Ep. 1818 - The Whole Jimmy Kimmel Firing Saga Is A Lie
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
162.93202
Summary
Jimmy Kimmel went on air after Charlie Kirk was murdered, and said that the murderer was a MAGA supporter. Was he telling the truth or was he telling a malicious lie? Today, we re looking at the truth behind Jimmy Kimmel's suspension.
Transcript
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The left is rallying around Jimmy Kimmel, who was taken off air for telling an egregious and
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malicious lie about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They're rallying around him as some kind
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of free speech martyr. Not Charlie. Not Charlie, who is a free speech martyr. No, no, no. Jimmy
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Kimmel, who was suspended for lying. But not only was Jimmy Kimmel suspended over a lie,
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it turns out the whole story about his suspension is a lie, too. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the
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Michael Knowles Show. Welcome back to the show. The mayor of Chicago
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has a plan to tamp down violence, to reform criminal justice. His plan is to try to get
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rid of the jails. Jails are a sickness, he says, that don't make anyone safer. We'll get to that.
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Jimmy Kimmel lost his job because Trump's FCC wielded authoritarian power to pressure the company
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to fire him. That's the official story from the establishment media, which lies.
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What actually happened? We got the inside scoop, not even from a right-wing outlet. It's from
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The Hollywood Reporter, okay? It's a trade publication for left-wing Hollywood.
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How Jimmy Kimmel's suspension went down. Sponsor panic, a defiant host, and a painful call.
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Subheader, Disney's Bob Iger and Dana Walden wanted to know how Kimmel was going to address
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the situation. What's the situation? That Jimmy Kimmel went on air right after Charlie Kirk was
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murdered by a radical leftist dating a trans furry who wrote Antifa slogans on his bullets.
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He went on air right after that and said that the murderer was actually on the same side
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ideologically as Charlie, that the murderer was a MAGA supporter.
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Malicious, egregious, preposterous lie. So how was Kimmel going to handle the situation? According
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to The Hollywood Reporter, sources say he planned to defend what he said rather than kowtowing to the
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outrage. Disney thought that would fan the flames. There was much more pressure, according to Hollywood
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Reporter, leading up to the suspension than was previously reported. It's a good report. You should
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all read it. Points to the social media SHIT storm that followed Jimmy Kimmel's lie. But
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one thing it also points out is that this suspension did not come primarily from the FCC.
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The FCC, Brendan Carr, chairman of the FCC, came out and he said, look, we need to make sure that the
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networks are abiding by their responsibilities and their obligations because the news networks
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are licensed by the government. They don't have some kind of right to public airwaves. They don't
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have private ownership of public airwaves. They're public. These are public airwaves. And so
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they can say what they want broadly, but they can't tell malicious lies. That then triggers the
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government's legitimate oversight responsibility, as we saw in the case of Jimmy Kimmel.
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Disney was already freaking out. Trump has pointed out that Kimmel's ratings could be a little spotty
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too, and that he's not been as talented as he used to be, and he's kind of weak in recent years.
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But that's all beside the point. It's not about the joke, if there was a joke in that monologue.
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It's about the lie. That's what triggers it. The sponsors, the corporation, Bob Iger, the audience,
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social media, all had turned on Kimmel. The FCC signaled that it might engage in its legally required
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oversight of the news networks. That's why the FCC exists. But Kimmel's suspension had relatively
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little to do with that. Kimmel's suspension came because of what he did and the natural consequences
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that come from companies and audiences and advertisers, all those normal things.
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Kimmel has no one to blame but himself. Nevertheless, nevertheless, the left has kept up this kind of
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rhetoric referring to the Trump administration even in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder as
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constituting a fascist takeover. Here's Rashida Tlaib, one of the squad in Congress.
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And I think it's really important we need to stand up against this.
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Fascist takeover, that's not a bad word. It's a fact. And here in D.C. and across the country,
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it is so incredibly important, Mr. Chair, that this committee does not allow rhetoric
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that defames or paints Washington, D.C. in a way that you all haven't really truly seen.
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You're just reading it. No, you're just reading it or something off of some.
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She said that eight days after Charlie Kirk's assassination.
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Eight days. And she said, it's unbelievable how little function there is in between her ears,
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because she says on the one hand that the Trump administration constitutes a fascist takeover.
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And then in the very same breath, she says, and this committee will not allow for defamation.
