Ep. 1590 - This Man Was Just Arrested For Murdering A Retired Cop. Now He’s Being Hailed As A Hero.
Episode Stats
Summary
On Friday morning, Rodney Hinton watched the body camera footage of his son being shot and killed by a police officer. After watching it, he went to the city attorney s office to file a wrongful death suit against the city of Dayton, Ohio.
Transcript
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, this will sound like a rerun. A guy committed cold-blooded murder,
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and now the social media mob is rallying around him. In this case, the victim was a retired
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police officer. This is the third killer in the past few months to find a cheering section
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on social media. What the hell's going on? Also, Trump delivers a perfect response to the totally
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fake AI Pope Trump controversy. And the state of Virginia passes a law restricting social media use
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for kids. I'm told this is a slippery slope and government overreach. I'm not persuaded.
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We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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spice. That's balanceofnature.com, promo code Walsh. Around 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday,
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a man named Rodney Hinton went to his lawyer's office in Ohio and watched body camera footage
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of his son's death. And in particular, the footage shows Hinton's 18-year-old son,
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Ryan, emerging from a stolen vehicle while carrying a handgun. At one point,
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Ryan drops the gun and then picks it up. And soon afterward, he's shot and killed by a police
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officer. None of these facts are in dispute. The video makes it all very clear. Watch.
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He's got a gun. He's got a gun on your right, on your right.
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it all began with a stolen vehicle, a Kia from Edgewood, Kentucky.
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GPS tracking led the investigation here, a condo complex in East Price Hill.
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Officers arrived, and Chief Terry Fiji explains what happened next.
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Yes, all four individuals get out and start running.
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Some in different directions. So officers decide which individual they're going to pursue.
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One officer decides to pursue the individual who we now know had a firearm in his hand.
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They heard the metal from the firearm, hit the concrete.
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This individual gets up, still has a firearm in his hand, and continues to run through the dumpster.
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Now, the reason the Hinton family was watching this footage in an attorney's office is that,
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of course, they were contemplating a lawsuit against the city for wrongful death.
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That was certainly what their attorney was thinking about.
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In fact, even after viewing this footage, the family's lawyer, who incidentally works for the Cochran firm,
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as in the late Johnny Cochran's firm, maintained that they had a case.
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And here's what the family's lawyer said as a way of arguing that the police officers were somehow responsible in this scenario.
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Now, admittedly, it's not quite as catchy as if the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit,
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but it's still a pretty remarkable line of argument from the Cochran firm, all things considered.
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After watching the footage of Ryan Hinton exiting a stolen car with a handgun,
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then dropping the handgun and picking it up as police chased him,
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and then turning towards the officers, the conclusion from these lawyers is that Hinton
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was murdered simply for open-carrying a firearm.
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He got the death penalty for doing nothing wrong whatsoever.
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Even though his gun wasn't holstered, and even though he was waving it around while committing a felony,
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and even though all of this is recorded, we're supposed to conclude that Ryan Hinton was open-carrying,
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Now, this is a level of shamelessness that, in another era,
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would lead to a flurry of lawyer jokes on late-night television,
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but it's not a joke to millions of people at the moment.
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It certainly wasn't a joke to Rodney Hinton, the father of the teenager who was killed.
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And just hours after he viewed the body camera footage of his son's death,
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Rodney Hinton got in his car with the intent of executing a police officer.
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He saw it as an act of revenge, and ultimately, he found a target.
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He ran over a recently retired sheriff's deputy who was directing traffic
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outside the commencement ceremony at the University of Cincinnati.
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The slain officer, a Hamilton County deputy named Larry Henderson,
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after police say a driver intentionally hit him.
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Cincinnati police say the driver is the father of an 18-year-old
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Cincinnati police say the father of the 18-year-old
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who was shot and killed by Cincinnati police on Thursday
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was driving the car that hit and killed a deputy Friday afternoon.
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Rodney Hinton, Jr., is now charged with aggravated murder for the deputy's death.
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Cincinnati police say the deputy was directing traffic ahead of UC's graduation ceremony
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when he was struck by a vehicle entering the intersection.
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It happened around 1 p.m. at the intersection of Martin Luther King Drive
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Now, Rodney Hinton knew that the police were justified in killing his son
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because they had just watched the body camera footage.
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If the father wanted to revenge, take revenge on anyone for causing his son's death,
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I mean, if your 18-year-old son is out with a gun stealing cars,
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Even a minimal amount of fatherly guidance would avoid a situation like that.
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Kids make bad decisions doesn't always mean that it's an indictment on the parents.
