memphis, Tennessee, and Saint Louis, Missouri, and is broadly consistent with other high crime major cities in red states.
00:34:47.000 The top ten high crime cities in red states commonly include Memphis, Saint Louis, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Birmingham, Little Rock, Detroit, sometime included in red state analysis, Baltimore, disputed as to red, blue in terms of Maryland, Jackson, Mississippi, and Shreveport.
00:35:01.000 Those cities are mostly in states that have voted Republican in recent presidential elections and consistently have among the highest murder and violent crime rates.
00:35:09.000 And as it turns out, empirical pattern in major southern cities with the highest crime, Democratic mayors have typically governed for more than eighty percent to ninety percent of the last three decades.
00:35:18.000 This pattern aligns with findings that among the 100 largest US cities, the great majority, about 60 to 65 percent, are led by Democratic mayors.
00:35:25.000 And nearly all of the largest cities in the South with high crime rates are included in this group.
00:35:30.000 So blaming that on red states as opposed to blue mayors, that is a category error, but Newsom knows that and he's making it on purpose.
00:35:40.000 We'll get to the latest economic reports plus firings at the CDC in a moment.
00:35:43.000 First, I follow the headlines every day.
00:35:45.000 I'm constantly plugged in, busy, always running around.
00:35:48.000 When I rush out of work every evening, there's only one thing on my mind getting home to the family because my family is the thing I care about the most.
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00:36:44.000 Also, here's the reality.
00:36:46.000 Over 90% of Americans don't get enough dietary fiber.
00:36:48.000 Most of us don't hit that recommended variety of fruits and vegetables either.
00:36:51.000 I know that I typically don't, which is why I use Balance of Nature supplements.
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00:37:46.000 Meanwhile, Democrats are struggling on their own to come up with an answer to President Trump.
00:37:51.000 I mean, they themselves are far too radical.
00:37:53.000 James Carville, who again has occasional.
00:37:55.000 brushes with reality.
00:37:56.000 He exploded over the DNC doing a land acknowledgement to open the other day, which of course Carville at least has enough touch the grass to him to understand that most Americans are not interested in a party that opens its actual national convention every year by suggesting that America is stolen land.
00:38:14.000 Lady, you're right.
00:38:16.000 That land, what we did to Native Americans is really well documented.
00:38:23.000 And it is a sad part of our nation's history.
00:38:26.000 Why are you bringing this up in an election?
00:38:29.000 Understand this.
00:38:30.000 The DNC does not exist.
00:38:32.000 It doesn't exist to right wrongs.
00:38:34.000 It doesn't exist to acknowledge the more unpleasant parts of history.
00:38:40.000 It doesn't exist to make people feel good.
00:38:43.000 It exists to get this through your head to win elections.
00:38:47.000 Now, do you think that's going to help us win elections, say, like we did in Iowa, which is, I think, close to Minnesota, my geography is there, by our good land theft from the Dakotas.
00:39:06.000 We're not.
00:39:08.000 Please stop this in the next election.
00:39:10.000 In the name of a just, merciful God, don't you see what's happening?
00:39:15.000 Don't you see where this has brought us to?
00:39:20.000 Well, you know, luxury believes that's that's what the Democrats are very much into.
00:39:25.000 One of the more hilarious luxury beliefs clips that I've seen in the recent past involved a member of the Pod Save America crew who are increasingly out hinged with regard to a wide variety of issues, but no shock there.
00:39:37.000 Team Obama always masqueraded as moderate when in fact they were extraordinarily radical, but they had on a LA City Council member named Imelda Padilla and she was trying to explain how she was making housing more affordable in.
00:39:48.000 in Los Angeles and Giant Vale.
00:39:53.000 Under the emergency ordinance, I'm bringing a set of tiny homes into an underutilized MetroLink parking station.
00:40:00.000 I didn't have to do any outreach, but I started a neighborhood watch and I also had a whole town hall related to addressing that component.
00:40:08.000 And there's also an ED one that's being built on Victory and Balboa.
00:40:12.000 And going back to what you said, the neighbors didn't want it at all.
00:40:17.000 They just didn't want the density.
00:40:19.000 They wanted me to kill it.
00:40:21.000 But by law, I really have no jurisdiction anymore because it's an ED one, right?