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We will not allow. And she kind of catches herself. She goes, I mean, well,
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it won't allow the Trump to defame. Anyway, moving on. I'm glad she said this because it shows you
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something that I think a lot of us have inferred since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which is
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that the left wants to murder us broadly. The left would be fine with our murder. In some cases,
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they would celebrate it. What's my evidence of that? The widespread minimization and mockery
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and outright celebration of Charlie Kirk's assassination from cable news, from MSNBC,
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from the kinds of left-wing streamers that have been platformed, popular left-wing streamers that
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have been platformed in establishment outlets, people like Stephen Bonnell, who called for Republicans
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to fear for their lives when they got to public events, a man who should be prosecuted for that,
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Hassan Piker, very popular left-wing streamer who has called for the streets to soak in the blood
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of capitalists, who has suggested the assassination of a Republican senator, Tom Cotton.
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These guys are the faces of it. But all the way down to your co-workers that you see on Facebook,
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the people you went to school with who are posting on Facebook that it's fine that Charlie Kirk was
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murdered, or further, that it's actually a good thing. And now we have Rashida Tlaib. Eight days later,
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what does she say? She says that Trump is a fascist. What is the import of that statement?
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What does it mean when the left calls right-wingers fascists or Nazis? For a long time,
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conservatives thought that what that meant was these people are hysterical. These people are
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hyperbolic. These people are so silly, they don't even know what fascism and Nazism really mean.
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Oh, those silly, crazy leftists. That's not the import of that kind of statement.
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We now can see in the wake of the assassination of Charlie and in the wake of the reaction to the
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assassination of Charlie, that the political significance of the left calling the right
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fascist or Nazi is to justify our murder. Because in our culture now, if you walked up to someone and
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said, hey, Hitler is on the rise, the implication is you should go kill that person. To compare someone
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to Hitler is to say that any means it would be acceptable to take that person out of society,
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go kill that person. And in the case of the events of last week, that's exactly what happened.
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One of the bullets said, hey, fascist catch. So when Rashida Tlaib says the Trump administration,
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they are fascists and they constitute a takeover of our government, what she is saying,
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especially in the context of last week's assassination, is murder President Trump.
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Now, of course, the left had already been doing that at the highest levels. Joe Biden launched his
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own presidential campaign on the lie, also egregious lie, that Trump had called neo-Nazis
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fine people at Charlottesville, and that Trump posed an existential threat to democracy. If you say
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that someone poses an existential threat to you, you are justifying the killing of that person.
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And of course, we saw in the wake of President Trump's near assassination, many people, including
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that streamer that I just mentioned, Stephen Bunnell, excusing it or encouraging it.
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Eight days after Kirk's murder, a Democrat member of Congress comes out and effectively says,
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you should murder the whole Trump government. And so we can't tolerate this. The firings need to
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continue. The social stigma and ostracism needs to continue. Rashida Tlaib, if she could be thrown out
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of Congress, if the Republicans could muster the votes, they should do that. If they could deport her,
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they should do that too. We cannot tolerate this kind of behavior in society. And that's not from a
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place of vengeance. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord, and I will repay. That's not even merely from
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a place of retribution, though retribution is important, and it's the primary object of the
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justice system. That comes from even a defense of the free marketplace of ideas in the broader public
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square, and stable government, and government by the people, and a constitutional system. You cannot
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have any of those things if people are threatening violence when you engage with them. You can't have
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it. You cannot have a market, as I've been saying now for almost a week, you cannot have a marketplace
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of ideas or anything else if certain actors keep coming in and shooting up the marketplace.
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In order to defend and even expand the marketplace, you have to exclude those actors,
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and you have to exclude those suicidal ideas. So the consequences need to keep up. The firings need
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to keep up. There's some good news on that front. We'll get to that in one second. First, I want to
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at goodranchers.com. Welcome to the table. Final point on this, one of these left-wing streamers.
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I talked about Hassan Piker earlier. This one, Stephen Bonnell, relatively popular, went on Piers
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Morgan's show, not only to call for the existential fear of conservatives in the public square, to say
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that they need to fear for their lives so that they shut up, so that if they didn't want to be murdered,
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then they shouldn't have elected Donald Trump, as he has previously said. But also now, just when you
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think this person has reached the depths of degradation in his extraordinarily deviant and
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degenerate life, he goes on to mock Charlie Kirk's widow for crying over her husband.
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I don't understand you, Destiny. You have so much hatred in your heart.
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It's such a simple thing. If you're going to weaponize somebody's grief against the other party,
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then of course people have a right to fight back against it. I think that she has every right to
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grieve in whatever way she wants. But when that grief is going to be weaponized to do recruitment,
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political recruitment, and further radicalization of the other side, then of course you not only have
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the ability to mock it, I think you have the obligation to mock it. It's insane.