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But if a kid's only 18 and he's already out with a gun committing felonies,
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then, like, yeah, you failed in the most basic way imaginable.
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Rodney Hinton decided to kill a police officer who was directing traffic.
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So this should be an open and shut case in every sense.
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His revenge, obviously, cannot be justified legally.
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And any hope of defending it morally is destroyed by the fact that,
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But also, the shooting of Ryan Hinton was justified.
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So it's not even like, you know, he's taking revenge on someone who murdered his kid.
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And also, the cop he killed had nothing to do with it anyway.
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So this is not like a Gary Plochet situation where a father ambushed and killed a man who kidnapped and molested his son.
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This is an act of premeditated, cold-blooded murder against a random white cop who is entirely innocent and had nothing to do with the situation at all.
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And yet, stop me if you've heard this one before,
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this murderer is being lionized and defended on social media.
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The father who just executed a sheriff's deputy in order to avenge his criminal son who flashed a gun to the cops
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is the latest celebrity in certain corners of social media.
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The viral clips defending this murderer are all over TikTok.
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I mean, you can go to TikTok if you want and see it.
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Just type in his name and you'll see nothing but these kinds of videos.
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You know, if they said he had a gun, this is what they said.
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But in that picture, it looked like he was running away.
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But sad as it may sound, when this happened, they actually showed his father the video of them unloving his son.
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It's a bunch of them in the courtroom surrounding the father while he's in an orange jumpsuit.
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Because the very next day, he took justice in his own hands and went and unloved a police officer.
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Well, he gets the age of the so-called kid wrong as he's, you know, showing these sympathetic photos in the background.
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Ryan Hinton was 18, not 16, when he jumped out of the stolen car with the firearm.
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But the bigger issue with the video is the claim that the father, quote, took justice in his own hands by murdering a random police officer.
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Notice how there's no pretext here about how the officers did something wrong or violated procedure or any of that.
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There's no explanation of how it's justice to kill a random traffic cop or to unalive a traffic cop, as this guy puts it.
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It's just assumed that killing a random white police officer is an appropriate response to the death of a black criminal.
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And millions of people find this reasoning persuasive at the moment.
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I mean, that's the situation we're in right now.
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You know, for the past half century or so, every aspect of American civic life has been devoted, at least superficially, to preventing a situation like this.
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I mean, if you spend trillions of dollars enacting a regime that rigidly enforces the seemingly laudable goal of racial equality,
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and then, you know, surely, eventually, you know, you'll arrive at a point where all men are judged based solely on the content of their character.
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I mean, that was supposed to be the idea anyway.
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That's the grand experiment we've all been participating in for our entire lives.
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And with each passing day, it's becoming more and more clear that this experiment is crashing down all around us.
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We are heading very directly towards open and overt, overt racial conflict.
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And to that end, here's another similar video, which has more than 20,000 likes on TikTok.
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We'll mute the audio because it's just obnoxious rap music.
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It shows Rodney Hinton in court in a jumpsuit, surrounded by a bunch of police officers.
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And there's the caption that the uploader has added, quote,
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they really tried to use over 30 deputies to intimidate Rodney Hinton, but he kept his head up, close quote.
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It's not some random troll that didn't get any attention.
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It's one of the most popular posts about Rodney Hinton's arrest.
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And people are responding to it because they genuinely believe that Hinton is a hero,
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or at the very least, he was justified, or at the very least, he's a sympathetic figure.
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There's no rational argument that he's innocent, or that he was actually justified, or that his son was innocent.
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So this is just pure racial resentment spilling right out in the open.
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Another post with roughly 70,000 likes on TikTok describes Rodney Hinton as a mourning father,
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Now, you look around any social media platform, and you'll find plenty of posts like this.
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On X, here's a post with roughly 700 likes, quote,
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Rodney Hinton had no criminal record before he killed an Ohio cop in retaliation for the cops killing his son.
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The police department brought 30 cops to his hearing to intimidate him, close quote.
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So apparently you get to kill a cop if you have no prior criminal record,
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and the police aren't allowed to guard you either, even after you've just murdered somebody.
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Then there's this post with more than 1,000 likes, quote,
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All I'm saying is, if a cop killed my son, I'm airing out the precinct.
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Rodney Hinton Jr. is a saint and a hero, close quote.
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Now, yesterday we discussed the story of Shiloh Hendricks,
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the woman who has now raised hundreds of thousands of dollars after using a racial slur at a playground.
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What's happening now with Rodney Hinton is yet another example of why Shiloh Hendricks raised all that money.
