Speaker 1: Welcome to today's podcast sponsored by Hillsdale College. All Things
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Speaker 1: iTunes and Hillsdale Jes. Welcome back in America. I've changed
Speaker 1: Matt Continetti's thump music. Matt is the head of Domestic
Speaker 1: Studies at AEI. He is also a calumnist for the
Speaker 1: Wall Street Chunal Free Expressions Page. But he really belongs
Speaker 1: to the city, being the city of the district to
Speaker 1: Columbia and the Beltway. He's really mister Beltway. I think
Speaker 1: he was at the White House Correspondence Association dinner at
Speaker 1: Junior High. Am I right about that? Matt? Did you
Speaker 1: go when you're like in sixth grade?
Speaker 2: No, though I did.
Speaker 3: Used to go to the Capitol Building when I played
Speaker 3: hooky from high school. To show you what a political
Speaker 3: nerd I am.
Speaker 2: You you are so I when you.
Speaker 4: Could go and you could sit in the gallery and
Speaker 4: even take the Capitol Hill subway, you know, without having
Speaker 4: a pass.
Speaker 2: That those were the glory days.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you're married. Before that came out on national
Speaker 1: television and radio, you wouldn't have been able to put
Speaker 1: that on your dating profile on the app.
Speaker 2: What's done is done.
Speaker 1: I have no shame, all right, Matt. You remember ten
Speaker 1: years ago, I'm sure you do, the Comet Ping Pong
Speaker 1: pizzeria shooter who walked in to feed the freed the
Speaker 1: kids because he'd been deep into the inner tubes and
Speaker 1: he'd become persuaded that there was a pedophilia ring that
Speaker 1: kept children hostage in the basement of Comet Pizza. Do
Speaker 1: you remember that?
Speaker 2: I remember well.
Speaker 3: It was on all the news, and Democrats denounced it
Speaker 3: and offered entreaties for everyone to tone down the rhetoric
Speaker 3: as a result.
Speaker 1: It was ten years ago and three miles away from
Speaker 1: the White House Correspondence Association dinner. Now the lunatic and
Speaker 1: President Trump called him crazy and unbalanced and troubled. On
Speaker 1: Sunday night, that lunatic swam in waters similar to the
Speaker 1: unbalanced man who shot up comment pizza. Do you think
Speaker 1: the reaction to the waters of the ten year ago
Speaker 1: that's four chan and QAnon will be the same as
Speaker 1: the reaction to the waters in which this guy swam,
Speaker 1: which is basically blue Sky and Jimmy.
Speaker 3: Kimmel, Well, I don't think the response from Democrats is
Speaker 3: the same, Hugh. I think that plenty of Democrats condemned
Speaker 3: political violence in the abstract in the aftermath of this
Speaker 3: attempted assassination of President Trump and his cabinet at the
Speaker 3: White House Correspondents dinner.
Speaker 2: But very few have.
Speaker 3: Affirmatively stated that President Trump is not any of the
Speaker 3: horrible things that the assassin claimed he was, and that
Speaker 3: Nora O'Donnell repeated to the President's face less than twenty
Speaker 3: four hours after the assassination attempt on sixty minutes Sunday night.
Speaker 2: So that's what I'm looking for.
Speaker 3: I would I would ask the Democratic leaders to go
Speaker 3: out there and say, for starters that Trump is not Hitler,
Speaker 3: that Trump is not a dictator, He's not a king.
Speaker 3: He is a populist politician. He has his flaws, he
Speaker 3: there are ways to criticize him. Democrats can have a
Speaker 3: different view of where the country is going or should go,
Speaker 3: but they need to really pull back on the depiction
Speaker 3: of Trump as some type of fascist leader, because what
Speaker 3: that does is it lowers the bar for people who
Speaker 3: think that they are going to save the country by
Speaker 3: going after this president in a violent way.
Speaker 1: Now, I began the program with Aaron McLain, who has
Speaker 1: put out the School of War podcast today with Douglas Murray,
Speaker 1: and there's two of the leading public intellectuals like you,
Speaker 1: they're going to be around for decades. And they ended
Speaker 1: up talking about the meaning crisis, which is too many
Speaker 1: people of both the far left and the far right
Speaker 1: lack meaning and so they attach on to this crazy stuff.
Speaker 1: But also education in America has failed, both in the
Speaker 1: numeracy and literacy but also into basic civic education. What
Speaker 1: do we do about that matter? That's not an unsolvable problem.
Speaker 2: Well, these are big issues.
Speaker 3: And you know, my hero Charles Kradhammer like to say
Speaker 3: that politics matters most because if you get the politics right,
Speaker 3: then everything else will follow. But if you screw up
Speaker 3: your politics, then all you're going to reap is misery.
Speaker 3: And I think that beyond these kind of metaphysical questions
Speaker 3: you discussed in your previous interview, Hugh, we need to
Speaker 3: think about the politics here. And our political system is
Speaker 3: kind of off kilter, and the fact that the primaries
Speaker 3: now matter more than the general election. The fact that
Speaker 3: the type of hateful rhetoric is normalized online and appropriated
Speaker 3: by elected officials. That's been a feature in temperate rhetoric,
Speaker 3: has been a feature of American politics, but it's certainly
Speaker 3: producing I think viral effects now with the new landscape
Speaker 3: of social media where you have three assassination attempts on
Speaker 3: Donald Trump in less than two years. You have the
Speaker 3: high profile shooting of Charlie Kirk, a conservative leader. You
Speaker 3: have the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO, and then
Speaker 3: the lionization of his murderer. There's something going wrong with
Speaker 3: our political system, and I think it starts with just
Speaker 3: across the board denunciations of these acts full stop, and
Speaker 3: denunciations of people who would justify them, like the Democrat's
Speaker 3: newest heart throb, this Hassan piker guy who was featured
Speaker 3: in the New York Times justifying murder just a few
Speaker 3: days before this assassination attempt on President Trump.
Speaker 1: Well, it is an extension of the from the River
Speaker 1: to the Sea rhetoric. It's an extension of the takeover
Speaker 1: of your Alma Maters campus by radicals and Murray talks
Speaker 1: about that. They they all those young activists from high
Speaker 1: schools around the United States arrived at Columbia expecting to
Speaker 1: be climate activists, and they became hamas activists and they've
Speaker 1: been they've been bent, and I really think we've got
Speaker 1: to go back deeper than college. Can't save this. Now,
Speaker 1: this goes back into your high school. Did you have
Speaker 1: a sane teacher for American government? Did you have a
Speaker 1: great inspiring teacher anywhere that said read these books over here?
Speaker 3: Oh, I had several great teachers at public schools in
Speaker 3: northern Virginia, Hugh that I'm forever grateful for my ap
Speaker 3: US history teacher, in particular, Kevin Kelly, fantastic teacher. He
Speaker 3: assigned Richard Hofstedder's American political tradition as as a senior
Speaker 3: in high school, and I'm sorry, in junior in high school,
Speaker 3: I read that book and it really kind of opened
Speaker 3: my eyes. And I think there are great teachers out there.
Speaker 3: But I'll say that one thing that's going wrong with
Speaker 3: our political system is this desire for absolutist solutions. You
Speaker 3: mentioned the climate hysteria there, the idea that we're going
Speaker 3: to rid the world of fossil fuels in order to
Speaker 3: prevent this apocalypse. That's sort of apocalyptic thinking that Donald
Speaker 3: Trump is a fascist tyrant who is going to end
Speaker 3: democracy in America. What that does is it inspires people
Speaker 3: to take apocalyptic actions. And so this is where we
Speaker 3: have to move away from in our politics. We have
Speaker 3: to start getting back to kind of serious, concrete discussions
Speaker 3: of the issues. The Israel Palestine is a great example
Speaker 3: of this. This idea that from the river to the sea,
Speaker 3: Palestine must be free. The idea of you're going to
Speaker 3: end a country, the state of Israel, the only homeland,
Speaker 3: national homeland for the Jewish people. You're just going to
Speaker 3: end it and not think about the consequences. That's really
Speaker 3: I think where we've gone wrong. And the Democratic Party
Speaker 3: in particular needs to understand that it is becoming captured
Speaker 3: by radical elements in our society. And that's a danger
Speaker 3: because to have one of our major parties go completely
Speaker 3: off the rails can cause a great deal of damage
Speaker 3: in the short run.
Speaker 1: You know what happened in the twenty twenty primary, Matt
Speaker 1: is that the Democrats had a series of debates with
Speaker 1: friendly moderators, none of them ask them, for example, if
Speaker 1: climate change is really your number one agenda? Why are
Speaker 1: you concerned about the blockade of Iranian oil? Why do
Speaker 1: you think the president? I mean, there's easy questions to
Speaker 1: ask that are not confrontational, not but just generally the
Speaker 1: logic of the left doesn't add up. But they didn't
Speaker 1: get anything except underhand pitching. Will they get other than
Speaker 1: underhand pitching in their selection process this time around?
Speaker 3: I really I'm afraid they won't, Hugh, I really think
Speaker 3: he will be up to some of the candidates, you know,
Speaker 3: I mean there's one. There will be something important I
Speaker 3: think happening if Ram Emmanuel gets on that debate stage
Speaker 3: for the Democratic primary in twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 2: Now, Ram Emmanuel is a liberal Democrat. I don't agree
Speaker 2: with him.
Speaker 1: You're way too polite, Matt. He's way too polite now.
Speaker 4: But you know, I don't know, yeah exactly, you say it,
Speaker 4: and you know the real rom he will he will scratch,
Speaker 4: he will be scrappy, and he will mix it up,
Speaker 4: I think, and introduce some sharp, sharp distinctions in the debates.
Speaker 2: If he gets on stage.
Speaker 4: I think that will be critical because otherwise the voices
Speaker 4: of dissent in the Democratic Party, the.
Speaker 2: Voice is like Emmanuel.
Speaker 3: Then Senator John Fetterman, my favorite Democrat who's different from
Speaker 3: Emmanuel in a lot of ways, but he's courageous in
Speaker 3: standing up for what he sees is tradition liberal beliefs.
Speaker 3: In the Democratic Party, they're going to be shut out
Speaker 3: and it's just going to be a conversation of the
Speaker 3: left among.
Speaker 2: The left and for the left.
Speaker 3: And by the way, Hugh, you know all this glorification
Speaker 3: of the left and the celebration of these I think
Speaker 3: very toxic voices like pikers that are rising within the
Speaker 3: Democratic Party.
Speaker 2: The media loves it, right, but they don't.
Speaker 3: They forget that it was less than two years ago
Speaker 3: that Donald Trump was re elected right in the opposition.
Speaker 2: Yeah, after being in the consigned to the political wilderness.
Speaker 2: So this is still a country that I think is willing.
Speaker 3: To reject the left, and the Democrats are tempting fate
Speaker 3: if they go down this radical course.
Speaker 1: Oh goodness, I hope you are right. Matt Connetty from
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal of the American Enterprise Institute. Follow
Speaker 1: him on at Continetti, read him in the Journal Free
Speaker 1: Expression Vertical, and stay tuned in America. I'm he Hewan
Speaker 1: on the Salem New channel of the Salem Ready or
Speaker 1: not Working, and all of our affiliates north, South, East.