00:40:28.000 But we still as a team got together with the developer, the high school across the street, other stakeholders, and instead of building something that was potentially six stories, we got it down to three stories.
00:40:39.000 And we also got the developer to also work with us to make sure that it helps the families of the area.
00:40:45.000 We also said, you know, instead of a ton of office space, we do want you to also incorporate a few more parking lots and EV chargers.
00:40:54.000 And there's John Lovett looking like his head is going to legitimately come off his body and explode, which is because this is what you guys look at the magic they are doing in lowering rent prices in California by preventing three stories of a building from being built and also getting rid of office space.
00:41:11.000 Genius level stuff here from your democrat friends.
00:41:14.000 Okay.
00:41:15.000 Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin continues to show over and over again.
00:41:18.000 He has no interest in peace at all.
00:41:19.000 According to the New York Post, Russia has launched a sweeping aerial assault across Ukraine late on Wednesday, pounding Kiev with ballistic missiles and swarms of drones killing at least seventeen people, including four children, injuring dozens more.
00:41:31.000 Andrey Yermak, the top advisor to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy, said, quote, many people are under the rubble, including children.
00:41:37.000 The barrage began around 9:30 pm setting off air raid sirens and prompting urgent shelter notification warnings in nearly every region nationwide.
00:41:45.000 Now, you know, I've been in Kiev when the journal alarms went off.
00:41:50.000 In fact, we released an extraordinary video this morning going through what Vladimir Putin wants, the history of Ukraine.
00:41:56.000 There's footage of me in Ukraine that's never been seen before.
00:42:00.000 Here's a little bit of what it looked like.
00:42:21.000 That is up on our YouTube page.
00:42:23.000 It will also be up over at Daily Wire, you should check it out.
00:42:26.000 But suffice it to say that Vladimir Putin has no interest in peace and we knew this.
00:42:29.000 We knew this.
00:42:31.000 According to the New York Post, at least four Russian MiG 31 jets armed with Kinshaw missiles decolled during the attack.
00:42:37.000 Missiles, drones and bombs were spotted throughout the country, particularly in Kiev, but also in western regions of the country where attacks have been rarer.
00:42:43.000 At least seventeen people, including four children, were killed.
00:42:46.000 More than twenty two were injured.
00:42:47.000 That's the second largest air attack on the nation's capital since the war began.
00:42:51.000 It's the biggest since President Trump's summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
00:42:56.000 Meanwhile, the Europeans are grasping at straws.
00:42:58.000 They've now been floating the possibility of the Ukraine Russia buffer zone in a push for peace.
00:43:02.000 According to Politico, they are weighing the creation of a 40 km buffer zone between the Russian and Ukrainian front lines as part of a peace deal, a lasting idea Moscow has embraced that would likely stretch the continent's modest number of peacekeeping troops.
00:43:14.000 The proposal, according to five European diplomats, is among several that military and civilian officials are considering for either a post-war or ceasefire scenario in Ukraine.
00:43:22.000 Officials disagree how deep the actual zone could be.
00:43:24.000 It's unclear whether a key would accept the plan as it would come with territorial concessions.
00:43:28.000 The US is not involved apparently in these buffer zone discussions.
00:43:32.000 So the idea would be that there would be a block, a strip of land inside Ukraine would be blocked off to force a fragile peace.
00:43:38.000 Now, the reason that Putin presumably would accept that is because he's figuring, okay fine, they'll put together some sort of buffer zone.
00:43:44.000 We'll just put some infiltrators in there, some little green men, as they call them, and those people will start doing violence and a uprising, and then the Europeans won't be able to do anything.
00:43:53.000 Are the Europeans going to up the ante?
00:43:54.000 Are they going to do counter insurgency offensives in that buffer zone?
00:43:58.000 There's a reason that Putin wants to sign on to that.
00:44:01.000 European diplomats have stayed away from likening this to the heavily guarded divide between North and South Korea.
00:44:06.000 They compare it more to the division of Germany during the Cold War, which again was an actual hard division.
00:44:11.000 Putin and his deputies have said they want to create buffer zones along Russia's borders with Ukraine.
00:44:17.000 No details have emerged to suggest what these these proposals would entail.