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You know, if you're saying that justice is somehow served by the execution of a random white police officer
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in the name of defending a thug who stole a car and flashed a gun, and many people are saying this,
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then you don't get to clutch your pearls because of Shiloh Hendricks.
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I mean, the standards are so wildly out of whack that it's just not sustainable.
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Okay, like saying, it's okay if we kill people, but not okay if you use naughty language.
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And with every day, it becomes more and more apparent that we simply cannot continue on this trajectory.
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If large numbers of black people are openly defending and cheering for actual murderers who kill white people in cold blood,
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then you cannot tell white people that they have to make a big show of condemning a woman who said a bad word.
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And that's especially true as more and more white people are executed without any media attention whatsoever.
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For example, you probably haven't heard of this story of a 22-year-old woman named Logan Federico in South Carolina.
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And according to the authorities, Logan Federico was, quote,
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randomly murdered by a career criminal who was on a spree of thefts, break-ins, and credit card fraud.
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And that career criminal named, a 30-year-old named Alexander Dickey, allegedly broke into a neighboring home around 3 a.m.,
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stole a firearm, credit card, and debit cards, and keys to a vehicle.
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He then allegedly entered the house where Federico was staying, entered a room, shot her before fleeing the scene in a stolen vehicle, close quote.
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So this is yet another person that, you know, has committed multiple crimes, given chance after chance after chance,
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because what the justice system says to people like this is that we're going to keep putting you on the street,
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keep putting you back on the street until you do something so heinous that we have no choice but to put you in prison for an actual, like, significant length of time.
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It's basically like, we're going to let you keep going and criminal and victimizing people until you kill someone.
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We're just going to wait for that to happen, and then we will deal with you.
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Now, somehow that story didn't get much national attention, and neither did this one involving the execution of Tara and Taylor Jones
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in front of their home in the affluent neighborhood of Wellington, Florida, last year.
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Surveillance footage shows that Tara and Taylor Jones were shot to death by a 63-year-old mechanic named Norman Scott
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There was no public show of support for these victims.
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Instead, we're now at the point where three, count them, three, cold-blooded killers in the span of a few months
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have found large cheering sections on social media, including Rodney Hinton, Carmelo Anthony, and Luigi Mangione.
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In fact, one of these viral TikTok videos supporting Rodney Hinton with more than 20,000 likes
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actually brings up Luigi Mangione in this context.
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That silent rage, and you know, people mistake black Americans sitting out.
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People mistake that black Americans sitting out doing line dances and stuff.
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And this happened with more than just black Americans months ago.
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The laws of this country and what's going on in this country pushing things to the brink.
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People can say, oh, listen, no, it didn't start there.
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It didn't start on the streets when Luigi did it.
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It didn't start on the streets when Mr. Hinton did it.
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It started right with the lawmakers and the rich folk who are always putting too much pressure
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And when that pressure has nowhere else to go, it points back to set itself free.
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And then you can't brandish your gun at the cops.
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And they're trying to arrest you for committing a felony.
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So those are the laws that are responsible for this.
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And also the law that says you can't brandish your gun at the cops.
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Well, there is one useful aspect of this totally inane video that we just watched,
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which is that it makes the point that the situation isn't all about race.
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Luigi Mangione was obviously white, and plenty of people justified his actions too.
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In fact, as you probably recall, some people who call themselves conservatives also justified
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And that tells us that we're witnessing a general breakdown of law and order on top of the racial
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You know, decades of justifying and excusing criminality have led us to a point where people
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who commit blatant first-degree murder are celebrated, at least if they're viewed as allies
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And again, we've had now three of these cases in five months.
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So as you continue to hear the high-pitched outrage over Shiloh Hendricks, keep in mind
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that nothing she did in any universe could ever end your life or the life of anyone you care
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The people cheering the execution of an innocent police officer or a CEO or a white high school
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student at Attract Me, on the other hand, are actually dangerous.
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I mean, they're the ones you should be hearing about nonstop.
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They're the actual threat to you and your family.
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They're the ones who are trying to bring about a complete breakdown in law and order.
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And as the execution of this police officer in Cincinnati once again demonstrates, even if
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they can't destroy somebody like Shiloh Hendricks, they will still do everything in their power
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The conclusion to the Trump as Pope saga that we discussed yesterday.
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Catholics were not so happy about the image of you looking like the Pope.
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Somebody made up a picture of me dressed like the Pope, and they put it out on the Internet.
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To the best of my knowledge, popes aren't big on getting married, are they?
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I think it's the fake news media that, you know, they're fakers.