Speaker 5: And West.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to America. I'm joined now by Eli Lake
Speaker 1: of The Free Press, host of Breaking History. He was
Speaker 1: at the White House correspondence dinner on Saturday night. I
Speaker 1: listened to his recounting of it on the Commentary podcast yesterday. Eli,
Speaker 1: I was not there. I was actually at a school
Speaker 1: play hours away. I've only gone once because I hate
Speaker 1: for you, I know, I really really hate those things.
Speaker 1: Part introversion, part Shina's part. I don't do small talk
Speaker 1: very well with people, but some people like it, and
Speaker 1: I'm not condemning it. I am just curious. In the
Speaker 1: aftermat of the Comet Ping Pong pizza shooting, which happened
Speaker 1: in December twenty fifteen, it was about three miles away
Speaker 1: from the Washington Hilton Suddenly, and I knew nothing about
Speaker 1: pizzagate lunacy, but once I learned about it, q Chan suffered.
Speaker 1: We had four chan, QAnon, four chan, anyone who dealt
Speaker 1: in that particular weird, very very odd, left wing conspiracist world.
Speaker 1: They were shunned. Do you expect the same shunning on
Speaker 1: the right yeah, I was on the right. It was
Speaker 1: very on the right. Right right now, do you expect
Speaker 1: the same shunning on the left of the water in
Speaker 1: which this killer or would be statement assassin swam, which
Speaker 1: is the no King's water. That's really what it is.
Speaker 1: It's the no king's water. Will it will no kings
Speaker 1: go away? No.
Speaker 6: I don't think no kings will go away. What I
Speaker 6: do think, though, is that it is kind of forcing
Speaker 6: a new conversation among Democrats. And what I mean by
Speaker 6: that is that if you just look at the sequence
Speaker 6: of events in the last few weeks, the entire news
Speaker 6: cycle about Hassan Piker, who you know, your last guest
Speaker 6: Mike Rogers, kind of went into chapter and verse you
Speaker 6: know things America deserved nine to eleven, praises the communist
Speaker 6: regime in China, supports thinks Hamas's morally.
Speaker 7: Superior to Israel.
Speaker 1: Go through it.
Speaker 6: These are fringe opinions, their radical opinions, and their anti
Speaker 6: American opinions. And there was a column by Ezra Kleine,
Speaker 6: who's very bright New York Times guy and is something
Speaker 6: of a gatekeeper for American liberals, and he is the
Speaker 6: original title of that column was Hassan Piker is not
Speaker 6: the enemy. They change the headline, and then Hassan Piker
Speaker 6: goes on a bunch of other kind of liberal podcasts.
Speaker 6: You know, he goes on Crooked Media, the Pods of
Speaker 6: America guys, And he's asked about some of his past
Speaker 6: statements regarding to Hamas, and he does not use the
Speaker 6: opportunity to sort of say that quote was taken out
Speaker 6: of context.
Speaker 1: This is what I really believe.
Speaker 6: He kind of doubles down, and then you know, we
Speaker 6: see what he does in another New York Times kind
Speaker 6: of really softball interview extraordinary, where you know, he's he
Speaker 6: would like to see you know, more crimes like art
Speaker 6: theft and you know, Mikey, you know, stealing and shoplifting
Speaker 6: is micro eluding. And you know, he understands why a
Speaker 6: lot of Americans supported the you know, Luigi Mangione. So
Speaker 6: these are fringe opinions. And I think something like this
Speaker 6: which kind of makes it real. Uh, you know, thank god,
Speaker 6: this guy did not succeed in any way and didn't
Speaker 6: really get past the first barrier of security for the event,
Speaker 6: so we should say that, but it makes it it.
Speaker 6: I think it will force a kind of conversation. I
Speaker 6: think you're going to see people like rama Manuel. I
Speaker 6: think you're going to see others who are going to
Speaker 6: stand up and start to say, wait a second, we
Speaker 6: are we are committing kind of political suicide if we
Speaker 6: say that the Hassan Pikers are part of our coalition
Speaker 6: and if we just game this out a little bit more,
Speaker 6: because I believe that Hassan Piker is really a proxy
Speaker 6: for a fight between socialists and you know, liberal Democrats
Speaker 6: basically and the party. The Democratic Socialist of America has
Speaker 6: had an entry est strategy, which means that they will
Speaker 6: run in democratic primaries and they'll use their cadres to
Speaker 6: basically kind of get the nomination, and that that is
Speaker 6: that's a strategy that ultimately is aimed at taking over
Speaker 6: the Democratic Party. And I think that now's the time
Speaker 6: for Democrats who a don't agree with this kind of
Speaker 6: thing and be really would like to remain a national
Speaker 6: party capable of winning a presidential election, would have to
Speaker 6: say something like, if Democratic Socialists want to run on
Speaker 6: their own, go right ahead, that you can do that
Speaker 6: in our system, but you're not going to you can't
Speaker 6: be Democrats. You can't run in the same Party as us,
Speaker 6: and in that respect, I think that that's the big
Speaker 6: fight that's coming, and we'll see what happens.
Speaker 1: Because before I wish I was as optimistic as you.
Speaker 1: I look at the Democrats.
Speaker 6: I'm not optimistic. I'm just saying that that's the fight.
Speaker 6: I'm saying.
Speaker 1: I don't know what to hope that they hope it
Speaker 1: actually happens. Yeah, I want. I want there to be
Speaker 1: a fight too. All of my Democratic friends from the eighties,
Speaker 1: nineties and forward, they're all normal people. I had a
Speaker 1: party with them on Friday night before I left town,
Speaker 1: and they're Clinton administration people and Biden administration people in
Speaker 1: Obama administrator, but they're my age and they're not crazy.
Speaker 1: I think the Democratic Party sort of their liberal activists,
Speaker 1: the Joshua Micah Marshall's, the Matthew Iglesias, they all kind
Speaker 1: of lost their footing in a tug of war with
Speaker 1: these people on the left. Ezra Kline, you know, I've
Speaker 1: told this story before. Ezra was in my daughter's class
Speaker 1: back in California, so he's always been the surfing sandit
Speaker 1: to me, he's always in sixth grade. I can't take
Speaker 1: him seriously. But that's not fair to Ezra, he is
Speaker 1: taken seriously, but he's trying to be on with Iglesias
Speaker 1: and Marshall. They've lost they've been pulled over the line
Speaker 1: by the Hassan pikers and the AOC's. I don't know
Speaker 1: how they ever get traction again.
Speaker 6: Well, I mean, this is going to take some work
Speaker 6: if they're serious about saving their party. But you've got
Speaker 6: to find young voices that are willing to stand up,
Speaker 6: that are going to be gen Z in their twenties
Speaker 6: right now, and they're going to they have to be
Speaker 6: willing to sort of stand up and saying this is
Speaker 6: not the direction that we want to go. We don't
Speaker 6: like you know. I mean, if they're Democrats, they don't
Speaker 6: like Trump, that's obvious. So we could say we don't
Speaker 6: like Trump, but we also don't like communists China and Humas.
Speaker 6: I mean, it shouldn't be that difficult to sort of
Speaker 6: say that, but that's what's needed. And you know, what
Speaker 6: I would say is that the right has done a
Speaker 6: pretty good job, in my view, of producing younger conservatives
Speaker 6: at this point. That obviously a lot of them right
Speaker 6: now because that's where the party is. They like Trump,
Speaker 6: but they haven't you know, I look at a guy
Speaker 6: like Josh Hammer, and that guy's terrific. He has not
Speaker 6: gone along with the elements of the right that have
Speaker 6: decided to obsess over Israel and sort of go in
Speaker 6: a populist direction that I think you and I would
Speaker 6: agree is not that great. They need to find their
Speaker 6: young leaders who are going to stand up to a
Speaker 6: Hassan PI or on his own terms. They have to
Speaker 6: find their own streamers, that to find their own podcasters.
Speaker 6: Maybe that's going to be the work over a few years.
Speaker 6: Maybe you can't do it right away. But because I mean,
Speaker 6: you know, Iglesias and Marshall, they're around my age. It's
Speaker 6: it's not really for that generation. It's for the It's
Speaker 6: for the younger people to sort of meet meet the
Speaker 6: Hassan pikers where they are and say no, no, no, not,
Speaker 6: you know, not another step forward.
Speaker 2: This is we don't want this.
Speaker 6: Meanwhile, if I'm the state Democratic Party of South Carolina
Speaker 6: or New York City or whatever, I would make sure
Speaker 6: that if you are a DSA person, you don't get
Speaker 6: to run in my primary, full stop. That's the other
Speaker 6: thing you gotta you gotta, you gotta end their entry
Speaker 6: as strategy which has been going on now for a
Speaker 6: few years.
Speaker 1: At this point, now, I got to go back to
Speaker 1: the generational thing. Uh, you know, Conservative have done a
Speaker 1: pretty good job, and we have one minute, Elis, I
Speaker 1: might keep you for I can't keep you. Who is
Speaker 1: who follows the Mary Katherine Ham, Guy Benson, Seth Mandel's.
Speaker 1: We got a lot of those, Ben Shapiro, a lot
Speaker 1: of forty somethings. Do we have any twenty five year
Speaker 1: old people?
Speaker 6: Well, you know, I painted to the Israel Shabas Keston.
Speaker 6: Bob is a pretty young guy. I think he's pretty good.
Speaker 6: And you'd have to get I got to I got
Speaker 6: to think of it in terms of the right. But
Speaker 6: I think that yeah, you can find those people. In fact,
Speaker 6: I would say the rebels on campus right now. If
Speaker 6: I'm thinking about this kind of as a generational strategy
Speaker 6: on the right, the people who are chafing under wokeness
Speaker 6: at elite universities, those are the future leaders of the
Speaker 6: of the conservative movement as I see it.
Speaker 1: I hope you are right. Eulila can be followed at
Speaker 1: Breaking Histories of Correspondent for the Free Press. Follow him
Speaker 1: on x at Eli Lake. Thank you, Eli, I'll be
Speaker 1: right back in America station be shooting on Saturday night
Speaker 1: because it's a big story and we're beginning to get
Speaker 1: our arms around it. And I begin with Aaron B. McLain.
Speaker 1: Aaron's the host of the School of War podcast. He's
Speaker 1: also a contributor to The Free Press. He is also
Speaker 1: a CBS National Security and I discovered today that after
Speaker 1: his undergraduate years at Saint John's he did what everyone
Speaker 1: would do. He got Masters in Medieval Arabic from Oxford.
Speaker 1: That's kind of what everyone does, right Eric.
Speaker 7: It makes sense at the time. It made sense at
Speaker 7: the time.
Speaker 1: You know, it was it before or after the Marine Corps.
Speaker 8: That was before, that was before, and you know, one
Speaker 8: of its main consequences was it led me to believe,
Speaker 8: when I was joining the Marine Corps that I was
Speaker 8: obviously going to go.
Speaker 7: To Iraq because my Arabic was decent.