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Stephen Bonnell, a very prominent young left-wing broadcaster, says you have not only the right,
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but the responsibility to mock Charlie Kirk's widow. Why? Because she spoke in public.
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The same reason that they're excusing or celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk.
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He says, oh, she has every right to be sad, but the moment she is sad in public,
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then we have to mock her. Oh, Charlie Kirk and the other conservatives,
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they have every right to their opinions, but the moment that they state their opinions in public,
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It's perfectly fine for them to feel things, but if that leads to any effect in public whatsoever,
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as he says, her speaking will lead to recruitment because it will generate sympathy and empathy,
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and it will be logical, and it will attract people. And we can't have that.
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Which is also part of the reason they murdered Charlie Kirk. It's not just that they murdered
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Charlie Kirk because they didn't like the way he phrased something. It's that he was extremely
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politically effective, more politically effective than anyone else of his generation.
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You got to murder the conservatives who speak up. You got to mock the conservatives who speak up
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when their husbands are murdered. You have to stop any of them from being effective.
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This person is not fit for polite society, and he should be excluded from it. He should not be
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welcome into places of employment. He should not be welcome into clubs and associations. If he wants to
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go have his horrible ideas somewhere in a cabin in the woods, I suppose he can do that. None of us
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will stop him. But in terms of society, he cannot be welcomed into that. He should not be welcomed
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into the marketplace of ideas. What he advocates is the abolition of the marketplace of ideas. And so
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that's the kind of thought that stops thought and the sort of thought that ought to be stopped.
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Happily, he has been demonetized on YouTube. So he makes his money by doing this.
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He's been demonetized on YouTube. That's good. Years ago, he was already banned from
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a social media platform, Twitch. That's all good. It should go further. He should be
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deplatformed from all of these places. He has no right to be in the public square. He damages the
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public square by his very presence in it. He should go away from public life. He should retreat to a
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much more private life. And he should not be welcomed in public life. Elon Musk has called
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for him to be prosecuted. I also have called for him to be prosecuted. He is at this moment
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calling for violence against conservatives who speak on campus, who speak at public events.
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There is a kind of a specificity. There is a kind of urgency. There is a kind of immediacy
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to his incitement of violence here. And this is not just a generic abstract opinion. This is
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immediately in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination. When more events like the one
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at which Charlie Kirk was assassinated will be occurring quickly. And this guy is calling for
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our murder at those events. That guy needs to be in jail and he needs to be in jail for a long time.
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And there is nothing hypocritical about this. There is nothing authoritarian about this.
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This is the basic enforcement of the law. This is the basic enforcement of the norms and standards
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that must exist for any kind of free society to continue. Now, not everyone agrees. I think most
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people agree with that at this point, but not everyone does, including Barry Weiss. You know,
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Barry Weiss, she's a perfectly, perfectly nice lady. She runs the Free Press. She is a former
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left-wing liberal who is now a slightly more centrist liberal. And therefore, in our kind of crazy
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society, she seems almost like she's on the right. But she's not really on the right.
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She's basically a left libertarian. And she runs an outlet called the Free Press,
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which publishes some good work. But this was not good work that she just published.
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She just published an argument against the right basically doing anything right now.
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With regard to Jimmy Kimmel and with regard to the broader de-platforming and
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discouragement of some of these kinds of ideas, Barry said, for those on the right who might like
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what they're seeing from this FCC, remember the Democrats will wield this power again.
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Now, I have a lot of grace for Barry Weiss here. She is new to the right. She's not really on the
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right. But she's new. She used to be on the left. She used to be at left-wing outlets. And so she's
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new. And I'm not surprised that she's making these kinds of arguments. But it's not correct.
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The argument that she is making is, it basically boils down to the right at this moment should not
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wield the power that we have for justice and the common good. In other words, we should not govern
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now. I'm not persuaded. I'm not fearful of using the power that we legitimately have in ways that
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are just today, after the people gave us that power, because the left might in the future
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hypothetically do the thing that they always do, that they've been doing for many decades. I guess
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I'm not afraid of that hypothetical, which already exists. And furthermore, I don't think there's
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anything unprincipled about wielding that power today. If you're an anarchist or an extreme libertarian,
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then I guess, yes, it would run contrary to your principles to govern. But I'm not any of those
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things. I'm a conservative. And I recognize that the FCC exists for a reason. The FCC exists
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to regulate these kinds of things, to regulate broadcast news, the broadcast stations. In the
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article itself, not just the tweet, the article itself, have it right here, the jaw boning in
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Jimmy Kimmel. The editors, the editorial board writes, the suspension of his late night show isn't
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a great loss to the culture, but the FCC's coercion undermines our most fundamental values.