00:44:21.000 So Russia's probably figuring, okay, if we've got a buffer zone, then we will be able to again exploit that buffer zone.
00:44:28.000 Because the question, as always with Russia, is who's going to stand up to them when they push the Russian way of war is you push where there's mush.
00:44:35.000 This goes all the way back to Lenin and Stalin.
00:44:37.000 Nothing has changed.
00:44:38.000 You push where there's mush and there's awfully much mush happening on the European and yes, on the American side as well.
00:44:45.000 And if you want Vladimir Putin to come to the table, you need to up the ante in the other direction, which is what President Trump had signified he wanted to do on Truth Social last week.
00:44:52.000 And then Elbridge Colby and team over at the State Department and the Defense Department have decided that they want to hold up aid to the Ukrainians in the middle of all this, which is kind of unbelievable.
00:45:02.000 Meanwhile, Germany's Friedrich Merz says that there's not going to be a Putin-Zelensky summit.
00:45:07.000 So all that talk last week about it, not going to happen.
00:45:09.000 He said, unlike what had been agreed between President Trump and President Putin last week, when we were together in Washington, it's obviously not going to come to a meeting between Zelensky and Putin.
00:45:19.000 European leaders have privately expressed skepticism that the peace push with Putin will yield results.
00:45:24.000 But again, the Europeans are basically saying over and over and over that Putin is sabotaging whatever is left here.
00:45:30.000 That is not a surprise.
00:45:31.000 In order to understand what Vladimir Putin is doing, again, I recommend that you watch that YouTube video because I really go through in detail what Putin wants.
00:45:37.000 And the answer is he wants to ingest Ukraine.
00:45:39.000 He sees Ukraine as a giant stick in his eye.
00:45:44.000 He sees Ukraine as a Russian speaking historically Russian territory that has decided to move away from a Russian-dominated Eastern Europe that thwarts his ambitions for a Russia-dominated not only Eastern Europe but Western Europe, making essentially Western Europe into sort of a satellite of Russia.
00:46:05.000 That is the goal of that has been the goal of Vladimir Putin for decades.
00:46:09.000 There is nothing new here.
00:46:10.000 Russia is just the latest manifestation of all of that.
00:46:12.000 Get some more on this in a moment.
00:46:13.000 First, when I started the Daily Wire, felt like we had to figure out everything with.
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00:47:11.000 Start selling today at shopify dot com slash shapiro.
00:47:18.000 Also, you're heading to somewhere this Labor Day weekend.
00:47:21.000 Well, take me with you.
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00:47:31.000 You only have a few minutes., check my shores.
00:47:33.000 Those are the same clips.
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00:47:51.000 Hey, meanwhile, some good news and some bad news on the economic front.
00:47:55.000 Good news is that the US economy grew at a 3.3% annualized rate in the second quarter.
00:47:59.000 According to an updated Commerce Department estimate, as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, that is an upgrade of 0.3%, which is good.
00:48:07.000 That latest estimate changed because of revisions to investment and consumer spending.
00:48:11.000 Investments in IP, light trucks and commercial and health care structures were all revised upwards.
00:48:16.000 So again, there are revisions.
00:48:18.000 Those revisions had been historically kind of downwards.
00:48:21.000 That's what happened last time.
00:48:22.000 Now the revisions are upward.
00:48:24.000 So that means that the US economy grew at an annualized average 1.4 percent in the first half of the year, which is a significant slowdown from the pace in recent years.
00:48:33.000 But the economy continues to chug along.
00:48:36.000 Still a lot of uncertainty out there.
00:48:39.000 Meanwhile, a brand new inflation reading is out.
00:48:43.000 Apparently, the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation measure came in exactly where the economists thought that it would.
00:48:49.000 The personal consumption expenditures price index rose 2.6% in the twelve months through July.
00:48:54.000 That's perfectly in line with where it was in June.
00:48:57.000 So futures pricing suggests that traders currently see an 85% shot that the Fed lowers the interest rates.
00:49:03.000 Again, that is what is expected, which is a little bit surprising only because, again, the goal of the Federal Reserve is to get those interest rates down to 2% or below.
00:49:11.000 That's sort of their mandate.
00:49:12.000 It's currently riding at 2.6%, 2.9%.