Speaker 8: In those days, seven years in the Marine Corps, never
Speaker 8: set foot in an Arabic speaking country, not a layover
Speaker 8: at an airport. Went to Afghanistan instead, which was, you know,
Speaker 8: very operationally exciting, but no one speaks a look of
Speaker 8: Arabic there.
Speaker 1: Now I've got a retired marine Corps Major General Buddy
Speaker 1: mel Spies, and he was in charge of all in
Speaker 1: Marine Corps education, and he said, the sixteen weeks, I
Speaker 1: don't know if is OCS sixteen weeks or was the
Speaker 1: basic school sixteen weeks?
Speaker 8: The basic school is longer than OCS, so it's it's
Speaker 8: probably up there in the sixteen weekghborhood.
Speaker 7: My OCS class was.
Speaker 9: Ten weeks, okay, So he said about the basic school,
Speaker 9: we cram eight weeks of education in the sixteen weeks
Speaker 9: because a lot of our young marines arrive without a
Speaker 9: moral compass.
Speaker 1: In other words, they've got to put judgment and values
Speaker 1: in as well as skills training. You and Douglas Murray,
Speaker 1: in one of the best hours of podcasting I've heard
Speaker 1: in a long time, ended up talking about the collapse
Speaker 1: of American education and allowing people like the would be
Speaker 1: shooter on Saturday Night to emerge twisted, ill informed, illogical,
Speaker 1: lost in the diaspora of idiocy. What do we do
Speaker 1: about that? You guys didn't talk about what do we
Speaker 1: do about that?
Speaker 8: Well, that's because it's an enormous problem and it's hard
Speaker 8: to even analyze the problem. So you're right, we didn't
Speaker 8: get to solutions. Just to restate my theory just briefly
Speaker 8: for your audience. You know, clearly this shooter who appears
Speaker 8: to be very likely mentally on well seized with conspiratorial
Speaker 8: theories about pedophilia and sex crimes you know in the
Speaker 8: White House and things like that.
Speaker 7: This is somebody who is.
Speaker 8: Getting his infraformation from a fractured media landscape, from an
Speaker 8: educational system that fails young people in particular, fails young
Speaker 8: men in terms of directing sort of the natural male
Speaker 8: desire to be heroic, to do something brave, to do
Speaker 8: something bold. There are healthy ways that a society can
Speaker 8: channel that. They can channel young men into the military,
Speaker 8: They can encourage young men to build families, to do
Speaker 8: things that are.
Speaker 7: Productive for society.
Speaker 8: But if young people and I keep lingering on the men,
Speaker 8: because of the men and most of the shooters, they
Speaker 8: do the very best things and the very worst things
Speaker 8: in society typically if those desires aren't properly channeled. And furthermore,
Speaker 8: these young people are seized with a sense that society
Speaker 8: is somehow corrupt, either because they're seized by left wing
Speaker 8: revolutionary conceptions or right wing conceptions of a fall in
Speaker 8: radical progressive society.
Speaker 7: Come to hate the society.
Speaker 8: Don't be surprised when they try to do their acts
Speaker 8: of zany heroism in ways that are deeply, deeply antisocial.
Speaker 1: Aaron, I don't know how long you've been in the
Speaker 1: Beltway ten years ago. You might have been in Afghanistan
Speaker 1: ten years ago. In December of twenty sixteen, a lunatic
Speaker 1: from the right walked into the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria
Speaker 1: three miles from the Washington Hilton, fired a weapon into
Speaker 1: the ceiling. It was ar fifteen, I think, and was
Speaker 1: there to free the children who had been kidnapped by
Speaker 1: a pedophilia ring. He had fallen into the QAnon four
Speaker 1: chan world of weirdness and immediately roundly condemned by everyone,
Speaker 1: and four chan and QAnon became appropriately radioactive. I'd never
Speaker 1: heard of him before, but they just became very radioactive. Well,
Speaker 1: the same radioactivity attached to the ecosystem in which the
Speaker 1: would be statement shooter on Saturday Night, UH Live breath
Speaker 1: Swam existed.
Speaker 8: I wish I could give you a happier answer, Hugh,
Speaker 8: but I think the answer is obviously not Epsteinism.
Speaker 7: Just to give it a name, I'm not.
Speaker 8: Sure what we should call it, But this this sense
Speaker 8: that the terrible, you know, crimes and miserable record of
Speaker 8: of Jeffrey Epstein and some of his associates actually is
Speaker 8: more than what it seems. It is in fact a
Speaker 8: kind of all explanatory story about American elites, global elites.
Speaker 7: This is widespread to.
Speaker 8: Include amongst you know, respectable people that you and I
Speaker 8: know and can talk about and who are not I think,
Speaker 8: particularly looney, but they embrace it enough that I think
Speaker 8: it's here to stay on the left, and it's a
Speaker 8: useful cudgel against the president. So there's there's a there's
Speaker 8: a reason for it, and you know you asked me
Speaker 8: for solutions earlier.
Speaker 1: I do.
Speaker 8: I do worry about education in this country. I do
Speaker 8: worry about whether education gives young people to write moral compass.
Speaker 8: But you know, especially with the with the advances or
Speaker 8: such as they are, the digital revolution, kids constantly on screens,
Speaker 8: kids constantly on social media, the introduction of AI into
Speaker 8: educational processes, which really frightens me, like all of that
Speaker 8: counts as education, Like the culture.
Speaker 7: Really is education.
Speaker 8: You're educated by your parents, you're educated by your school,
Speaker 8: but you're a educated by the culture, and that landscape
Speaker 8: is just so fragmented at best and often toxic, and
Speaker 8: we don't have the school. We don't take schooling seriously
Speaker 8: in a class. I'm a fan of classical schooling. I
Speaker 8: went to Saint John's, So classical schools is probably the
Speaker 8: shorthand answer, but a little hard to impose that as
Speaker 8: a matter of national policy.
Speaker 1: There is a new book out on Tolkien and Lewis
Speaker 1: during the nineteen thirty three to nineteen forty five period,
Speaker 1: and they diagnosed early the malevolence growing in Germany, and
Speaker 1: they put a name on it. And C. S. Lewis
Speaker 1: suggested the only answer to evil ideology is the fresh,
Speaker 1: clean sea breeze of old books. And I think that's
Speaker 1: still true. I don't think they're very popular. Even Wilford
Speaker 1: mcclay's Land of Hope, that's the alternative to ours, in
Speaker 1: it's not nearly wherever it should be. Is that doable
Speaker 1: as a national project, replacing a progressive curriculum with a
Speaker 1: traditional civics curriculum that's patriotic.
Speaker 8: It's certainly possible on a school by school basis, So
Speaker 8: then it's incumbent upon you know, I mean, and look
Speaker 8: there are plenty of private schools in particular across the
Speaker 8: land that do this, and it's it's not just about
Speaker 8: it is about old books, but it's the old books
Speaker 8: do a few different things for students, don't they.
Speaker 7: They expose you to excellence.
Speaker 8: You know, there should be some language learning, some serious
Speaker 8: mathematics along that to make your mind agile. But the
Speaker 8: way in which you construct the curriculum should build a
Speaker 8: coromon identity, an identity of obviously patriotism and commitment to
Speaker 8: your community, and commitment to what's needed to make that
Speaker 8: community thrive. But also, you know, religious schools are sometimes
Speaker 8: quite good at this also to your faith tradition, Jewish
Speaker 8: schools often are some of the best at what I'm
Speaker 8: what I'm describing, and end up, you know, resulting in
Speaker 8: really strong communities as a consequence. You know, this question
Speaker 8: of the community, the culture of the school, it's all linked.
Speaker 8: And I think when we talk about schooling sometimes we're
Speaker 8: focused on all the wrong things. And you know, we
Speaker 8: shouldn't be surprised when we see some of the terrible
Speaker 8: chaos and conspiratorialism that we see out about in the
Speaker 8: land all.
Speaker 1: Right now, A very serendipitous thing to come out of
Speaker 1: the near tragedy of Saturday night. You and Douglas Murray
Speaker 1: were both at the dinner. People can listen to your
Speaker 1: experiences on the School of War podcasts today. Then you
Speaker 1: sat down and did a podcast. I said, you want
Speaker 1: to do this a lot. You and he are a
Speaker 1: very good team. You both work for the Free Press,
Speaker 1: he worked for the Post, you worked for CBS. Did
Speaker 1: that thought cross your mind that there was a lot
Speaker 1: of chemistry there.
Speaker 7: Well, I love talking to Douglas.
Speaker 8: You know, he's one of the smartest people I know,
Speaker 8: and he always has something interesting to say. But you know,
Speaker 8: it came about very organically. As you say, we were
Speaker 8: both at the dinner. I think I had greeted him briefly.
Speaker 8: We were sitting at different tables on the way in,
Speaker 8: and then of course the incident happened.
Speaker 7: It was very chaotic. People were taking cover.
Speaker 8: I was sitting with the Secretary of warpete Hegseth, also
Speaker 8: with Dana White, whom you know, the head of the UFC.
Speaker 1: Who my master composure the Buddha.
Speaker 8: Yeah, not just composure, his whole body language here. He
Speaker 8: was just straining to be in the fight. He clearly
Speaker 8: none of us really knew what was going on. He
Speaker 8: didn't know what was going on, But if there had
Speaker 8: been action nearby, you could bet he would one hundred
Speaker 8: percent have been have been and I probably would have too,
Speaker 8: but more out of a sense of responsibility. He seemed
Speaker 8: genuinely frustrated that the action was not happening right in
Speaker 8: front of him. But my point is, you know, we
Speaker 8: were all sitting there it all happened, and then afterwards
Speaker 8: there was sort of million around waiting for word, like
Speaker 8: we didn't really know. We thought the shooter was dead
Speaker 8: outside we'd been told to stay in the room, and
Speaker 8: I saw Douglas across the room, and so we went
Speaker 8: over and poured ourselves a couple of glasses of champagne
Speaker 8: and just actually had a version of the conversation that
Speaker 8: we then had on the podcast.
Speaker 1: So quick. Good question. Do you think the days of
Speaker 1: dinners like the White House correspond Association, when so many
Speaker 1: targets are gathered together in an age of drones and
Speaker 1: attack on gatherings of leaders is something we invented with
Speaker 1: Iran and Israel invented with his balla. Do you think
Speaker 1: those are over?
Speaker 8: You can secure a dinner like that? Just this dinner
Speaker 8: wasn't particularly well secured. There are facilities, there are ways
Speaker 8: to build perimeters, there are ways to be more serious
Speaker 8: about securities. So no, I don't think the days of
Speaker 8: it are over, but this was not a well secured
Speaker 8: event in my opinion.
Speaker 1: I could not agree with you. I've only been once
Speaker 1: and I was struck at the time. It was kind
Speaker 1: of chaotic. Aaron B. McLain. Follow him on x go
Speaker 1: and listen to the School of War Today where he
Speaker 1: and Douglas Murray talk about the meaning crisis education young
Speaker 1: men and the response at the dinner during the chaos.