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My question, though, sir, was about the fact that it was put out on the White House account,
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even though it was AI-generated, it was a joke, it was a meme.
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Does it at all diminish the substance of the official White House account to have it go
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That could be the response to about 85% of the questions that the media asks Trump, or,
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I mean, actually, probably 99%, give me a break.
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And he's also right, of course, that the Catholics were not offended.
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Catholics are not easily offended, in my experience, certainly not by jokes.
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I mean, as I said yesterday, Catholics tend to have a kind of morbid, pretty edgy sense
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of humor, and this AI Pope thing was neither morbid or edgy.
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So you've got to try a lot harder to offend Catholics, I mean, actual believing, practicing
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I'll tell you one thing that offends us deeply is, for example, seeing a Democrat politician
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on the one or two occasions when they go to church in a year, all for show, of course,
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when they do show up, like on Easter and Christmas, if they even go then.
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But on those occasions, when they go up and receive communion, that offends us, because
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Someone who is not actually a practicing Catholic, who rejects church teaching, who promotes
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mortal sin, who is guilty of the sin of scandal, their entire public existence is scandal.
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Existing as someone who calls yourself Catholic and yet promotes and supports the murder of
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babies and the destruction of marriage and so on, that is scandal.
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So seeing them receiving communion and desecrating the Eucharist in defiance of church teaching,
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A Democrat politician receiving communion, Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or Kathy Hochul, who
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we just found out yesterday because she was pretending to be offended by this thing.
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I think it's the first time she's mentioned allegedly being Catholic.
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But any of them receiving communion is approximately 10 billion times more offensive than a Pope meme.
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But when it comes to that, of course, the media doesn't.
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And so it's always this weird, and this happens like every once in a blue moon when it's convenient
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But so it's one of these weird occasions where the media, not only do you have Democrats who
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are Catholic pretending that they care about their faith, but the media pretending to care
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about how Catholics feel, pretending to care about the feelings of Catholics, pretending to
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stand up for their Catholic brothers and sisters is very funny.
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When it comes to this issue, which is something Catholics, again, actual practicing, which is
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to say real Catholics, this is something we've been complaining about and talking about and
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outraged about, outraged in a real kind of deep, justified sense forever, which is these
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Democrat politicians receiving communion when they shouldn't be.
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According to church teaching, they shouldn't be.
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But when it comes to that, the media, like that's what we're actually offended about.
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The media in that case would, you know, just scoff at us.
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Speaking of people who like to scoff, David French was on MSNBC doing his whole shtick.
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And there's a couple of things here that I want to respond to, but let's first watch
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David French on MSNBC if we can, if we can bear to watch it.
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You need a barbarian to fight back against you.
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And what I'm getting from you is you don't really believe that, that the barbarians aren't,
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I mean, look, if Donald Trump wouldn't be a barbarian in this scenario, you know, and
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think about how contrary this is to the example of Jesus, because Jesus comes to ancient Israel
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when it's under Roman occupation, where the people of Israel are deeply oppressed and
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He doesn't come and rule in the way that these Christian right people want to rule.
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He serves other people and even forgives the people are executing him as they're executing
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And yet you look at this Christian right, the MAGA Christian right, it is will to power.
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Look how they applaud as Trump is cruel to immigrants, just vicious, depriving them of
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This is nothing about this is drawn from historic Christian theology.
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Uh, so a few things here, speaking of things that are actually offensive to Catholics and
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Christians generally, uh, here's another one when you're using the name of Christ as
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a, uh, as a, you know, as a, as when you're using, uh, the, the example of Jesus allegedly
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to make some, uh, uh, inane and false political point that misrepresents Christ's actual teachings
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And that's what David French does here because he says, he says, he says, well, you know, Jesus
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But then he's applying that to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and, and saying that
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somehow that means that, you know, Donald Trump and the MAGA movement aren't following
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So of course we want to rule in the sense of governing, in the sense of controlling the
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government, in the sense of enacting our agenda through law and policy.
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I mean, you're correct, David, that Jesus was not interested in that, but that doesn't mean
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Jesus did not come to be a political ruler of the earth.
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Uh, Jesus did not come to run for office, right?
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Or to be, uh, you know, or, or to be a, a, a political ruler, but that doesn't, so what
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I mean, it's like nobody can, is that, is it, it's anti-Christian somehow if you're, if
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you want to have political control, if you want to run for office, I mean, it's incoherent.
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Like we still, we have a government and we have elections.
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So if conservatives will not rule, quote unquote, then the left will.