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Our most fundamental values? What's our most fundamental value?
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Lying about the assassination of a civil debater is our most fundamental. Letting a hack comedian
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tell an egregious and malicious lie on public airwaves is one of our most fundamental values?
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I don't know. I guess we have different political philosophies. I don't think that's what James
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Madison and Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton considered to be one of the most fundamental
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values of America. At no point in our history have we believed that letting people, much less a hack
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comedian, egregiously lie about important national events on public airwaves is a value. My question to
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them is, what's the point of the FCC? If the point of the FCC is not to regulate what happens on public
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airwaves, what is the point of the FCC? There isn't one. I guess the argument you hear from some of these
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guys is just, well, maybe we shouldn't have an FCC. Maybe we should just let the invisible hand of the
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free market. Okay, whatever. All right. You have a different conception of government. I'm talking about
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our government, though. I'm talking about our system. I'm talking about our fundamental values.
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Not only does it not run contrary to the purpose of the FCC to call this stuff out,
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that's the whole point of it. And I am afraid that the laissez-faire liberalism that allows the
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left to get away with its increasingly murderous designs, overtly murderous designs, not just the
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wacko who shot Charlie, but all of the many people throughout all of the strata of the left who
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celebrated it. I'm not letting that go. I think we've all had enough. And I think we're going to do
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something. We've tried not doing something about it. That led to the destruction of our public square and
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the assassination of the most civil, generous, prominent public debater we have. So we tried that.
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That didn't work. Now I think we're going to do our jobs and accept our responsibility in society.
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Speaking of strange theories of criminal justice, here we have Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson
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arguing that if you want to stop crime, you have to let people out of jail.
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The fact of the matter is we are driving violence down in this city and we're using every single
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resource that's available to us. Jails and incarceration and law enforcement is a sickness
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that has not led to safe communities. Jails are a sickness that do not lead to safe communities.
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You hear this sometimes, not just from the libs on the left, but even from the libertarians.
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So we have an over-incarceration problem. Here was Brandon Johnson saying, he says, oh,
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a crime, it's going down in Chicago. It's great. Really, you think that? Does anyone really think that?
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Hey, hey, if you think that, then go out to the south side at about 11 p.m., maybe around midnight,
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just walk around in a nice polo shirt and chinos. Tell me how you do. Oh, you don't want to do that?
00:24:43.540
No, you don't want to leave your car unlocked? You don't want to come to a complete stop at a
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traffic light in a certain place? Come on. No one thinks Chicago is safe. Crime is out of control in
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Chicago. Many people are murdered every weekend. But we're not putting people in jail, right? Maybe
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that's the problem. It actually relates to the same error that is being made here by the people
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complaining about the FCC or the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel or any of it. They say, if we ever
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do anything to try to address a problem, it's only going to make the problem worse. And it's the same
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kind of glib libertarianism that says that, you know, the government never does anything right.
00:25:23.680
And really, the ideal form of government is to get rid of the government altogether. And then the
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magical, invisible hand, which is providence for atheists, that will fix everything.
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If only we stop incarcerating criminals, then we'll have less crime. That is defied by
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all of the crime statistics we ever have had. But furthermore, it gets to a deeper question
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that is philosophical. And it's, how do you help criminals? How do you help criminals?
00:25:56.900
People are committing crimes for all sorts of reasons, because of defects of their will,
00:26:00.960
because of bad circumstances in which they grew up, because of the ignorance in which they're mired.
00:26:04.700
And so they commit crimes. And we have to protect society from those people. And we have to give
00:26:09.400
those people retribution because of the crimes that they committed. But we also want to rehabilitate
00:26:13.800
those people. So the question becomes, how do you help the criminals? Do you help the criminal
00:26:18.260
by letting them get out of jail? That's the argument made by Brandon Johnson. That's the
00:26:22.820
argument made by the left. That's the argument made by Rashida Tlaib, who wants to abolish prisons.