00:49:15.000 But the basic idea here, and I think this is correct, is that the price spike that we are about to see will be temporary because demand will drop off.
00:49:22.000 And so what you want is to jog the demand from the other side in terms of monetary policy.
00:49:27.000 Now listen, if you're a monetarist, if you're somebody who believes in the way that Milton Friedman did, that monetary policy lies at the heart of economic manipulation by the central government, then I can see why you'd be interested in this sort of, if you're sort of a Vienna school person,
00:49:44.000 which is what I am, where you believe that the central government should not be flipping that switch up and down and up and down and up and down, then what I would really prefer is to allow the interest rates to go down to zero essentially in terms of the overnight rates and really allow the economy to do what it's going to do.
00:50:02.000 And that doesn't mean lowering the interest rates.
00:50:05.000 I'm just not of the generalized belief that that should be up to the government whether people speculate or whether they don't speculate.
00:50:13.000 That seems like a mistake to me, but that that's a broader economic discussion in terms of whether the interest rates come down.
00:50:18.000 Obviously, President Trump has been pushing for that for a long time for two reasons.
00:50:21.000 One, it jogs consumer spending.
00:50:23.000 Two, it also reduces the amount of outstanding debt that we have given the fact that we have this massive outstanding national debt.
00:50:32.000 The stock market is a little bit wavery.
00:50:35.000 It's certainly not jumping.
00:50:37.000 And this has been the problem for President Trump basically since Liberation Day.
00:50:42.000 You go back historically.
00:50:43.000 What you will see is that President Trump between.
00:50:46.000 Between him taking over in January of 2025 and Liberation Day, what you see is actually fairly significant and steady growth in terms of the in terms of the stock market.
00:50:59.000 And then you see as we approach Liberation Day, things start to hover and then you see them just drop off a cliff and now we've kind of made up back most of that ground.
00:51:08.000 But again, as I say, as I pointed out before, the actual measure that we should be using is not, have we hit record highs under President Trump?
00:51:16.000 If you had a natural rate of growth, you would.
00:51:18.000 The Dow Jones industrial average was 44,000 when he took office.
00:51:21.000 Today it is 45,500, which.
00:51:24.000 Which again is not the kind of radical increase that you would have expected.
00:51:28.000 All the crosswinds are having an impact.
00:51:31.000 Hopefully, the impact begins to shallow.
00:51:35.000 And meanwhile, huge controversy over the CDC because the White House decided to lay off the director of the CDC.
00:51:43.000 Presumably that was at the behest of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
00:51:45.000 Now again, a lot of distrust over the CDC, a lot of it well earned.
00:51:49.000 The CDC was chocked filled with people who prioritized ideology over science.
00:51:54.000 As we talked about yesterday, one of the people who is leaving is the MPOC's guy,'s gone and that's good.
00:52:06.000 However, the question remains as to what exactly the CDC is going to be from here on out.
00:52:11.000 Is it going to be sort of a tool of RFK Jr.'s more bizarre medical beliefs or is it actually going to follow the science, which is what we were promised?
00:52:19.000 Well, apparently the person who's going to be selected to replace the outgoing head of the CDC, Susan Minerez, is Jim O'Neill.
00:52:26.000 He's currently the deputy secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, that is the interim leader of the CDC.
00:52:33.000 So O'Neill served in the George W. Bush administration as a senior health official before becoming a close ally of Investor Peter Thiel.
00:52:40.000 He was confirmed by the Senate in June to serve as Deputy HHS Secretary.
00:52:43.000 As Acting CDC Director, O'Neill is set to play a key role in the agency's efforts to revise vaccine recommendations with the CDC scheduled to hold a meeting of vaccine advisers next month.
00:52:52.000 That process, overseen by RFK Jr., is expected to lead to a narrower CDC guidance on which Americans should receive coronavirus vaccines.
00:53:00.000 That's fine.
00:53:01.000 Again, I think that the original mandate that came down from the federal government with regard to the vaccines, which is that kids needed them, was an absurdity is something that Marty McCarry has talked about, who again is working inside the HHS.
00:53:14.000 So that's not a bad thing.
00:53:17.000 O'Neill was a frequent critic of the CDC.
00:53:21.000 He tweeted things like, is Omicron the best vaccine?