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And meanwhile, you'll sit on the sidelines and not get involved in any meaningful way in
00:29:00.420
And then you'll exclusively criticize the people on the right who are in the fight.
00:29:04.800
So, I mean, exclusively, these guys like David French, they don't even pretend to do the
00:29:15.280
It started with when you got these guys that used to be basically conservative and they were
00:29:21.740
defending conservative ideas and promoting conservatism.
00:29:29.420
And for a while, on their way to just being full blown left or left this way, on their
00:29:35.300
way to it, there was a while where they were like in the middle, sort of pretending to be
00:29:46.000
He's exclusively focused on criticizing one side and one side only.
00:29:49.800
And it's not the side that actively despises Christianity and wants to see it wiped from
00:30:01.500
And that's the part that David always leaves out.
00:30:06.120
But he's also, he represents this kind of, what still identifies itself as conservatism would
00:30:18.380
pretend to be a kind of, I guess, moderate, above it all conservatism, but it's not conservatism
00:30:25.760
But, you know, he takes exception to the way that the quote unquote Christian right fights
00:30:44.560
No, if the Christian right doesn't fight for power, then the anti-Christian left,
00:30:48.380
will remain in power because that's the other option.
00:30:52.480
The other option is that the side that has murdered 60 million babies and castrated thousands
00:30:57.140
of children, and that opposes every single bit of Christian moral doctrine, the side that
00:31:02.500
sees the institution of the family as the enemy, as a thing that must be destroyed, right?
00:31:23.200
And then we hear him, of course, lamenting cruelty, cruelty to immigrants.
00:31:29.620
It's the cruelty of enforcing the border, the cruelty of defending our national sovereignty,
00:31:36.900
I mean, none of these things are actually cruel.
00:31:38.680
Cruelty means by definition that you're sadistic, that you take pleasure in causing pain and suffering.
00:31:50.800
Cruelty is not doing something that causes pain and suffering.
00:31:56.420
You can do things that cause pain and suffering that aren't cruel.
00:31:58.760
If you're doing it in order to cause pain and suffering, if you're doing it because you
00:32:02.620
enjoy the pain and suffering, if the pain and suffering is the end that you're trying to
00:32:11.440
Well, that's not, nobody who supports America having borders and laws does so because they
00:32:23.500
Okay, if you think that Americans want strong borders and immigration laws just because they
00:32:27.220
enjoy seeing immigrants in pain, then first of all, you have no understanding of these
00:32:33.300
And you obviously harbor a deep, deep resentment and hate towards a huge number of your fellow
00:32:43.400
And you are assuming the absolute worst in them.
00:32:54.060
Assuming the absolute worst and people will disagree with you.
00:33:01.900
The other option, as we've seen, is a country flooded with criminal aliens, gangs, drugs.
00:33:06.960
The other option is untold misery, death, violence, destruction.
00:33:18.700
He just wants to sit on the sideline and nitpick and criticize the people who are actually in
00:33:26.800
I've dealt with a lot of this in the last days.
00:33:28.800
We talked about the Shiloh Hendricks case yesterday.
00:33:30.360
And of course, I've been, you know, as you would expect, I've been getting plenty of grief
00:33:37.200
Well, many of them, you know, the left obviously is upset about it because, you know, but I
00:33:50.500
I've also been getting a lot of grief from people ostensibly on the right who were, you
00:34:00.440
My position, if you watched yesterday, you know, it's that, it's that, yeah, it's bad to
00:34:04.960
use a racial slur to a child to say a racial slur to a child is a bad thing.
00:34:18.220
And, you know, my argument, it's like, it's, it's, I went into it in great detail for 20,
00:34:25.360
The main thing is that this is, this is repudiating cancel culture, that if you want to destroy
00:34:31.320
cancel culture, there have to be disincentives attached to it because that's how human beings
00:34:36.720
Human beings are, they, they, they operate based on incentives and that's how the mob works
00:34:44.800
And if the mob knows that, you know, making someone famous, as they say, putting their name
00:34:49.420
and likeness all over the place, finding all their personal information, publishing it,
00:34:53.020
if they know that that might actually have a positive impact on the person's life in the end,
00:35:02.540
So that's the main thing to me is that the, the fundraiser part of it was, you know, going
00:35:11.660
on the offense against cancel culture and also going on the offense against these utterly
00:35:22.720
It's the, it's the cancel culture and racial double standards.
00:35:28.300
It's not even about what happened on a playground, but in any case, uh, plenty of so-called conservatives
00:35:41.640
And, but my question to them, and, and, and I noticed that a lot of them obviously didn't
00:35:47.080
They weren't engaging with the argument, but even, and some of them did, there were some,
00:35:50.740
a few people that tried to thoughtfully engage with my arguments.