Speaker 1: It's really kind of a must listen to podcasts. Aaron,
Speaker 1: thank you for joining me. Follow him on exit Aaron
Speaker 1: A R O N. B McLain m ac l E
Speaker 1: A N. I'll be right back on the hu US
Speaker 1: show long Welcome back America. I'm here, Hewett. After the
Speaker 1: White House Correspondence Association melee and chaos, we saw Michael
Speaker 1: Duncan and John Ashbrook strumming in the background. Where have
Speaker 1: all the flowers gone? They kept their composure. They were heroes. Duncan.
Speaker 1: Good that you're not in any way insurance. Did you
Speaker 1: take the bottles off the table. Did you and Ashbrook
Speaker 1: loot the wine?
Speaker 10: No, we didn't, Hugh, thanks for having me.
Speaker 11: No.
Speaker 12: I texted my wife, who wasn't in attendance, and I
Speaker 12: got out of there as soon as they lifted lockdown
Speaker 12: because I didn't want to hear about lingering with the
Speaker 12: journals and drinking all night.
Speaker 10: I got home as soon as I can. In fact,
Speaker 10: I ate a lin.
Speaker 12: Cuisine at my kitchen table in my full tuxedo in regalia.
Speaker 12: I felt like the monopoly man after he was down
Speaker 12: on his luck.
Speaker 1: All right, now a year old enough, maybe old enough
Speaker 1: to remember ten years ago. I'm going to ask all
Speaker 1: my guests about this today because it seems to me
Speaker 1: so parallel. Ten years ago, a lunatic from the right
Speaker 1: who'd been swimming in QAnon and four chan walked into
Speaker 1: the Pizza Ping Pong pizzeria three miles away from the
Speaker 1: Washington Hilton up Kennectut Avenue and fired a ar seventeen
Speaker 1: or fifteen into the roof and came to rescue the
Speaker 1: children and held people hostage. He thought a pedothelia ring
Speaker 1: was operating. He'd been swimming in the dark recesses of
Speaker 1: the web the aftermath of that was immediate and widespread
Speaker 1: condemnation of the crazies, the shutdown of QAnon and the
Speaker 1: ridicule of qunanon. The basic they became lepers four chan
Speaker 1: may have suffered a dent. Do you think there will
Speaker 1: be a similar reaction to the forums in which the
Speaker 1: shooter on the would be statement assassin the forums in
Speaker 1: which he swam. Is that forthcoming is a blowback against
Speaker 1: them forthcoming?
Speaker 10: No, I don't think so, Hugh.
Speaker 12: In fact, most of the mainstream media and Democratic leaders
Speaker 12: are willing to amplify everything that was in this lunatics manifesto.
Speaker 12: You look at that interview that Trump did with Nora O'Donnell,
Speaker 12: and she's reading from the thing. I remember a time
Speaker 12: when we didn't release manifestos because they would be too dangerous.
Speaker 12: But now, when they're slandering the president of the United States,
Speaker 12: she's more than happy to read it to him, like
Speaker 12: those words care any weight. And we've seen that same
Speaker 12: message being amplified by Democratic leaders because they think they
Speaker 12: can win cheap political points by doing so. So I
Speaker 12: don't anticipate they're going to change any of their behavior
Speaker 12: at all.
Speaker 1: You were reminding me, I talked about this yesterday. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven, the Virginia Tech killer who murdered
Speaker 1: thirty seven kids on the campus and wounded a dozen more,
Speaker 1: he had made a videotape and he had sent it
Speaker 1: to NBC and they rushed it on the air. I
Speaker 1: went ballistic on this show, as did many other people,
Speaker 1: because you don't give them what you want. Nora O'Donnell
Speaker 1: gave the guy what he wanted. Now, you and I
Speaker 1: know how they run these things. They have production meetings,
Speaker 1: they go through the questions. The talent doesn't show up
Speaker 1: and just start firing questions. So I'm not ready to
Speaker 1: just blame Nora O'Donnell. Somebody center in to do that.
Speaker 1: Can sixty minutes be fixed?
Speaker 12: And I have a hard time seeing how, Hugh And
Speaker 12: it's a real shame because it's been a sort of
Speaker 12: a flagship program for a long time, but they've clearly.
Speaker 10: Lost their way.
Speaker 12: I think they were looking for a cheap reaction from
Speaker 12: the President by reading that manifesto, and they're going to
Speaker 12: do anything they can to try to get their ratings back,
Speaker 12: and I think that's what Nora O'Donnell was doing there.
Speaker 10: I think it was shame, and.
Speaker 1: She stepped on a rake because the President kept his
Speaker 1: composure completely and said, you're horrible people plural, not just
Speaker 1: you and Nora. He knows how it's done. Horrible. You
Speaker 1: shouldn't be reading that. He gave her a lecture and
Speaker 1: a scolding. You think anyone's going to hear that other
Speaker 1: than Barry Verry Wise, No.
Speaker 12: I would imagine she's probably getting backslaps at the cocktail
Speaker 12: party in Georgetown next time she shows up because she
Speaker 12: stuck it to Donald Trump. I mean, I think a
Speaker 12: lot of these questions are really driven by producers and
Speaker 12: people like Nora O'Donnell, who run in circles in liberal
Speaker 12: media where they're really catering to each other rather than
Speaker 12: the audiences they pretend to care about. Which is the
Speaker 12: most frustrating thing in all of this is like, I
Speaker 12: don't think Donald Trump should have done the interview. I mean,
Speaker 12: come on the Ruthless Variety Program, Come talk to Hugh Hewitt,
Speaker 12: you know, if you want to give a recap of
Speaker 12: your thoughts on this shoot and the shooter. Because every
Speaker 12: time he shows up at one of these mainstream outlets
Speaker 12: they try to pull something like this.
Speaker 10: It's crazy.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's a last round. Michael I thought, wow, well presidential,
Speaker 1: he's going to use the biggest venue available to him
Speaker 1: to reassure the world that the country is fine, just
Speaker 1: like after Reagan got shot. Al Haig blew it. But
Speaker 1: then Reagan showed up on the balcony and waved as
Speaker 1: soon as he could and George hw got back. But
Speaker 1: you assure the Iranians that there's not been a coup,
Speaker 1: and you were sure the Aanians were going to keep
Speaker 1: this straight closed. And Nora o'donna could have asked about
Speaker 1: the Iran war. I really could not believe the malpractice
Speaker 1: involved in that interview. But I digress. I want to
Speaker 1: ask you about the problem. What do we do about
Speaker 1: American education that is producing losers? And although this guy
Speaker 1: went to Caltech and got a master's, he was a
Speaker 1: part time SAT tutor and he was at the No
Speaker 1: King's rally, he's a loser. How do we stop that.
Speaker 12: I think there's a hopelessness that people feel young people
Speaker 12: in America right now, and I think a lot of
Speaker 12: it is driven by social media and they see what
Speaker 12: people are posting on Instagram all day and they're seeing
Speaker 12: the best aspects of every person's lives and they feel
Speaker 12: like they're hopeless and they're not going anywhere, and so
Speaker 12: they're looking to find purpose. And people find purpose in
Speaker 12: the strangest places. Sometimes it's on you know, four Chan
Speaker 12: or message boards, where they feel like they can be
Speaker 12: a hero behind a keyboard, and then they do crazy
Speaker 12: things like this. It's an unfortunate part of our culture today.
Speaker 12: I think it's going to take a generation or two
Speaker 12: to change it.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, that left field question for you. I'd love to
Speaker 1: hear the Ruth Fellows answer this. Did you have a
Speaker 1: great teacher or teachers in high school? A great one
Speaker 1: I had.
Speaker 12: I had great teachers in high school, particularly you know,
Speaker 12: in subjects. I really enjoyed teachers I didn't necessarily agree
Speaker 12: with on everything, but challenged me in ways that allowed
Speaker 12: me to think critically for you know, the first time
Speaker 12: about new subjects, and the teachers were always respectful.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 12: I think a lot of parents really woke up during
Speaker 12: COVID and they saw the way that teaching was done
Speaker 12: in America today. It really opened their eyes that things
Speaker 12: have changed since when I was a kid, and it's unfortunate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I had a couple of guys Ron Karen Bauer,
Speaker 1: and Fred Hoover. Ron was a right wing Latin teacher.
Speaker 1: Fred was a center left English teacher. Did not bring
Speaker 1: their politics with him, but boy they could teach. It
Speaker 1: was Catholic school, so they weren't getting paid either. Do
Speaker 1: you think those people still exist who want to teach
Speaker 1: not for ten but for the joy of teaching.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I think absolutely they definitely exist. I mean, shout
Speaker 12: out to doctor Kivella, shout out to Margot Maclear. I
Speaker 12: had some great teachers, particularly in history, when I was in.
Speaker 10: High school and in college.
Speaker 12: You know, I found that the best teachers in college were,
Speaker 12: you know, the professors who came in after getting some
Speaker 12: real life experience working in the field in which they
Speaker 12: were teaching, and they could give you fantastic stories and
Speaker 12: anecdotes that applied to the field you hope to one
Speaker 12: day be working in. But I find in college, especially
Speaker 12: those are few and far between.
Speaker 1: I would love to reverse engineer this shooter's educational experience
Speaker 1: and find out where he went off the rails. It's
Speaker 1: not he just didn't dive into into blue sky and
Speaker 1: become crazy. Something happened along the way. Good to talk
Speaker 1: to you, my friend, Michael Duncan, the old man from
Speaker 1: the Purplesse podcast. Thank you, Michael. Make sure you listen
Speaker 1: to Ruthless today because they were talking about this dinner
Speaker 1: and it was fascinating. Stay tuned, America. I'll be right
Speaker 1: back on the You Dealership walking back in America. That music
Speaker 1: means David M. Drucker with us. He is the chief
Speaker 1: of Legal correspondent for the Dispatch. Drucker, were you at
Speaker 1: the Correspondent's dinner on Saturday night? I don't think you're
Speaker 1: that kind of guy.
Speaker 13: I've been before for Hugh multiple times, haven't been in
Speaker 13: a couple of years, did not go this year. Did
Speaker 13: hit an after party, but was not at the dinner.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're not my They're not my idea of a
Speaker 1: good time. And I've only done it once in that time.
Speaker 1: It was Sarah Hockaby Sanders getting chewed up by a
Speaker 1: comedian and I just decided this is ridiculous. All right.
Speaker 1: The key question is does it change anything? The would
Speaker 1: be statement Assassin is you know he's a lefty? Okay,
Speaker 1: tell me why not?
Speaker 13: Well, look, I mean I should caveat that. I always
Speaker 13: like to wait a few weeks for the dust to
Speaker 13: settle and look at fresh polling.
Speaker 14: But I just think this country.
Speaker 13: Right now is very sort of divided in an entrenched way.
Speaker 13: We're very polarized. After a decade, everybody has very fixed,
Speaker 13: defined opinions about President Trump, and he you know, for
Speaker 13: better or worse, and.
Speaker 14: Some people love it and some people don't.
Speaker 13: But he never changes his postures, his behavior, his rhetoric
Speaker 13: never changes. And so especially judging by the aftermath of
Speaker 13: the attempted assassination in Butler and in other events, I
Speaker 13: just don't see this changing the atmosphere politically in this country.