00:26:28.400
That's the argument made even by some on the right who were pushing President Trump in the first
00:26:32.320
term to let criminals out of jail. The Kim Kardashians of the coalition. Is that the way you help
00:26:38.320
them? Or do you help them by punishing them? And on this point, I think I'm going to turn away from
00:26:45.600
the mayor of Chicago. I'm going to go back to Plato, who wrote a whole book about this called
00:26:49.200
Gorgias in Antiquity, in which he argues in the voice of Socrates that the way to help someone who's
00:26:58.320
doing injustice is not to let them off the hook, but actually to punish them as a kind of medicine.
00:27:04.500
Because, Socrates argues, it is worse to do injustice than to suffer injustice. To suffer
00:27:11.440
injustice might damage your body. To do injustice damages your soul. For those of us who have a
00:27:19.540
sense of the eternal destiny of man, we would say that to suffer injustice might have temporal effects,
00:27:26.380
but to commit injustice has eternal effects. It could affect our lives in the hereafter. But it even
00:27:33.260
affects our lives now. If you allow someone to persist in vice and ignorance all the time,
00:27:38.460
their lives are going to get worse. And so it's actually an act of mercy to punish the guilty.
00:27:44.400
It will help them to reform. You might not always like the medicine that the doctor assigns you,
00:27:49.980
but if you don't take the medicine, you're going to die. And if you allow criminals to persist in
00:27:55.360
their crime and to keep getting away with it, they're going to suffer a kind of a spiritual death.
00:27:59.480
It's just like when you're raising kids. If you, if you, you don't want to punish your toddler
00:28:04.700
because, you know, it feels bad and you want your toddler to like you or something. And you,
00:28:09.700
so you let him get away with it, let him get away with it, let him get away with it. You're not doing
00:28:12.620
him any favors. You're damaging him and he's going to get worse and worse and worse. It's going to have
00:28:17.280
bad effects. It's the same thing in society. It's the same thing when we think about the relation of
00:28:23.880
the government to criminals. And it's, it's no surprise that Chicago is a third world country
00:28:28.700
under that kind of idea. Well, that idea hasn't worked. Maybe we need to try something else.
00:28:34.580
Laissez-faire, hands-off, let the left threaten to murder us hasn't worked. Maybe we need to try
00:28:38.940
something else. Maybe this really is an inflection point. He's not the only one who says it,
00:28:45.040
the mayor of Chicago, a Jasmine Crockett, the new AOC in Congress. She, she goes even further.
00:28:53.920
She, she says that committing a crime does not make you a criminal.
00:28:58.800
I understood what was kind of pushing them there. And so I do want people to know that just because
00:29:06.360
someone has committed a crime, it doesn't make them a criminal. That, that is completely different.
00:29:12.280
Being a criminal is more so about your mindset. Committing a crime can come for a lot of different
00:29:18.660
reasons. Said Contra, committing a crime does in fact make you a criminal. And the ideology that
00:29:29.160
she's advancing here is so pernicious. It's so subtle, but it's, you see it throughout liberalism.
00:29:34.840
It says, no, no, no, what you do has no connection to who you are.
00:29:38.960
Yeah, you might do crimes all the time, but on the inside, if you don't think of yourself as a
00:29:45.940
criminal, if you don't identify as a criminal, you're not a criminal. What makes you a criminal
00:29:50.560
is when you identify as a criminal. It's a mindset. Well, this is what the left says about identity
00:29:56.360
broadly. Your, your physical conditions, your actions, your social relations have nothing to do
00:30:03.800
with who you really are. It's just all in the imagination. That's all the imagination is all
00:30:08.640
that matters. Of course, that is not true. We are what we habitually do. We are creatures of habit,
00:30:17.480
virtue and vice or habits. Virtuous people do a lot of virtuous things. Vicious people do a lot of
00:30:26.700
vicious things. None of us is good. None of us can be holy on our own. We are born with a fallen
00:30:34.920
nature and the law exists to show us our sin and to direct us to the need for a savior and to
00:30:43.520
direct us to, to pray for grace. And then we can cooperate with grace and cultivate habits of virtue.
00:30:50.580
And then we can be, we're not still not like good people, but we can be better. We can be more fully
00:30:56.820
human. We can be more fully what we are supposed to be. Or we can persist in our, in our vices and
00:31:04.280
pretend that what we do has nothing to do with who we really are. And then we can live in imagination
00:31:09.900
land, but the reality around us is going to fall into crime and decay and destruction. And this ties in
00:31:16.860
with the latest update about the alleged shooter, the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk.