00:35:53.700
But the one thing that was missing was, was, okay, what would you have us do instead?
00:36:01.120
So what I'm saying and what a lot of people are saying is that this is a, this is a, an
00:36:06.360
effective and really devastating way to fight back against cancel culture and racial double
00:36:11.300
standards, uh, which are both great evils in society that have harmed people and harm society
00:36:34.920
What's your plan for, how are you going to destroy cancel culture?
00:36:38.860
What are you going to do about these racial double standards that we've all been complaining
00:36:46.700
This is not, this to you is not, you don't like it.
00:36:55.100
And, uh, from these people, there's, there's really no answer to that.
00:36:59.660
The answer is always something like, well, uh, well, you know, nobody should, this
00:37:09.560
That's it's no one should engage in, in a cancel culture.
00:37:12.820
There should, you know, there should be no racial double.
00:37:14.680
Well, yeah, we know that talking about the way things should be is not a plan.
00:37:24.640
And that's why to me, this is the dividing line.
00:37:28.200
You know, people have a lot of different ways of dividing conservatives, different labels
00:37:32.180
that they use for the type of conservative that they don't like.
00:37:36.480
Uh, woke, right, for example, is one label that's used now by certain people on the right
00:37:43.900
or ostensibly on the right towards other people on the right that they don't like.
00:37:48.080
As far as I can tell, woke, right, what it really means, I don't even know exactly what
00:37:52.160
they want it to mean, but what it really means is this person is too far to the right.
00:37:57.740
They're, they're, they're farther to the right than I am.
00:38:08.500
To me, there are two groups, generally speaking, among conservatives.
00:38:13.680
And I would borrow from Teddy Roosevelt to explain these groups.
00:38:18.400
The groups are, on one hand, the men in the arena.
00:38:22.040
And on the other hand, the critics, you know, as Roosevelt said, it's not the critic who
00:38:27.880
It's not the, the man who points out how the strong man stumbles.
00:38:30.540
Uh, the credit belongs to the man who's actually in the arena.
00:38:34.560
The dividing line really is between the people who are in the fight, who have, who have actual
00:38:39.980
influence, who are trying to, you know, cultivate and wield actual influence.
00:38:44.940
Um, who are shifting the culture to the right, who are doing the hard, sometimes, sometimes
00:38:52.020
ugly work of shifting the Overton window by force of will.
00:39:03.540
And then there are the people standing on the sidelines and going, eh, I don't know about
00:39:11.780
I don't like, I don't like how you're doing it.
00:39:19.660
It reminds me of when, when you're, when your wife asks you to carry some really heavy piece
00:39:23.660
of furniture up the steps and then inevitably you get to the top of the steps and she sees
00:39:28.860
what it looks like in the room and says, eh, nevermind, I actually wanted it downstairs.
00:39:32.220
But anyway, as you're carrying this big bulky thing, uh, and she's standing there saying,
00:39:46.520
It's not, but it's not, I'm like, I'm the one actually carrying this thing.
00:39:55.600
And, um, David French is the equivalent of that really on a cultural level.
00:40:01.500
And all these people are the people complaining about woke, right?
00:40:04.000
And all this, all this, uh, they're the equivalent of that.
00:40:10.680
They're, they are not going to actually, you know, roll their sleeves up and get in there
00:40:19.020
Instead, they're going to stand on the sideline and they're going to criticize the way those
00:40:24.960
They're not going to help, but they don't like the way you're doing it.
00:40:32.720
And when I, uh, when I think about who I respect among conservatives and who I would consider
00:40:39.340
my, you know, friends and allies, it's, it's the former group, the men, the men in the arena.
00:40:47.660
And all the critics who are on the sidelines who have not done anything, who have no real
00:40:51.120
influence, who are just talking to themselves, who, you know, have no wins under their belt
00:40:58.020
I mean, the right has some real wins, especially in recent years.
00:41:05.320
Obviously there's still a lot to be done, but we have some real wins.
00:41:08.940
Like things have changed in the culture and the culture has, I think, generally shifted
00:41:13.360
to the right in, in some areas and, and, and significantly in some areas.
00:41:17.180
And so when you look at that, there are certain people you can point to and say, okay, well,
00:41:24.400
Clearly there's not, there's not one person you could point to and say though, well, they
00:41:28.700
did it all, obviously, but there are certain people you can look at and say, yeah, well,
00:41:33.760
they, they really had something to do with that.