00:53:23.000 Remember, the CDC can redefine the word vaccine at will.
00:53:26.000 And I mean, I pointed that out at the time.
00:53:28.000 If you go back and listen to the show, I said Omicron may actually have ended the pandemic because everyone got it and fewer people were dying, which is typically what happens with viruses as they get less voracious.
00:53:39.000 They get more viral and less voracious.
00:53:40.000 They kill fewer people, but they affect more people.
00:53:43.000 Tevi Troy, who served as Deputy HHS Secretary under George W. Bush, described O'Neill as a tested health official.
00:53:49.000 He said he believes the CDC should focus on its core mission of combating dangerous communicable diseases.
00:53:54.000 I trust you'll bring that perspective to his new role.
00:53:57.000 Okay, so that seems like a fine pick.
00:54:01.000 Still not sure, you know, what the run in was with Monero's, but the person who is slated to replace her seems basically fine.
00:54:09.000 And as Caroline Lovett points out over at the CDC, the president does have the power to fire whoever he wants at the CDC.
00:54:15.000 That is under the prerogative of the executive branch.
00:54:18.000 Her lawyers' statement made it abundantly clear themselves that she was not aligned with the president's mission to make America healthy again.
00:54:26.000 And the Secretary asked her to resign.
00:54:29.000 She said she would, and then she said she wouldn't.
00:54:31.000 So the president fired her, which he has every right to do.
00:54:36.000 No, obviously that is true.
00:54:39.000 Joining us online is Thomas Chatterton Williams.
00:54:41.000 He's an author and staff writer at The Atlantic.
00:54:43.000 He's also visiting professor of humanities and senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College 2022, Guggenheim fellow and nonresident fellow at AEI.
00:54:51.000 His brand new book out titled The Summer of Art Discontent, The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.
00:54:55.000 Thomas, thanks so much for joining us.
00:54:57.000 I really appreciate it.
00:54:58.000 Hey, it's great to be with you, Ben.
00:55:01.000 So first of all, it sounds like this book has been a while in the making because it really focuses in on that insane summer of 2020 that basically broke the country in about ten different ways.
00:55:11.000 So what is the basic thesis of the book?
00:55:14.000 Well, I try to trace the trajectory of the bo kind of optimism and this kind of multi ethnic bargain that was struck under the rise of Barack Obama and his first term, through the disillusionment at the realization that the election of one man wouldn't solve all of America's racial tensions and the kind of great awakening,
00:55:34.000 if you want to call it, that occurred since I would put it at the death of Trayvon Martin, roughly, that went through all through Trump's first term through the Biden administration peaked in the summer of 2020 and I think contributed greatly to the kind of backlash and recalibration of culture that we're going through right now.
00:55:52.000 So when you look at that timeline, where do you see?
00:55:55.000 sort of the breaking point?
00:55:56.000 So you say that, and there was by the polling data, a tremendous upsurge in optimism with the election of Barack Obama.
00:56:03.000 Race relations in the United States were on an optimistic trajectory.
00:56:06.000 Both black Americans and white Americans, by all available polling data, were very optimistic about race relations in the United States circa about 2009, and then you can see a sharp dive starting about 2013.
00:56:17.000 And so, you know, there's a temptation always to sort of ascribe racial problems to the Trump administration, the first Trump election and all the rest, but the reality is that that seems to have been symptomatic of something that was already happening by the data that I'm looking at.
00:56:31.000 Oh, very much so.
00:56:32.000 So I think that the disillusionment, it's multifaceted, of course, but obviously, Occupy Wall Street and the kind of reaction to the economic crisis cannot be dismissed.
00:56:44.000 And that kind of formed a template for, I think, a left-wing kind of reaction and activism that then found its real purpose and calling with the rise of social media, with the ubiquity of smartphones and the distribution of videos of police violence and vigilante violence against black people, the circulation of those videos.
00:57:06.000 Trayvon Martin is a real inflection point, the beginning of Black Lives Matter and a kind of just growing.
00:57:11.000 disillusionment during the second term of the Obama administration that then found its real purpose once Trump was elected in twenty sixteen.
00:57:22.000 Well, again, looking at that trajectory, do you think that President Obama bears some responsibility for that?