Speaker 1: All right now, David, I want to take you back
Speaker 1: ten years. I'm asking every guest this today who might
Speaker 1: remember it ten years ago. Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria, three
Speaker 1: miles up Kennekat Avenue from the Washington Hilton. A guy
Speaker 1: walks in with an AR seventeen or fifteen and shoots
Speaker 1: up the ceiling and wants to free the children who
Speaker 1: he knows are in the basement in a pedophilia ring.
Speaker 1: And turns out he's a lunatic on balanced man who's
Speaker 1: been deep in the web at four chan and QAnon
Speaker 1: special and immediately that what that does is make radioactive
Speaker 1: the water in which he swam. People want nothing to
Speaker 1: do with QAnon, not that they wanted to do anything
Speaker 1: with four chan or QAnon to begin with, but becomes
Speaker 1: widely known that these are disease sites. Now, this guy
Speaker 1: Saturday night lived on Blue Sky and obviously watched Jimmy Kimmel.
Speaker 1: What do we think do any of those sites? Do
Speaker 1: the no Kings rally begin to police themselves of the
Speaker 1: kill Trump rhetoric?
Speaker 13: Well, I mean, first, let's see what happens. I mean,
Speaker 13: second of all, you know, I'm the first person to
Speaker 13: say that the lunatic fringe exists on the left as
Speaker 13: well as you know on the right. Right, I mean,
Speaker 13: Steve Splie was shot practicing from the congressional baseball game.
Speaker 13: Him and other Republicans were targeted by a supporter of
Speaker 13: Bernie Sanders what ten years ago. Now President Trump was targeted.
Speaker 13: Then on the other side, Governor Shapiro is targeted, some
Speaker 13: state legislators that are Democrats in Minnesota were targeted. And
Speaker 13: so then we have to look at where this guy
Speaker 13: sort of lived, right, I don't think anybody's ever looked
Speaker 13: at these social media sites, whether Twitter, now x or
Speaker 13: Blue Sky as radicalizing platforms, but we could talk about it.
Speaker 13: I'm really interested to see if this guy was involved
Speaker 13: in some other fringe groups. I've seen some of these
Speaker 13: not Kings protesters, a lot of them. Most of them
Speaker 13: that I see in are normal, run of the mill
Speaker 13: American protesters.
Speaker 14: There is some rhetorica I've got friends, I've.
Speaker 1: Seen I've got friends. But should you go to and
Speaker 1: should you go to rallies with Trump? Is Hitler signs?
Speaker 1: Should you just associate you?
Speaker 14: Well, I don't think they.
Speaker 13: I don't think there should ever be Trump as Hitler
Speaker 13: signs because nobody's Hitler but Hitler.
Speaker 14: And I think that.
Speaker 13: And I think this, although you know, as my boss
Speaker 13: Jonah Goldberg likes to say it's not necessarily symmetrical, but
Speaker 13: I think this is a both sides problem, and I
Speaker 13: think I think both sides should be policing themselves. I
Speaker 13: think that Democrats on the left could do a lot
Speaker 13: more to police their side in this regard. I think
Speaker 13: the same can be said of Republicans in their side.
Speaker 13: This is a case of a guy that appears to
Speaker 13: be not appears to be, that is acknowledged to be
Speaker 13: a left wing thinker, activist, political thinker of some kind
Speaker 13: who did not like President Trump or Republicans or his administration.
Speaker 13: So let's deal with that and say, say it is
Speaker 13: what it is. But you know, I was trying to
Speaker 13: respond to your broader question. Yeah, you go to a
Speaker 13: rally like this and you see a sign of rhetoric
Speaker 13: like that, you should tell people to cut it out.
Speaker 13: My point was to say is that these protests, as
Speaker 13: I've seen, and I've covered some of them, have not
Speaker 13: been dominated by that.
Speaker 14: I have seen some fringe elements of that, but it
Speaker 14: hasn't been dominating. And on the right. I have said
Speaker 14: this for years.
Speaker 13: You see a few fringe actors, and most of these
Speaker 13: people are doing you know, it's the American way to
Speaker 13: go protest for government.
Speaker 15: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, you know the Tea Party, of which I would
Speaker 1: give a few speeches, they were usually old people, and
Speaker 1: they were reading the Constitution and the Declaration of Independent
Speaker 1: They're not the anti ice people with sex toys beating
Speaker 1: up on reporters, and they certainly aren't.
Speaker 14: Well such a ga. So, Hugh, that is very true.
Speaker 13: I'm just trying to get my time in here because
Speaker 13: I usually we have a heart out. You know, I
Speaker 13: could show you some of the email I get from
Speaker 13: people who describe themselves as support as a president Trump
Speaker 13: and Republicans with very violent, offensive, sometimes anti Semitic rhetoric.
Speaker 14: These are people on the fringe.
Speaker 13: I don't consider them a part of the right broadly speaking.
Speaker 13: My point is you can find this sort of thing
Speaker 13: on both sides at different times, in different places.
Speaker 1: David, you ought to try and screen the calls to
Speaker 1: this show sometimes when we get the Builderberger people, and
Speaker 1: you know, we're very aware of the lunatic fringe in America. However,
Speaker 1: we do police ourselves and we don't let them on
Speaker 1: the air, or we dump them. This is what the lie.
Speaker 14: You've always been very good about about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know that. Joan is right. It's very asymmetrical.
Speaker 1: Right now, the legislator in Minnesota was murdered in cold
Speaker 1: blood by a lunatic. That lunatic had been an evangelical
Speaker 1: pastor in Africa. I understand. I read the backstory. What
Speaker 1: I am looking for, and maybe you've seen it is
Speaker 1: an in depth study into every violent actor of the
Speaker 1: last since Columbine to find what the crossover, you know, like,
Speaker 1: what are they doing at Quantico at the FBI Academy.
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen a study on that?
Speaker 13: No, I have not, and I think that that would
Speaker 13: be very valuable.
Speaker 14: You know, I've read some people.
Speaker 13: That speculate that usually whether these people are are you know,
Speaker 13: right leaning or left leaning, that a lot of times
Speaker 13: these people are people that are alone.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 13: You know, college Vin Williams was saying in our recent
Speaker 13: Dispatch podcast, you never you never find out that the
Speaker 13: shooter was a guy who's been married for twenty years,
Speaker 13: you know, just celebrated his twenty anniversary in Hawaii and
Speaker 13: has four beautiful children.
Speaker 1: Right, is taken at the church and teaching Sunday school.
Speaker 14: Absolutely not correct?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 13: And I wonder if that's the through line. I mean,
Speaker 13: we've seen that with school shooters. These are people that
Speaker 13: commit evil accent in some cases are evil people, no doubt,
Speaker 13: but these are people that you know, felt alone, were alone,
Speaker 13: felt marginalized. I don't think it was anybody's fault that
Speaker 13: they felt that way, but this seems.
Speaker 14: To be the through line.
Speaker 1: Give a listen to the Aaron McClain Douglas Murray podcast. Day.
Speaker 1: I want to listen to you and Jonah talk about this,
Speaker 1: but give a listen to Aaron McLain and Douglas Murray
Speaker 1: on the School of War podcast today, because they talk
Speaker 1: about American education and its failings, and I think that
Speaker 1: is a patient Q or whatever we've call it up
Speaker 1: this problem. David M. Drucker on Accident to dissetch. Thank you,
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to highly concentrated Hugh, and don't forget.
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Speaker 1: I love them classes walking back in America. I'm Hugh Hewett.
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit older than mister Lylacs, James Lylac
Speaker 1: says in James Lylakes dot substack dot com. James, however,
Speaker 1: may have distant memories of the late sixties, and he
Speaker 1: may remember the SDS blowing up townhouses in Granwitche Village
Speaker 1: and bank buildings in Rotc buildings and math labs across
Speaker 1: the country. Are we headed back to the sixties? James, Yes,
Speaker 1: and no.
Speaker 16: I don't remember those, But I do remember the seventies.
Speaker 16: I remember Patty Hurst, of course, Tanya the revolutionary fervor
Speaker 16: standing in front of an SLA flag, and all the
Speaker 16: madness of that stuff, of the move in Philadelphia and
Speaker 16: the rest of it. So I remember that. I don't
Speaker 16: remember the bombing. But I don't think we are necessarily
Speaker 16: going to go to a wave of bombing next like
Speaker 16: we had in the sixties, or like they had, you know,
Speaker 16: before the Palmer Rides and the rest of it. For
Speaker 16: some reason, that just doesn't seem to be what the
Speaker 16: new guys are all about. I could be entirely wrong,
Speaker 16: but you know, somebody should be going on Reddit and
Speaker 16: seeing exactly how detailed the bomb making instruction community has become,
Speaker 16: because if it has since, Reddit seems to be the
Speaker 16: wellspring of so many of these things. And I'd say that,
Speaker 16: as somebody who's on Reddit for a variety of useful purposes,
Speaker 16: it shouldn't be too easy to suppot it coming bombing way,
Speaker 16: because they'll be talking about it in subrettits endlessly subreddits
Speaker 16: called where do I bomb the Fascist state next?
Speaker 1: You know, Okay, I got a question for you. You
Speaker 1: remember ten years ago I brought this up to a
Speaker 1: lot of guests today in Washington, d C. Three miles
Speaker 1: away from the White House correspondence dinner. There was ten
Speaker 1: years ago a lunatic who walked into the Comet Ping
Speaker 1: Pong pizzeria, shot up the roof and was there to
Speaker 1: free the kids who were trapped in the basement for
Speaker 1: a pedophilia ring that didn't exist. He had gone deep
Speaker 1: into the waters of the lunatic Internet, and he had
Speaker 1: drunk deep, deep of the craziness like this guy did.
Speaker 1: But in the immediate aftermath of that, of course, he
Speaker 1: was widely condemned, and rightly so. But so we're four
Speaker 1: chan and QAnon. So in the aftermath of this, are
Speaker 1: we going to see Blue Sky and Jimmy Kimmel and
Speaker 1: the No Kings people condemned?
Speaker 16: Condemned only by the sources that are implying to say
Speaker 16: that the incitement to the co meant to laughter are wrong.
Speaker 16: I remember the comic pizza thing. Actually comment was the
Speaker 16: liquor store in my neighborhood in Adams, Morgan. The guys
Speaker 16: bought the sign moved it over there. And what was
Speaker 16: interesting about that was that Q, on the face of
Speaker 16: it was Q was crazy. Q was deep in conspiratorial
Speaker 16: and had all these timetables and revelations, and there was
Speaker 16: a master guy who was releasing all the information. You
Speaker 16: really had to marinate in the crazy to get the
Speaker 16: Q stuff. What we have now is not Q level craziness.
Speaker 14: It is it is.
Speaker 16: Not conspiratorial in the Q sense some dark forces. It's
Speaker 16: just more I don't know how else to put it.
Speaker 16: It's not the sort of scriptural, textual stuff that they had.
Speaker 16: It's just guys on Reddit saying Trump is a fascist.
Speaker 16: It's just guys on Reddit and Blue Sky and the
Speaker 16: rest of it saying it goes without saying that Trump
Speaker 16: is the fascist and a pedophile and a rapist and
Speaker 16: the rest of it. And then they get they get
Speaker 16: hit up, They get head up, I think, not by
Speaker 16: additional information like in Q, but.