00:31:23.380
There's a report from the New York Post that says that the alleged shooter was a big fan of playing
00:31:31.240
a video game. He was a big video gamer and he was apparently quite addicted to pornography and so much
00:31:37.760
so that he actually played video games that are pornographic. Apparently there are porn video games
00:31:44.080
now. We will live to see horrors beyond our imagination, as I think Nikola Tesla told us.
00:31:50.860
He was a big fan of this porn video game. He played it quite recently. And not only was he gay,
00:31:57.060
and not only was he dating a self-identified trans, but he was also something called a furry.
00:32:02.980
A furry is someone who is sexually attracted to human beings in anthropomorphic animal costumes.
00:32:10.300
And so I guess the video game was a gay, furry video game. According to the Post last week,
00:32:18.240
this account associated with the shooter on the site had recently watched content,
00:32:23.140
not only depicting this kind of stuff, but also created by a user named Red Rusker,
00:32:28.900
who is an artist known for furry pornography, who has admitted to drawing images showing underage
00:32:33.920
characters having sex. So cover your ears if young people are listening to this. We now find out
00:32:41.660
that the shooter was addicted to pornographic video games depicting a kind of sex with animals that was
00:32:52.780
also pedophilic. How did we get there? How did we get there? How did we get to that point?
00:33:04.980
When I was a kid, I remember when I got my first computer, and I certainly remember before we had
00:33:09.600
the internet in our house. In part, that was because we didn't have a lot of money. But there was a time,
00:33:15.920
I'm not even all that old. I feel like an old man sometimes, but I'm not that old. But there was a
00:33:21.140
time within living memory when people didn't have computers in their house. And they certainly didn't
00:33:27.320
have the internet. And let's just say they certainly didn't have furry shades of gay three on their
00:33:33.440
computers. There was a time when pornography existed as it's existed since antiquity. But when to purchase it,
00:33:40.620
you had to go into a seedy store in a trench coat trying to hide your identity and ask for the
00:33:47.160
magazine that was covered up in foil. There was not assumed to be some constitutional right to
00:33:51.940
pornography in magazines. It was in a packaging where you couldn't see it because kids would go
00:33:56.840
into magazine stores. And you would have to talk to a human being and hand him some money and buy
00:34:02.080
the magazine that showed naked ladies. It didn't show furry shades of gay three. It showed
00:34:07.040
like naked ladies. And that was considered obscene enough.
00:34:13.980
Now, we've let this problem fester. In the 90s, when computers and the internet became popular,
00:34:20.800
there were two laws that were passed. The Communications Decency Act, from which we get
00:34:26.200
the now famous Section 230, which is supposed to regulate the big tech companies, but actually gave
00:34:33.060
them kind of a carve out. It was very important to political debates over speech on the internet a few
00:34:36.400
years ago. The Communications Decency Act primarily was about decency in communications. And the Child
00:34:42.000
Online Protection Act. Both of these had broad bipartisan support, were signed into law, liberal
00:34:48.180
judges gutted them. Everyone at that time agreed, we need restrictions on obscenity, because it can
00:34:57.660
really pervert people's minds, especially the minds of children. That's why we call it the Child
00:35:01.220
Online Protection Act. And then we just kind of looked away, because of liberal judges and because
00:35:08.020
of a laissez-faire ideology. I said, what's the big deal? All right, it's some naked ladies on the
00:35:13.720
internet. Okay, it's some naked men and ladies on the internet. Okay, now it's some naked, now it's like
00:35:20.840
animals that look like, okay, now it's underage. Okay, now it's in video games. Now, whoa, whoa, whoa.
00:35:27.440
You very quickly get to a degree of degeneracy that previously was more or less unimaginable.
00:35:36.760
The laissez-faire, hand of the free market, hasn't corrected that. The government exists in part to
00:35:42.840
correct these things. And so while everyone's focusing on the ideology of the shooter, on the
00:35:48.320
defenses of political violence that have come from the left, let's not lose sight also of the obscenity,
00:35:54.360
because the guy was a complete sex freak. Our culture broadly said you're not even allowed
00:35:59.460
to use phrases like perversion anymore. But he was a profoundly sexually perverted person.
00:36:06.300
I think we all have to admit that candidly. And he was encouraged in his perversions by
00:36:12.140
public resources like the internet. And one of the things that is supposed to be kept out of the
00:36:20.260
public square that is not protected by the First Amendment is obscenity. Why? That's for the same
00:36:27.500
reason that we don't allow direct threats in the public square, why we need to de-platform people
00:36:31.480
like the streamer Stephen Bunnell. Because if you allow direct threats in the public square, if you
00:36:36.340
protect those, it undermines the public square. It undermines discourse. It shuts people up. It
00:36:41.460
doesn't encourage people to speak more freely. If you permit fraud, lies, the sorts of lies that
00:36:47.760
that Jimmy Kimmel said on public airwaves. If you allow fraud in the public square, that doesn't
00:36:52.840
expand the public square. It doesn't add another voice. It undermines. It shrinks the public square
00:36:57.180
because it undermines market integrity. It tells people that you can't trust what is being said.