00:57:27.000 I've made the case that the most important election of my lifetime was not twenty sixteen, twenty twenty or twenty twenty four, that the most important election was actually twenty twelve.
00:57:34.000 The reason being that in two thousand eight, President Obama came in, he basically suggested that he was a unifying figure, he was going to unify right and left.
00:57:42.000 There wasn't a red blue or a red America or a blue America.
00:57:44.000 There wasn't a black America or a white America.
00:57:46.000 This was legitimately the rhetoric he used in two thousand eight.
00:57:48.000 in 2008, coming in in sort of his own personage as a unifying figure.
00:57:53.000 And then by 2012, after his approval ratings had nosedive thanks to Obamacare, the rise of the Tea Party and all the rest, in 2012, he ran a significantly more polarizing campaign.
00:58:03.000 He really tried to kind of agglomerate various identity groups together, which is why you saw a radical shift in the way Democrats started to approach politics.
00:58:11.000 Instead of sort of broadcasting, they started narrowcasting to various different audiences figuring that they had a rising majority minority coalition that this was never going to be defeated again because demographics were destiny.
00:58:22.000 And then I think they were totally shocked by the election of President Trump because of that.
00:58:25.000 And so we're now in this kind of reactionary cycle from one identity politics to the other.
00:58:31.000 Well, absolutely, we're in a reactionary cycle.
00:58:33.000 And I think the first time I really became aware of the dynamic you're talking about was with the loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
00:58:41.000 Mark Lilla, the Columbia University professor, wrote a very interesting book, The Once in Future Liberal, in which he talked about how if you just went on the Democrats' website, the DNC's website, they had seventeen different messages for seventeen different groups they had identified as part of their coalition.
00:58:58.000 Whereas if you went on the RNC's website, they had one platform, whether you might like it or not.
00:59:03.000 You might like it or not, but they had one platform, take it or leave it.
00:59:06.000 The Democrats were micromass messaging.
00:59:08.000 I saw that I became aware of that first in 2016, but I do think that Barack Obama is not entirely without fault.
00:59:14.000 I also I think I see things a little differently than you.
00:59:17.000 I think that he probably, no matter what he did, it was any misstep, there was very little attitude.
00:59:24.000 He had no leeway.
00:59:26.000 But I do think he really made a mistake in how he framed the Trayvon Martin killing.
00:59:31.000 When he mused that if he had a child, he would look like Trayvon, that injected a kind of identity angle when the country was already quite outraged and unified, I think, and appalled by the idea that you can't just walk to the store and come home without being stalked and targeted, right?
00:59:47.000 There was unity around that.
00:59:48.000 And I think that if you can imagine Donald Trump saying that about Lake and Riley or something like that, and it would be seized upon by the left as quite a kind of signal that white identity is foregrounded.
01:00:00.000 And I just think that, you know, there were ways to talk about the Trayvon situation based on universal principles that would have brought the country together.
01:00:07.000 I also think, you know, in the book I talk about how I think in retrospect it was quite a mistake the way he handled Officer Crowley's arrest of Henry Louis Gates junior at Harvard University, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
01:00:20.000 That also seemed to inject a level of interference from the president that wasn't necessary or called for and that, you know, violated part of what was the kind of post-racial bargain that Barack Obama had come into office with, which was the idea that we are happy to elect you and to believe that America can become a post-racial society.
01:00:43.000 So therefore, that means that when things like this happen, you trust the process and we already have elected you and you don't actually inject a kind of identity politics into something like the arrest of a Harvard professor.
01:00:54.000 That is just not part of what the post-racial president was supposed to bring to the table.
01:01:00.000 And one of the things that's been sort of fascinating to watch.
01:01:03.000 over the course of the last couple of decades has been the reality that our politics has become significantly less individualistic, and yet individualism is blamed for all of the failings of our politics.
01:01:12.000 And so you have a sort of woke collectivism that has risen on the left.
01:01:16.000 You've seen an identitarian collectivism that's risen on certain parts of the right.
01:01:20.000 I wouldn't say that that's the Trump movement, but I would say that there are certain parts of the Trump movement that are kind of at the fringes that are playing in those waters.