Speaker 10: Just by repetition of this thing.
Speaker 16: It becomes you know, it rewires, the brain wags until
Speaker 16: that that's all they can think about. So the condemnation, no,
Speaker 16: because a lot of what they are saying is not
Speaker 16: out of the mainstream. About what of a lot of
Speaker 16: people on the left of the progressive side, And say,
Speaker 16: take for example, the number of people today who lost
Speaker 16: their jobs because they went on TikTok and said, oh,
Speaker 16: isn't that too bad? I thought today was going to
Speaker 16: be the morning where we got that news. And these
Speaker 16: are nurses, these are elementary school teachers. I mean, I
Speaker 16: remember my elementary school pretty well, and I'm pretty sure
Speaker 16: that missus Powers in fourth grade did not conclude the
Speaker 16: class by saying, oh, and let us all hope that
Speaker 16: JFK is shot tomorrow.
Speaker 7: Just didn't come up.
Speaker 16: You might have thought about it, but it just wasn't
Speaker 16: part of the sort of elementary school curriculum. But now
Speaker 16: they go on TikTok before they go to class and
Speaker 16: teach the ABC's and talk about how disappointed they are
Speaker 16: that this guy didn't shoot the president.
Speaker 7: So it's not that far.
Speaker 16: It's not as far out of the mainstream and weird
Speaker 16: and convoluted as the Q stuff was.
Speaker 14: It's just what simply a lot of people believe.
Speaker 1: Well now at the Aaron McClain and god Wis Murray
Speaker 1: podcast This Morning School of War podcasts, I recommend it
Speaker 1: to I talked to Eron at the start of the show.
Speaker 1: They talk about extremism in America and they end up
Speaker 1: squarely on public education. The end up on the education
Speaker 1: of young America. What went wrong? James? There many things
Speaker 1: have gone wrong, but what what's number one?
Speaker 16: I would say, Well, I mean, you can point to
Speaker 16: any number of theories of learning that came through that
Speaker 16: decreased the ability to read. You can talk about the
Speaker 16: you know the lawnmarks through the institutions and which people
Speaker 16: who were just sort of generally granola and the rest
Speaker 16: of it went into teaching and therefore decided that Howard
Speaker 16: Zinn is the Bible, to which I almost believed. I mean,
Speaker 16: if you have a lot of people who came out
Speaker 16: of the sixties or share sixties type philosophies, then yes,
Speaker 16: they're going to use that to cover and sort the
Speaker 16: way they teach American history. So we got away from civics.
Speaker 16: You don't teach civics anymore. You got away from history
Speaker 16: as he used to be taught because it centers the West,
Speaker 16: and you can't have that, because it's there's America and
Speaker 16: finds its exceptional and you can't have that.
Speaker 15: And the whole the.
Speaker 16: Howard Zin narrative of the West in America being uniquely
Speaker 16: evil just sort of becomes the default position for these
Speaker 16: people when they teach. So it's that, it's the lessening
Speaker 16: of standards. It's the number of kids who can't read
Speaker 16: very well. It's the kids who in the later years
Speaker 16: have had their attention span completely rotted because they infinitely
Speaker 16: scroll and doom scroll and can't even get their brain
Speaker 16: to focus on an idea except for a TikTok sized
Speaker 16: bite about what's wrong with the country and why Trump
Speaker 16: is an evil man. So education, yes, universities first, and
Speaker 16: then I think it's seeped down to the to.
Speaker 1: The middle, to the junior and to the elementaries. We see.
Speaker 1: So my one answer is tenure. That when and it
Speaker 1: became a public education teacher union objective to get tenure
Speaker 1: and then to add benefits and early retirement. But tenure
Speaker 1: is the root of all evil and elementary education I
Speaker 1: agree or disagree. I don't think so.
Speaker 15: I mean it's important.
Speaker 16: It is be great to be able to fire teachers
Speaker 16: who are bad teachers, But you can fire a teacher
Speaker 16: for being a bad teacher simply because they present a
Speaker 16: view of history with which you do not agree. There
Speaker 16: are many competing schools. I think that the answer is
Speaker 16: to eliminate public education as the default. Give every parent
Speaker 16: vouchers that they can use to go to the school
Speaker 16: or they choose. Are some of them going to take
Speaker 16: them to schools that we don't think are particularly good,
Speaker 16: or perhaps make the Howard z In curriculum look like
Speaker 16: Margaret Thatcher's biography. Possibly so, But those parents w want
Speaker 16: their kids to learn, to get a good education, to
Speaker 16: be steeped in American history. Can find schools and just
Speaker 16: separated from property taxes, from civiy taxes to the rest
Speaker 16: of it, go to a voucher system. And I think
Speaker 16: those who can prosper and do well in that environment
Speaker 16: will and will have a better class of people.
Speaker 1: I think you are right and we will close on
Speaker 1: that note. LILYX as in James ilycs do substat dot
Speaker 1: com for humor. He's actually a humorous He can be
Speaker 1: very funny as well very insightful. Or follow him on
Speaker 1: as Lilac's with the little electric man like bulb, which
Speaker 1: is also kind of amusing. Don't go anywhere, America, Stay
Speaker 1: tuned Morning Glory and evening Grace America. Byron New York
Speaker 1: joins me a little earlier than he normally does. He is,
Speaker 1: of course, with The Washington Examiner, chief political correspondent, Fox
Speaker 1: News contributor extraordinaire Byron. Did you happen to be at
Speaker 1: the White House Correspondents Association dinner? I was not. I
Speaker 1: was at a junior high school student play. I was not.
Speaker 5: The last one I went to was twenty seventeen, which
Speaker 5: is the first one that Trump wasn't there, and I
Speaker 5: thought that would be newsworthy and it was. And I
Speaker 5: kind of kicked myself for not going to this one
Speaker 5: because it was newsworthy too.
Speaker 1: I believe the first one I went to was the
Speaker 1: same one, but that was when the so called comedian
Speaker 1: was so awful to Sarah Huckaby Sanders that I said,
Speaker 1: I don't need to ever do this again, and it's
Speaker 1: not my kind of an event any I kind of
Speaker 1: hate those events.
Speaker 5: But well, you know, Trump had a chance to. I
Speaker 5: wouldn't say, just put an end to the dinner. It
Speaker 5: was pretty close, because you know, you could see in
Speaker 5: twenty seventeen when Trump was there, you could see how
Speaker 5: dependent the entire dinner is on the presence of the
Speaker 5: President of the United States, even if it's one they
Speaker 5: all hate, but having a president there just makes the event.
Speaker 5: And when the president is not there, they might as
Speaker 5: well be having a First Amendment brunch somewhere. And that
Speaker 5: was really fascinating. And of course Trump skipped it all
Speaker 5: four years of his first term and the first year
Speaker 5: of this term, and it's still not totally clear to
Speaker 5: me why he agreed to do it this time.
Speaker 1: Well, the good thing about the twenty seventeen dinner is
Speaker 1: that they invited Hall of famers from the Baseball Hall
Speaker 1: of Fame. And I walked in and a guy jumps
Speaker 1: up and says, Hugh Hewett, I love what you do.
Speaker 1: And it's Dennis Eckersley, who is a childhood hero of
Speaker 1: mine through for the Indian and I went Abba David Davia,
Speaker 1: dab Daba Daba daba daba because I you know, Dennis Eckersley.
Speaker 1: So I was stunned for the first half of the dinner,
Speaker 1: and then the comedian came on and was just so slanderous.
Speaker 1: It was not my thing, all right. The Comet you remember,
Speaker 1: don't you, The Comet Ping Pong pizzeria shootout that was
Speaker 1: ten years ago in December. That shooter was a victim
Speaker 1: of internet fueled conspiracies having to do with child rape
Speaker 1: and hostage taking, and he went crazy. He was a lunatic.
Speaker 1: He was sentenced to four years by now Supreme Court
Speaker 1: Justice Kintaji Brown Jackson. What is the difference between this
Speaker 1: guy on Saturday Night and that guy ten years ago.
Speaker 5: The guy on Saturday Night has a lot more people
Speaker 5: who agree with him in his crazy ideas. Yes, if
Speaker 5: you read the Cole Allen's manifesto, the key part of it,
Speaker 5: I mean, first of all, it's an oddly kind of
Speaker 5: good natured manifesto. He expected to be killed in this
Speaker 5: and it was almost kind of cheerful. If you look
Speaker 5: at the key allegation here, he calls Trump a pedophile,
Speaker 5: a rapist, and a trader. Now, if you go to
Speaker 5: any one of a bunch of anti Trump media outlets
Speaker 5: or social media platforms especially, you'll see that stuff all
Speaker 5: over the place. They call him that all over the place.
Speaker 5: And then I believe it was just today. Andrew Kozinski,
Speaker 5: the guy at CNN, said he went through four thousand
Speaker 5: and seven hundred of Cole Allen's social media posts and
Speaker 5: found that Alan one compared Trump to Hitler. You see
Speaker 5: not a lot. Two urged Trump haters to buy guns.
Speaker 5: Three wanted to nullify the twenty twenty four presidential election results.
Speaker 5: You talk about that. Or he suggested that the Butler
Speaker 5: assassination attempt on Trump had been faked. You've seen that
Speaker 5: a lot, so Cole Allen, which is kind of like
Speaker 5: a sponge for every crazy thing that is said on
Speaker 5: social media platforms and the scary thing, of course, is
Speaker 5: that there are a lot of other people like that.
Speaker 1: Right now. I want to go back to my parallel event,
Speaker 1: the comed ping punk Pizza re issued out. In the
Speaker 1: immediate aftermath of that, even people like me who had
Speaker 1: never heard of pizza Gate immediately realized, oh, that's a
Speaker 1: four chan QAnon crazy person. And although four chan and
Speaker 1: QAnon were already sort of diseased and radioactive, they became
Speaker 1: completely unacceptable. The parallels to four Chan and QAnon from
Speaker 1: ten years ago right now are Blue Sky and Jimmy Kimmel. Well,
Speaker 1: they suffered the same kind of repulsion and revulsion that
Speaker 1: that haunted four Chan and QAnon after that that incident,
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 5: The answer is going to be no. I don't think
Speaker 5: they will, especially just because there's so much, so much,
Speaker 5: And I do remember feeling almost sorry for this guy
Speaker 5: who went and he fired his rifle one time inside
Speaker 5: comment pizza.
Speaker 1: Into the room.
Speaker 5: He was going to rescue the children who were allegedly
Speaker 5: being abused by like Hillary Clinton and John Podesta or
Speaker 5: some of the things that it was just it was
Speaker 5: it was completely detached from reality. But what you say,
Speaker 5: what you say about about Blue Sky and Kimmel and
Speaker 5: other platforms, is absolutely true. This kind of stuff gets
Speaker 5: said all the time.