00:37:03.460
If you allow obscenity and appeals to the prurient interest into the public square, that doesn't expand
00:37:10.780
the public square. It is not, as some perverts in judicial outfits in the 20th century said,
00:37:16.800
it does not constitute protected speech because it undermines speech.
00:37:22.920
Speech is rational. Speech makes use of our reason and allows us to arrive at the truth and to live
00:37:29.960
in accordance with the truth. That's what it's for. Obscenity appeals to the prurient interest.
00:37:36.220
When you're looking at pornography, don't even think about furry shades of gay. Talk about like regular,
00:37:42.100
normal pornography that you'd buy in the magazines in the 1990s before all of this internet.
00:37:46.680
Even that, any kind of pornographic material. When you see that, does it make you more rational or
00:37:53.640
less rational? We all know it makes you less rational. This is why advertising tries to get
00:37:59.180
up to the line of obscenity because they know that sex sells because it prevents you from thinking in a
00:38:04.040
rational way and it gets you to be more emotional and ginned up and lustful and irrational so that you
00:38:09.620
can be more easily manipulated. It is an open question. Had we properly regulated pornography
00:38:17.380
as both parties tried to do in the 90s, would that assassin have picked up that gun?
00:38:25.740
He says he was driven by a sexual ideology to protect his trans furry boyfriend. Would he have
00:38:33.160
become so hardened in those deviant desires and in that deviant identity? Would he have been exposed
00:38:40.360
to it in the first place? Would that have happened? You know, we sometimes draw a distinction between
00:38:46.540
public and private sins. There's really no such thing because society is made up of people and people
00:38:51.640
are the same people in private and in public. Are we going to take that seriously too? It seems to me
00:38:58.560
the obvious reform that has to come after the assassination of Charlie is a reform to the free marketplace
00:39:06.600
of ideas to protect it, to prop it up again. Not to abolish it or something, but to re-fortify it such that
00:39:16.020
we can have a healthy conversation and a self-government. A big part of that is going to be
00:39:22.420
obscenity too. It's not just a weird, creepy fact that the alleged shooter was a gay furry attracted to
00:39:31.620
transgenders who played porn video games and liked the work of artists who depicted minors.
00:39:37.780
That's not just a coincidence. That's part of the whole degeneration of this person's mind and the
00:39:47.860
degeneration of our public square. For over a week, we paused advertisements and any appeals to Daily
00:39:53.240
Wire memberships to focus on the only thing that really matters in this moment, which is remembering
00:39:57.680
and honoring the legacy of Charlie Kirk. Without even being asked, you still showed up. You watched,
00:40:04.820
you commented, you shared, you supported us by becoming Daily Wire members. You reminded us once
00:40:09.180
again that we are not alone in this fight and that we will not be silenced and that together we will
00:40:14.900
keep building the future. Thank you for standing with us. You are what makes America great and
00:40:19.180
inspire all of us here to continue the work we do every day. My favorite comment yesterday is from
00:40:25.520
SBrowny130 who says, what is sad? The left is more upset about someone losing their show than someone
00:40:30.000
losing their life. Yep. Yeah, that's not true for all liberals, but it's uncomfortably true for a
00:40:37.500
broad swath of them. Finally, we arrive at the mailbag. Our mailbag is sponsored by Pure Talk at
00:40:42.480
puretalk.com slash Noel's Relish. Your free one-year membership to Daily Wire Plus. Take it away.
00:40:47.760
Hi, Michael. I have a bit of a mixed message today. I am saddened by the news of Charlie Kirk,
00:40:55.640
but at the same time, on the same day, nearly the same time as the announcement of his death,
00:41:03.820
my brother is having a baby. I don't know how to feel about this. I'm saddened by the news of Charlie
00:41:13.120
Kirk, and I need some guidance here. I don't know how to feel. I don't know how to act, and I think your
00:41:22.540
words of wisdom might be able to help. Please help me. Thank you for all you do, and God bless. God
00:41:32.920
speed. Okay, good question, and congratulations on your brother's kid. You're saying, is it all right
00:41:41.300
to be happy about good things, even when really bad things happen?