00:41:37.480
And then there are a lot of other conservatives.
00:41:38.840
And now, and by the way, I'm talking about all the, this is exclusively talking about the
00:41:42.260
conservative sort of commentariat, the, uh, the, the pundits, the, the, the influencers,
00:41:48.580
So in that group, there are certain people in that group you can look at and say, okay,
00:41:52.600
well, yeah, they clearly had something to do with that.
00:41:57.120
And then there's another group who had nothing to do with it, that they, they could have never
00:42:01.960
They could have never gotten into public life at all.
00:42:04.220
They could, uh, have just gotten a job, you know, somewhere else, not on the public stage.
00:42:09.160
And the culture would look exactly the same as it does right now, because they have done
00:42:22.020
Um, absolutely no use for them because they are useless, just useless.
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Our friend and colleague Andrew Klavan has a brand new book out, and it's a must-read.
00:43:48.360
It's called The Kingdom of Cain, Finding God in the Literature of Darkness.
00:43:51.680
Only Klavan could take Cain and Abel, Dostoevsky, and Hitchcock and pull out a powerful case
00:43:58.500
It's sharp, it's moving, and it's exactly what you expect from a best-selling novelist
00:44:17.320
Our daily cancellation today begins with the news of a new law just passed in Virginia.
00:44:22.120
The Daily Wire reports, Republican Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin signed a bill into
00:44:26.080
law on Friday to limit the social media use of minors under the age of 16 to one hour per
00:44:30.900
The Consumer Data Protection Act, supported by both Republican and Democrat state lawmakers,
00:44:35.200
will require social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to limit minors' time
00:44:41.260
Platforms will use neutral age screen mechanisms to determine the age of users and then limit their
00:44:47.840
Parents, per the law, will be required to give verifiable consent if they want their child's
00:44:54.940
Now, to be clear about my own position, I'm in favor of this law.
00:44:59.500
I think laws like this should be passed in every state.
00:45:05.380
The average 11-year-old kid in America spends nine hours a day on a screen.
00:45:08.840
The average five-year-old spends three hours a day.
00:45:10.860
Children of all ages spend on average five hours a day just on social media.
00:45:14.460
And keep in mind that these are averages, and the numbers are skewed by the minority of
00:45:21.200
kids who have mean parents like me who won't let them use any screen but a TV, and then
00:45:27.900
So, you know, nine hours a day of screen time on average means that millions of kids are
00:45:35.700
And it means that a huge number of kids are quite literally spending every waking moment
00:45:43.440
A childhood dominated by screens, a childhood lived in a digital world rather than the actual
00:45:48.440
physical world, a childhood spent sitting and staring into a little glowing box, that
00:45:52.520
is a tragedy with immense and terrible consequences.
00:45:56.180
And that's without considering what these kids are actually doing on the screens.
00:45:59.860
And among the worst things they can do, second only to watching, is social media.
00:46:03.820
The impact of social media on kids is widely, but I still think only partially understood.
00:46:10.100
We know that it makes kids more depressed, more anxious, more miserable, less healthy.
00:46:14.640
We still don't have the full picture because the first generation of screen children, children
00:46:20.660
of the screen, we might call them, have only just hit adulthood.
00:46:24.480
I mean, these are kids who were born into a world where everybody walks around with screens
00:46:28.900
Many of them have been raised on the screen from birth.
00:46:31.180
And we're only just beginning to see the consequences of that.
00:46:38.420
I mean, it's clear beyond any dispute that a child using a screen for hours every day,
00:46:42.480
especially if he's on the internet, can only harm him.
00:46:45.500
I mean, there is zero chance that your 10-year-old child's life will be improved by social media.
00:46:49.460
It can only damage him mentally, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually.
00:46:56.760
And yet, whenever there's an attempt to pass any kind of law to deal with this problem,
00:47:00.980
there will always be people, many of them, again, conservatives, panicking about government
00:47:09.340
And I've seen a lot of commentary along these lines in response to this legislation in Virginia.
00:47:13.740
You can take a glance at the comments under that Daily Wire article I just read about this law.
00:47:19.040
And you'll see many of these sorts of objections.
00:47:21.940
So here's just a quick sample, just as an example.
00:47:25.260
Quote, seems like a slippery slope of government control doesn't end well.
00:47:28.880
Start with something good that everyone agrees on, but the box has been opened.
00:47:36.580
Screen time should be minimized, but it's up to the parents how it's done.
00:47:40.880
It's also a slippery slope, as other feel-good laws have been.