Speaker 1: Now, I'm going to say a controversial thing. If you
Speaker 1: went to a No King's rally, that does not make
Speaker 1: you complicit in this statement would be Assassin's manifesto. But
Speaker 1: if you went to a No King's rally, you sold
Speaker 1: a lot of signs, and if you went to a
Speaker 1: No King's rally, some of those signs encouraged violence. Almost certainly,
Speaker 1: what's your obligation if you go to an event where
Speaker 1: there's violence being called for? Byron?
Speaker 5: You mean just as a participant.
Speaker 1: I don't think you're the moral test if you're if
Speaker 1: you're at a yeah, should you leave? No?
Speaker 5: I actually I actually covered the No King's rally in
Speaker 5: Boston this year. It was pretty big and there were
Speaker 5: lots of signs like that. I don't think one had
Speaker 5: a moral obligation to leave. But so, no, I don't
Speaker 5: think so we.
Speaker 1: Disagree on that. I think, if if this is a problem,
Speaker 1: if there's a current running through the left, and by
Speaker 1: the way, we have our nuts on the right, uh,
Speaker 1: and they're lunatics and they have their own conspiracy theory,
Speaker 1: and Pizzagate's not dead. Yet, by the way, I've been
Speaker 1: told by people that it still lives in the darkest
Speaker 1: corners and recesses of the Internet. I do think you
Speaker 1: have to distance yourself from this stuff or you get
Speaker 1: mud splatter on you. You're not complicit, just you're really
Speaker 1: hanging out with these people. Do you want to hang
Speaker 1: out with these people? Do you want them in your
Speaker 1: in your party? And now the Democrats I'll talk with
Speaker 1: people can go look on my YouTube and I'll talk
Speaker 1: lady with Mike Rodgers of Michigan, his party. The Democrats
Speaker 1: and Michigan have lost their minds.
Speaker 5: Well, you're absolutely right about this, and shaming is perfectly
Speaker 5: it is perfectly acceptable in these situations. However, just like
Speaker 5: in other political situations, I think a lot of this is,
Speaker 5: you know, constitution protected speech in the sense of a
Speaker 5: no King's rally. But I think it's important to say
Speaker 5: here that when we talk about these crazy beliefs, I
Speaker 5: do think millions of Americans have them, and at the
Speaker 5: same time would never think of getting a gun and
Speaker 5: going to try to kill the president. I think obviously
Speaker 5: Cole Allen was somebody who did, and there have been
Speaker 5: two other attempts where people with guns either shot the president,
Speaker 5: as it happened in Butler, or got very close to
Speaker 5: doing it has happened in Palm Beach. So I think
Speaker 5: the factor that the fact that Trump is such a
Speaker 5: target for so many people has got to mean that
Speaker 5: the presidential security system works differently for the duration of
Speaker 5: his time in office. There have been too many close calls,
Speaker 5: and if it means that the president is more a
Speaker 5: distanced physically from the American people, I think that just
Speaker 5: has to happen.
Speaker 1: Now, Barron, We're pretty comfortable as a nation that no
Speaker 1: country can do to us what we in Israel did
Speaker 1: to the Iranian leadership, and what Israel did that has
Speaker 1: bela leadership which has drop successive bombs on a gathering
Speaker 1: of the most important people. But do you think the
Speaker 1: White House Correspondent Association dinner is doomed in the era
Speaker 1: of drones, that it's just the softest of targets. It
Speaker 1: really is. I mean, you can go to Union station,
Speaker 1: you can go to where networks gather, you can go
Speaker 1: to all sorts of but the softest of targets is
Speaker 1: the Washington Hilton. Luckily, it's a one person lunatic and
Speaker 1: not an Iranian death squad.
Speaker 5: Right, yeah, I was. I was surprised when I saw
Speaker 5: that virtually the entire US presidential line of succession was
Speaker 5: in that room. I mean, it's just astonishing. People were
Speaker 5: looking around and saying, well, it's a good thing. Charles
Speaker 5: Grassley is not here. Senator Grassley, who is close I
Speaker 5: guess ninety years old now is the President pro temp
Speaker 5: of the Senate and thus is in line for the
Speaker 5: presidency before you start getting the cabinet members. But I mean,
Speaker 5: virtually the entire line of succession was there. So that
Speaker 5: was a bad idea.
Speaker 1: Now bad idea, although Grassley as president, Grassley's President wouldn't
Speaker 1: be bad. We'd have ethne all and everything, but it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be bad, right, and the History Channel would come
Speaker 1: back to being the History Channel Byron York. Always go
Speaker 1: to Doctor Fallen Mont exits Byron York and stay tuned,
Speaker 1: my friends. I've got Bethanye Mandel next on the new
Speaker 1: Here working Back America. I'm Hugh Hewitt, the All time
Speaker 1: O The Lonely People is back because Lonely People are
Speaker 1: shooting up White House Correspondent Association Dinners. I'm joined by
Speaker 1: Bethany Mandel, she's the co founder of the mom wars
Speaker 1: dot com subsack dot com, prolific writer as well for
Speaker 1: The New York Post and other places. Bethany, before I
Speaker 1: go down my question hole my list, what did you
Speaker 1: make of the WHCA event?
Speaker 17: It was interesting, certainly interesting. I was not there. I'm
Speaker 17: glad for it for many reasons. But the drama I've
Speaker 17: seen from a lot of people that were there is
Speaker 17: a tad over the top. It's a tad dramatic. But
Speaker 17: it was a very interesting event. It seems now we
Speaker 17: have a.
Speaker 1: Problem, to my questions, we have a problem that goes
Speaker 1: way back ten years ago. In December of twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: a lunatic from the right who had lived on the
Speaker 1: far corners of four Chan and QAnon, walked into Comet
Speaker 1: Ping Pong Pizza in Washington, DC and fired his rifle
Speaker 1: into the ceiling. He was there to rescue the children
Speaker 1: who were being held by a PETI filia ring in
Speaker 1: the basement. There is no pedophilia ring. It was all
Speaker 1: made up. But he swam in those waters so long
Speaker 1: that it turned him. This is the mirror image. But
Speaker 1: the aftermath of pizzagate, was it Everyone who was associated
Speaker 1: with Pizzagate was exiled rightly. Four Chan's reputation, if it
Speaker 1: had one, got worse, and QAnon, if it had any
Speaker 1: kind of public id, was immediately identified as something you
Speaker 1: wanted nothing to do with. Will this same repulsiveness attached
Speaker 1: to the waters in which the WHCA would be statement
Speaker 1: assassin swam. Will they get hit by the same blowback?
Speaker 17: No? I mean you really have to sort of dig
Speaker 17: back into history to find the right wing equivalent of
Speaker 17: political violence apologists and those who utilize it. But on
Speaker 17: the left this has become a chain between the baseball
Speaker 17: shooting and the previous assassination attempts on President Trump, on
Speaker 17: the secret on the Supreme Court justices. I was talking
Speaker 17: to a member of Congress recently, Lee who told me
Speaker 17: that there was someone on their property like this is
Speaker 17: this is a problem that is widespread. And when we
Speaker 17: see Hakeim Jeffries a day and a half later saying,
Speaker 17: you know, Trump is an existential threat to America, and
Speaker 17: Katie Porter, who's running for governor of California, is sending
Speaker 17: fundraising emails with the subject line, f Trump, where do
Speaker 17: you go from there? The left is not reigning this
Speaker 17: in well.
Speaker 1: I think they'll pay a price politically, but I would
Speaker 1: like it to begin with this fellow lived on Blue Sky.
Speaker 1: This fellow went to No King's rally. If you go
Speaker 1: to a No King's rally and you see Trump as
Speaker 1: Hitler signs, should you leave? As a moral question this
Speaker 1: in the political way, it's a moral question.
Speaker 17: Yeah, absolutely. But the problem is, and I sort of
Speaker 17: hypothesized that maybe this guy could have been autistic, because
Speaker 17: there's an understanding among most people when they say, you know,
Speaker 17: Trump is a fascist, Trump is Hitler, they don't actually
Speaker 17: believe it, because if you believed it, you would do
Speaker 17: what this guy did.
Speaker 15: No one believe.
Speaker 17: Very few people actually believe it or they would act
Speaker 17: on it. But there are some people who actually take
Speaker 17: all of this rhetoric at face value. And one of
Speaker 17: those people was Cole Allen, who went to the White
Speaker 17: House correspondents Toader on Saturday night.
Speaker 1: Now there would be the person who shot Trump and
Speaker 1: killed Corey Competoi had a sixteen hundred sat according to
Speaker 1: the President in the sixteen minutes interview, and I had
Speaker 1: a schizophrenic break. I don't know what we'll find out
Speaker 1: about this guy on Saturday night, but it's a weird
Speaker 1: resume cal Tech, a master's in computer science, and he's
Speaker 1: a part time tutor at the SAT place. That's not normal.
Speaker 1: That's not human development, is it?
Speaker 17: No, No, it's not normal. I mean one hester, he
Speaker 17: was living with his parents. He was obviously failure to
Speaker 17: launch situation. But the scary thing about a lot of
Speaker 17: these people is they are just on the line of
Speaker 17: like weird on the left, but that line is getting
Speaker 17: blurred so much that it's normal to still live with
Speaker 17: your parents, it's normal to failure to launch and not
Speaker 17: date in all these things. He is actually very ordinary
Speaker 17: on the left, and that's what's scary about it.
Speaker 1: So the answer is I listen, and I recommend to you.
Speaker 1: By the way, Douglas Murray talking today with Aaron McLain
Speaker 1: on School of War, there are two of the younger
Speaker 1: public intellectuals in the class with you, and Seth Mandel
Speaker 1: and Mary Catherine Ham and Matt Continetti and Guy Benson.
Speaker 1: We got a bunch of them who are forty five
Speaker 1: and younger that will call out wacky right wingers. I mean,
Speaker 1: you will. Does the left have a counterpart? Are they
Speaker 1: all the pod bros and nutters? Because people like Joshua,
Speaker 1: Michael Marshall and Maddie. They've aged out and they don't
Speaker 1: have any influence. They lost the tug of war with
Speaker 1: the crazies. The podbros Have lost the tug of war
Speaker 1: with the crazy. They are themselves becoming crazier.
Speaker 17: Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, the only way to gain traction
Speaker 17: on the left, and you're showing on Salem TV, you're
Speaker 17: showing pictures of Hassan Piker. The only way to gain
Speaker 17: credibility and notoriety and fame and all of these things
Speaker 17: on the left is to keep on inching farther and
Speaker 17: farther to the margins. And so you know, if you
Speaker 17: don't have Hassan Piker on your show, well what's wrong
Speaker 17: with you? Why are you so closed off? Even the
Speaker 17: New York Times now you're showing the New York Times
Speaker 17: opinion page interview with Hassan Piker. They are whitewashing personalities
Speaker 17: like his because they see him, and I think rightfully
Speaker 17: so as the future of the left. That is a
Speaker 17: real problem. There's a problem with the fact that Senator
Speaker 17: John Fetterman is so far gone for Democrats that he's
Speaker 17: practically a Republican at this point that is mind blowing
Speaker 17: and not right.