00:41:46.000
Yes, of course. If that were not the case, you could never be happy.
00:41:54.520
I don't mean to make light of anything. I don't mean to be overly reductive, but yes, of course,
00:42:02.720
very horrible things happen all the time. The assassination of Charlie was a particular
00:42:08.680
national trauma, and the reaction to it was a secondary trauma, but very, very horrible things
00:42:15.420
happen every day in the fallen world, and good things happen too. And what likely will happen
00:42:20.640
is that the bad thing will depress your spirit just a little bit. You're going to walk around,
00:42:25.680
and you're going to be a little bit glum, certainly in the immediacy after, in the immediate days after
00:42:31.200
the tragedy. It would be good, I think, especially that you're a man, not to dwell on it too much,
00:42:37.800
not to sob and sit around and cry all the time, have a little bit of a stiff upper lip, you know?
00:42:42.040
I was saying this after Charlie's assassination. A few days later, I really let it wash over me,
00:42:49.640
and I let the tears come right up to my eye. I let them come right up, and then I pushed it all
00:42:58.340
right back down. I let it come up. I let it wash over me, sitting alone in my office at night. But,
00:43:03.140
you know, you're a guy. You got to be tough. You got to be tough. You're not allowed to say that
00:43:06.300
anymore, but it's true. So, yes, let it affect you. Mourn, grieve, that's all real. But recognize
00:43:14.920
that the world is not totally lost. And there are, in fact, glimpses of good things in the world,
00:43:23.220
and they point to the ultimate good that we can find. Because there's darkness all over,
00:43:31.960
but light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not comprehend it. Okay. Next question.
00:43:38.700
Who can be compared like unto God? My brother Michael. Hail Mary. You have been critical of
00:43:45.320
dual citizenship, but you've also stated in the past that patriotism is a duty to one's country,
00:43:52.000
not a conformity of intellect and will to the ideals of that country. But if one is raised in two
00:43:59.700
countries and two cultures with two family ties, then does not one also have a duty to honor both
00:44:05.640
so long as they cohere to the higher principle of the faith? Second, isn't it interesting how
00:44:14.020
Libs will use the violinist argument to justify abortion because the violinist has no right to
00:44:20.640
your body? But if you are near death, then the violinist has a claim to your organs before you're
00:44:28.000
even dead. Since all arguments are about utility and not principle for them. Your thoughts?
00:44:34.540
Great observation. I love that observation at the end. The violinist argument, I won't recite it now.
00:44:41.760
It's one of these stupid arguments from the 70s or something about abortion. And it defends a mother's
00:44:47.500
supposed right to murder her kid. In the vein that the child has no right to the body of the mother,
00:44:54.500
just as if you woke up in a hospital strapped to a violinist who was living off of your body,
00:45:00.760
that he would have no right to do that and you would have every right to cut him loose.
00:45:06.160
So they make that argument about abortion, but then the moment anyone's in a car wreck or something,
00:45:11.040
they all claim that they have a right to every single one of your organs, even though the
00:45:13.760
harvesting of those organs very likely would be the thing that kills you. That's a good observation.
00:45:16.700
I like that. I don't like that that happens, but I like that observation. To your first point,
00:45:20.300
though, on dual citizenship, what about people who are raised in two countries with two cultures?
00:45:25.280
Yes, they will feel a kind of a familial draw and reverence and filial piety to those cultures,
00:45:32.880
and it's just not ideal. It's like children of divorce. You might grow up, I mean, divorce is a
00:45:38.720
horrible, horrible evil. And so if parents are divorced, you could have a kid who spends one week
00:45:47.180
at one parent's house and then the next week at the next parent's house. And in principle,
00:45:51.200
they have two homes, right? But really, no, because you can't have two homes. So that will
00:45:57.560
result in competing loyalties and a kind of a, I don't know, a kind of a schizophrenia, I guess.
00:46:05.880
So it's just not good. You should not be raised in two countries. It's fine to travel. It's good to
00:46:10.300
have affinity for other cultures. Some of my ancestors come from Italy. I have a great deal of
00:46:14.340
affection for Italy, and I like to go visit, but you really should have one home and one culture.
00:46:20.060
To raise someone with two homes is really to deprive them of a home. Okay, the rest of the
00:46:26.220
show continues now. We have the iPad. I will be talking to you. You do not want to miss it. We
00:46:30.600
have more voice mailbag. We have more written mailbag. We have a lot. See you over there.