00:47:44.140
Another one says, freedom means having the ability to make bad choices and hopefully learn
00:47:51.160
Even if they agree with their decisions, the government should not control this.
00:47:55.100
And also, it says, this type of government overreach will get a Democrat back as governor
00:48:01.900
On a political note, who are you to tell anyone how to raise their kids?
00:48:06.180
Another comment says, there are many things that could cause mental illness in children
00:48:08.820
I believe that this is something that parents should control and not the government.
00:48:14.600
You hear them any time there's any attempt to use the force of law to protect children
00:48:17.580
from the manifold harms found on the internet and social media.
00:48:21.180
And I find the arguments extremely unpersuasive.
00:48:27.200
Multi-billion dollar companies are selling products, smartphones, social media platforms,
00:48:31.820
that basic common sense, and also every study on the subject, tells us can and does cause
00:48:41.780
It's not overreach for the government to put up minimal guardrails in the interest of protecting
00:48:58.860
The hard, just imagine a dystopian future where an 11-year-old boy isn't spending any
00:49:07.140
Go outside, run in the grass, play some pickup basketball in the driveway, make actual friends
00:49:10.820
in real life, learn how to talk to actual physical people?
00:49:17.840
I hope we slip and slide our way into a world where a child spends much more time engaging
00:49:24.120
Now, it's true that this is something that parents can and should do themselves, but we
00:49:33.440
need laws, you know, just like we need laws protecting kids from problems, because the
00:49:38.400
reality is that a lot of parents are not doing it.
00:49:41.040
I mean, if your solution to a problem is parents should do it, then you don't actually have a
00:49:46.100
Talking about what people should do is not a solution.
00:49:55.540
That's the entire reason we have laws in the first place.
00:49:59.520
Now, if we could totally rely on parents to do their job, we wouldn't need any law against
00:50:05.940
We wouldn't need any law against nine-year-olds driving or smoking cigarettes.
00:50:08.920
I mean, my 12-year-old kids, my 12-year-old twins, they are not buying liquor.
00:50:20.780
And even if it was legal, they still would not be doing any of those things.
00:50:23.700
The thing stopping my kids from doing that stuff is not that it's illegal.
00:50:32.220
And yet, we still have laws against that stuff.
00:50:35.520
And as a parent, I don't take exception to that.
00:50:38.760
I don't think, well, you're trying to parent for me.
00:50:41.000
No, I recognize that, yeah, I mean, I'm an attentive parent, so my kids aren't doing
00:50:45.880
But like, yeah, obviously, we should, if someone, if a kid has a bad parent, if a 10-year-old
00:50:54.080
kid has a bad parent and walks into a liquor store, you know, to buy some vodka, it's like,
00:50:58.920
that still shouldn't, the fact that he has a bad parent shouldn't mean that now we're just
00:51:02.220
going to accept the fact that he's going to get alcohol poisoning, right?
00:51:05.440
So I don't hear people panicking about slippery slopes when it comes to that stuff.
00:51:09.640
We understand, in those contexts at least, that children are not adults, and so there
00:51:12.980
need to be different kinds of laws protecting them.
00:51:14.780
We also understand that people don't always do what they should do, including parents.
00:51:19.120
Every law exists because people don't do what they should do.
00:51:22.160
Saying that we shouldn't pass usage restrictions on social media or age limit restrictions on
00:51:26.080
pornography because parents should do that is like saying that we shouldn't have laws
00:51:30.320
against murder because people should just not murder.
00:51:35.620
I mean, it's the job of every individual to not murder.
00:51:38.580
You shouldn't need the government to tell you not to do it.
00:51:41.300
You should just not do any murdering regardless, and yet a lot of people do, which is why we
00:51:47.460
have the laws, just like a lot of parents actually do give their young children unfettered access
00:51:58.740
So don't, it goes back to what we said in the five headlines, just saying, well, people
00:52:05.120
That's not a solution to the problem that we're talking about, is it?
00:52:11.440
And they're not ever, like there's never going to be a time when everyone just does everything
00:52:19.320
All that said, all that said, I do agree that protecting children from the harms of
00:52:25.140
social media and screen addiction is a job that should be handled by parents.
00:52:31.520
And if you do handle it as a parent, then the law will be irrelevant to you.
00:52:37.340
It makes no difference, which is what it should be.
00:52:40.480
And if you're one of these parents who lets your 10-year-old use social media, then you
00:52:46.580
should be ashamed that legislation is required to do what you should be doing yourself.
00:52:52.660
And so ultimately, it's the parents who've made these kinds of laws necessary who are