Speaker 1: It's also mind blowing. Hassan Piker is not stupid, but
Speaker 1: he's ignorant. I have not yet hear him say anything
Speaker 1: that would suggest he's read a book in ten years.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's cliche after cliche. A lot of the
Speaker 1: left is just cliche after cliche, as opposed to I'll
Speaker 1: just take randomly continenty who's coming up next hour? I
Speaker 1: think the guy reads three books a day and pod
Speaker 1: Hortz it's at the library, it's it is an.
Speaker 17: Live with Seth and I don't know how he reads
Speaker 17: so much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's ridiculous. It makes me mad, but I nevertheless,
Speaker 1: I wonder do you think that the public will really
Speaker 1: understand the Democrats have lost the way, They've lost the thread.
Speaker 1: They're not the center left party anymore. They're radical.
Speaker 17: I think in some ways yes, But I think that
Speaker 17: the vast majority of Americans don't pay attention to this
Speaker 17: day by day sort of football stuff. They tune in
Speaker 17: when it's nearer to an election and they have to
Speaker 17: sort of pay attention to figure out what's going on.
Speaker 17: And the that the Trump campaign ran He's with they
Speaker 17: them not you like that message really resonated and really landed,
Speaker 17: and so unfortunately, I think it's a waiting game until
Speaker 17: the elections get closer, and then you kind of have
Speaker 17: to refresh people's memories and run some ads and say
Speaker 17: this happened on Saturday night and this is what Hakeem
Speaker 17: Jeffrey said on Monday morning. That's what it's going to
Speaker 17: have to take, because I don't think right now the
Speaker 17: majority of Americans are paying attention.
Speaker 1: Quick exit question. If you're a parent and you want
Speaker 1: to try and do your best to defense your kid
Speaker 1: against this, you home school. I believe in Catholic schools
Speaker 1: are Jewish schools, but what if people can't afford them,
Speaker 1: what do they do?
Speaker 17: People have to talk to their kids. You have to
Speaker 17: have these conversations. When I wrote my book Stolen Youth
Speaker 17: with Carol Markowitz, we've all talked to a lot of parents,
Speaker 17: and a lot of the parents that we spoke to
Speaker 17: had regrets because they felt like they lost their kids,
Speaker 17: not just to the left. They didn't just become progressive,
Speaker 17: but they really lost their minds. And these parents were
Speaker 17: evaluating what did I do wrong? And they didn't They
Speaker 17: didn't affirmatively tell their kids this is what we believe.
Speaker 17: They kind of left it up to the schools and
Speaker 17: fate and that's not the not the.
Speaker 1: Way to go. Bethany Mandel can be followed at Bethany
Speaker 1: seandark on x the mom Warris dot substact dot com.
Speaker 1: Mandatory reading for these times. So you're right back in America,
Speaker 1: stay tuned to be he here at showing the Salem
Speaker 1: New Channel, Salem Radio Network and are great radio fields,
Speaker 1: Welcome back in America on here and after the incident
Speaker 1: or on Saturday night at the Washington Hilton. I thought
Speaker 1: I would make the rounds of people who are running
Speaker 1: for office, like Mike Rodgers, it's formerly been a member
Speaker 1: of the House, former FBI agent, former director, or chairman
Speaker 1: of the House Intel Committee, and ask them if it
Speaker 1: gives them pause. Mike, you've been around politics for a
Speaker 1: long time, You've been in law enforcement for a long time.
Speaker 1: You're not old enough to have been around for the
Speaker 1: sixties like I was. But it is kind of a
Speaker 1: weird situation out there. How do you feel it on
Speaker 1: the trail?
Speaker 15: You know what worries me most, Hugh, is just the
Speaker 15: level of rhetoric and hate, you know, trying to identify
Speaker 15: the president with Hitler and fascism.
Speaker 11: Remember, there's a reason they do that, and it's because
Speaker 11: we went to war over Hitler. We went to war
Speaker 11: over fascism, and they want that level of angst. And
Speaker 11: when you add in their social media and interactions, and
Speaker 11: then you add in there this higher level of mental
Speaker 11: instability when it comes around the fringes.
Speaker 15: Boy, that is just a recipe for disaster. And you're
Speaker 15: encouraging people.
Speaker 11: Like you just saw for three times in less than
Speaker 11: two years, try to assassinate the president of the United States.
Speaker 15: That really needs to end.
Speaker 11: And we certainly have seen it with my opponents who
Speaker 11: really haven't come out and talked about this at all.
Speaker 15: They didn't even feel it was important enough to condemn it.
Speaker 15: And that's worrisome.
Speaker 1: Are you had one of your opponents, I'll say, add
Speaker 1: leads in some polls on their polls. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: not much difference between the three blind mice on the
Speaker 1: Democratic side. But I'll say I hosted Hassan Piker, who
Speaker 1: is mister social murder. Now that infinitous clip from last week.
Speaker 1: I'm curious, what do you expect them to say when
Speaker 1: they've thrown in with the hard lefts wild rhetoric.
Speaker 11: Well, they just keep finding excuses why it's kind of okay.
Speaker 11: Matter of fact, their own rhetoric has been pretty awful.
Speaker 11: I mean Lsayed talked about putting people in the mud
Speaker 11: and choking them out, and Mick Morrow talked about throwing
Speaker 11: beers at judges and Stevens, you know, talked about after
Speaker 11: the Charlie Kirk assassination went into viral this you know,
Speaker 11: here's all the.
Speaker 15: Terrible things he has said.
Speaker 2: You know, give an.
Speaker 11: Excuse or pause at least to the folks who have
Speaker 11: done you know, horrific crime.
Speaker 15: So they're all part of this new Democrat Party.
Speaker 11: Bernie Sanders is coming to Michigan on Sunday with Abdul.
Speaker 11: That is the energy of the party. It is the
Speaker 11: left now that's running the Democrat Party. This is not
Speaker 11: your grandmother's Democrat Party anymore. They are more radical, they
Speaker 11: are more a leftist, they are more extremist, and that
Speaker 11: rhetoric that they are using in places like No Kings.
Speaker 11: As matter of fact, they even had at the convention,
Speaker 11: that Democrat convention that was an absolute dumpster fire for Democrats,
Speaker 11: effigies of Donald Trump where they were hanging him. I mean,
Speaker 11: it's just crossed a line in a fervor that worries
Speaker 11: me about the safety and security but also the rhetoric
Speaker 11: of the future of the country.
Speaker 15: We are not a left this country. We are not
Speaker 15: a country that believes.
Speaker 11: That Mandami is going to save all of us by
Speaker 11: having more government involvement in your life and running your
Speaker 11: grocery store and telling people what home they can buy
Speaker 11: if they can buy one, or car they can drive.
Speaker 11: All of that is on the agenda for the left
Speaker 11: right now, and the way that they get there is
Speaker 11: by this in I would argue more violent rhetoric that
Speaker 11: we've seen not only here in Michigan but around the country.
Speaker 1: You know, I don't know if you remember. Ten years
Speaker 1: ago Lunatic walked into the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria on
Speaker 1: Kennecut Avenue and shot the place up, claiming he was
Speaker 1: there to save the kids from a pedophile ring. And
Speaker 1: that was Lunacy. I was unaware of the whole Lunatic conspiracy,
Speaker 1: but pretty quickly thereafter everyone just distanced themselves from q
Speaker 1: Andon and from pizzagate and from four Chan. They wanted
Speaker 1: nothing to do with the nutters. Now we've got four
Speaker 1: Kings adjacent Nutter. Do you think people will distance themselves
Speaker 1: from the waters in which he was swimming?
Speaker 15: I hope, I hope that they do that.
Speaker 11: I don't believe that they will look at the pattern
Speaker 11: over time here and look at the really the aggressive
Speaker 11: behavior we've seen, you know, attacking police officers, talking, defunding
Speaker 11: the police, all of those things just a few short
Speaker 11: years ago would have been absolute dismissal to run for office.
Speaker 11: Now it's it's part of their platform. Open borders, kind
Speaker 11: of part of their platform. Let people in and don't
Speaker 11: require them to drive show a driver's license to vote.
Speaker 11: I mean, where they're going is in such terrible place.
Speaker 11: I'd like to think that they'd come back to normal
Speaker 11: and say enough is enough. But the Democrat Party has
Speaker 11: to police themselves. And we have just witnessed in the
Speaker 11: last certainly here in Michigan with again this convention that
Speaker 11: was just awful, very openly anti semitic, if.
Speaker 15: Not worse by the way, and you see the rhetoric
Speaker 15: you see at these No.
Speaker 11: Kings protests paid for by the way, according to online
Speaker 11: reports by the George Soros organization.
Speaker 15: These are by design they're working toward this kind.
Speaker 11: Of chaos in American streets and in American politics, and
Speaker 11: Democrats today, in order to make it through their primaries,
Speaker 11: are becoming more radical and more leftists, and I argue
Speaker 11: a little more dangerous that has san Piker is the
Speaker 11: guy who came to Michigan, went to two universities, literally
Speaker 11: thousands of young students showed up. And you know regular Democrats,
Speaker 11: even elected Democrats supporting all of this, who said America
Speaker 11: deserved nine to eleven.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean he's so Now. I got to ask you,
Speaker 1: over the course of a decade, first Missouri went from
Speaker 1: blue to purple to red. Then Ohio went from blue
Speaker 1: to purple to rad is Michigan doing the same thing,
Speaker 1: so that Mike Rodgers and give us your campaign website
Speaker 1: might have a little win that it's back as sort
Speaker 1: of common since Midwesterners say we don't want any part
Speaker 1: of the hard left.
Speaker 11: So true, and people forget Michigan is in a change
Speaker 11: election cycle. This is not, you know, like the rest
Speaker 11: of the country where they're defending a midterm. Democrats have
Speaker 11: been in charge in Lancing for ten years, and you
Speaker 11: know they gave us the highest auto insurance rates in
Speaker 11: the country. They gave us highest energy rates in the Midwest.
Speaker 11: We went from top ten in education to forty four.
Speaker 11: We lost thirty thousand manufacturing jobs. And at the national level,
Speaker 11: they've held these Senate seats for thirty years. We've lost
Speaker 11: our defense, industrial based manufacturing and all the things I
Speaker 11: just talked about.
Speaker 15: So people are ready for a change.
Speaker 11: And when they see this nuttiness, remember these are folks
Speaker 11: that get up every day and they go to work.
Speaker 11: They got benefit three million families from that no tax
Speaker 11: on overtime that all of them opposed for their big
Speaker 11: government agenda.
Speaker 15: I do believe that there's some wind at our back.
Speaker 11: And in the last election, three hundred thousand more Republican
Speaker 11: votes than any other statewide Republican in the history of
Speaker 11: the state that I got tells me that we're moving
Speaker 11: in the right direction. And people understand when you go
Speaker 11: to work every day, you get it. We're working on
Speaker 11: all the problems that they face, and they're ready for
Speaker 11: a change here and we're going to be that change
Speaker 11: that we need in Michigan. And you can go to
Speaker 11: Rogers for Senate dot com, find.
Speaker 1: Rogers p Senate dot com, Rogers for Senate dot Com,
Speaker 1: or follow Mike on At At, Mike Rogers for Michigan,
Speaker 1: Mike Rodgers for m I pack you, Mike, I'll be
Speaker 1: right back in America. Thank you,