01:01:29.000 And what's blamed innerly is always the idea that meritocracy, rugged individualism are the problem and that the only solution is a collective solution.
01:01:37.000 And so a thing that really hasn't been tried all that much over the course of the last twenty years is the thing that now seems to be blamed by people on a number of sides of the political aisle.
01:01:47.000 Oh, well, individualism?
01:01:51.000 Yes.
01:01:53.000 Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm my my history of writing and my last book especially, Self Portrait in Black and White is a kind of plea for a return to the dignity of the individual and the idea that, you know, we can't just be reduced to the membership of abstract identity categories that we're slotted into.
01:02:11.000 And I think that, you know, I really am optimistic that America will proceed to this kind of multiethnic culture where people are first and foremost, individuals and that what's most salient about you is not that you're that you're that you worship at a different place than I do on the weekend or that you trace your ancestry to a different part of the world, but that you, Ben, and I, Thomas, talk together and we find out what our actual values are and that we believe in values that we can all buy into, irrespective of ancestry or these kind of categories that we divide each other into.
01:02:42.000 Yeah, well, one of the things that's really happened, I think also, is because of the use of language in different ways by the left and the right.
01:02:48.000 There are certain terms that get used that get immediately coded by the brand.
01:02:51.000 So you say multi ethnic and people on the right immediately go, oh, you just mean open immigration.
01:02:55.000 Anyone can come in.
01:02:57.000 that we should multi ethnic just means multicultural.
01:03:00.000 It doesn't mean assimilation.
01:03:01.000 And I think what you're going for, correct me if I'm wrong here, is just that ethnicity is a category that really should not be relevant to the question of individual quality, which I grew up with.
01:03:11.000 I think those of us who grew up in the nineties were basically told this over and over again, which is why I think the nineties may have been the greatest era of American life in this sense, or at least, you know, coming into it.
01:03:21.000 What was the basic idea that it was taken for granted that your race really shouldn't matter, that the Martin Luther King idea that you should be judged by the contents of your character, not the color of your skin, which now you say that and people think that you're being ironic or they think that you're being naive.
01:03:35.000 That's amazing because we all grew up with with that basic concept that that was the hallmark of what it meant to be an American was to judge people by their individual virtue, individual moral quality, their belief in the American system, the constitution, freedom of speech, property, right, like all these things were sort of the things that we grew up with and those things have been exploded.
01:03:55.000 That's absolutely right.
01:03:56.000 I mean, yeah, we're roughly the same age.
01:03:58.000 I'm a bit older than you, but that's the kind of America that I still believe in and that I was raised in and I can't forget.
01:04:04.000 And it's worse than even being naive.
01:04:06.000 You know, I wrote, I've written quite a lot about the idea of, you know, really buying into the idea of color blindness.
01:04:13.000 multiethnic doesn't mean anything other than that we all trace ourselves back to different starting points.
01:04:19.000 And that's fine.
01:04:20.000 America is able to be a dynamic society because of that.
01:04:24.000 But it's not naivety that you're accused of for kind of espousing that point of view.
01:04:27.000 Now it's even worse.
01:04:29.000 It's actually that you are an agent of white supremacy.
01:04:32.000 And it doesn't matter that I myself descend from African slaves as much as I'm descended from European immigrants.
01:04:38.000 That is just a I'm just a black mouthpiece of white supremacy.
01:04:42.000 And just Coleman Hughes has faced that.
01:04:44.000 Many, many black writers and public intellectuals who try to make that point are dismissed quite easily as merely agents of white supremacy.
01:04:52.000 And so it's kind of nefarious that that has just and even, you know, in the discourse, you know, at times, Martin Luther King is not so fashionable when he's associated too closely with that point of view.
01:05:02.000 Well, the book is The Summer of Our Discontent, The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.
01:05:06.000 It's definitely worth reading.
01:05:07.000 Thomas Chatterton Williams always has something interesting to say.
01:05:10.000 Thomas, really appreciate the time.
01:05:12.000 Great to be with you, Ben.
01:05:13.000 Thanks a lot for having me.
01:05:14.000 We'll get to the left's definition of Americanism.
01:05:18.000 The answer remains totally unclear.
01:05:20.000 Vice President Vance has some interesting words on it.
01:05:22.000 The show is continuing for our members right now.
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