Ep. 1676 - "No Kings Protest" Turns Into A Rallying Cry For Political Violence

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Today, Matt Wall Show, leftist protesters take to the streets to bravely stand up against our non-existent king, and they do so as always by explicitly calling for violence against their political opponents.

When will they finally be held accountable for it?

Is the question we'll talk about it?

And I think I've identified the precise moment in time when our culture peaked and then started its decline.

The real reason for the decline, the thing that may make the decline permanent, is something that isn't talked about very much, but we'll talk about it today.

It's an important conversation, in my opinion, so stick around for it.

All of that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.

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In the fall of 2022, a disabled 300-pound Air Force veteran in his mid-70s by the name of Craig Robertson posted the following message on Facebook from his home in Provo, Utah.

Quote, Hey, Merritt Garland, you demented weasel, send your FBI SWAT team to my house.

Less than a year later, Merritt Garland did exactly that.

Shortly before 6 a.m., a heavily armed FBI SWAT team showed up at Robertson's door.

They brought an armored vehicle with them.

along with night vision goggles, ballistic shields, a mechanical boom that they they used to shatter his windows.

Dozens of agents then launched flashbangs and barged into his home without even giving the opportunity to get dressed.

When Robertson awoke, startled, officers say he pointed a handgun at them.

They quickly shot him several times, killed him, and dragged his body onto the sidewalk where it remained unattended for several hours.

As news of the killing spread, various members of the media, including one of my producers,

filed records requests so that we could see the FBI body cam footage of this shooting, but we never received it.

The FBI acknowledged that the footage exists, but they've refused to share it.

To this day, we still have not seen it.

The FBI insists that the information cannot be released, saying that it might interfere with some vague, unmentioned law enforcement proceeding.

Meanwhile, as they hid the evidence, the Biden administration celebrated what they had done.

The neighbors were horrified, but the Biden White House was thrilled with the outcome.

Craig Robertson, they said, had threatened Joe Biden's life in various Facebook posts.

And because Biden was visiting Utah that day, the FBI had no choice but to assault the man's home, even though he was crippled.

Watch.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched a review into the deadly shooting of a Utah man during an FBI raid on his home on Wednesday.

Agents were attempting to serve arrests and search warrants on 75-year-old Craig Robertson after they say he made credible threats to kill President Biden and other Democratic public officials.

The deadly incident unfolding just hours before President Biden landed in Utah for an event.

The tipping point to me was President Biden was coming.

He was going to be in close proximity, and this individual had looked like he was on a planning path to carry out the attack.

A federal complaint full of screenshots details the dozens of threats Robertson allegedly posted on social media.

One of them just four days ago.

Quote, I hear Biden is coming to Utah, digging out my old ghillie suit and cleaning the dust off the M24 sniper rifle.

We're glad that nobody in law enforcement was hurt.

This is really not about just the rhetoric.

It's about the actions that can sometimes go with that rhetoric.

Biden's spokesman is just happy that no law enforcement officers got hurt.

He's grateful that this terrorist mastermind, this crippled 75-year-old, morbidly obese man who needs a cane to get around, was taken out without any loss of innocent life.

What's left unstated by Biden's spokesman and by the corporate media is that more than six months before this pre-dawn raid, FBI agents watched Craig Robertson drive to church, which he did every week, and they saw him hobble with his cane and sit down in the pews and attend a service and then hobble back home.

And then when he got home, the agents asked him a series of questions about his Facebook post, to which Robertson replied, don't come back without a warrant.

So They were tracking this guy for the better part of a year.

They knew his routine.

They knew of his physical condition, and they knew that he was highly paranoid about law enforcement, justifiably so, it turns out.

Therefore, whatever you make of Robertson's Facebook posts, and some of them were probably illegal under the law, it's obvious that the FBI had no reason whatsoever to besiege his home before 6 a.m.

as if he was Osama bin Laden.

I mean, they could have just walked up to him on his way to church, put him in handcuffs.

Could have placed him under surveillance to see if he really was going to suit up and camouflage and try to assassinate Joe Biden.

They could have taken his cane away and told him to go to sleep.

I mean, they could have done anything.

All of these options would have worked perfectly fine.

But it's obvious why Joe Biden's FBI decided against taking any of those steps.

They wanted to kill Craig Robertson.

They knew he would grab his revolver if they tried to break into his home at 6 a.m.

They knew his response would give them the pretext they needed.

And then as they sprawled Craig Robertson's lifeless body on the sidewalk, they'd be able to send a very clear message to every other so-called MAGA Republican in the country.

You know, just months before

Robertson was shot, Joe Biden, as you remember, flanked by Marines and in front of a blood-red

background, declared the MAGA Republicans to be the single greatest domestic terror threat faced by Americans.

In no uncertain terms, Joe Biden ordered his entire administration, including the FBI, to pursue MAGA Republicans as if they were members of al-Qaeda or ISIS.

That's exactly what the FBI's field office in Salt Lake City did when they attacked the home of Craig Robertson.

They were following Biden's orders.

Now that the Biden administration is out of power, it's easy to forget about the story of Craig Robertson,

the story and about the video that they still have not shown us.

But we shouldn't forget about it for several reasons.

First of all, obviously, it's a reminder of what Democrats will do if they ever return to power.

They won't simply imprison their political enemies.

They will happily kill them if they can concoct any justification for doing so.

But there's now another reason to revisit the case.

Over the weekend, as you may have seen, Democrats held a series of so-called no-kings protests in various locations across the country.

Now, yes, they were sparsely attended and many of the attendees were old pathetic geezers, but these protests still served a purpose.

They allowed Democrats to openly call for the deaths of their political opponents.

And these were not the idle online threats of a disabled 75-year-old man.

They were threats of violence that were made in public and in broad daylight

by people and by a movement that has the capacity to carry them out.

Many of these people were demonstrating their allegiance to Antifa, which is a known terrorist organization.

Now, in a moment, I'm going to show you some of these threats of violence.

As you watch them, ask yourself, why haven't any of these people been raided by the FBI at 6 a.m.?

Why haven't FBI SWAT teams showed up to any of their houses?

Why haven't any of them had their windows demolished by armored vehicles before they can even put their clothes on?

And now, it's not to say these people should suffer the same fate as Craig Robertson.

I'm certainly not saying that the FBI should concoct a pretext to kill any of these people.

I don't think the federal government should operate that way.

But at the same time, as long as we're pretending that the rule of law still exists in this country, you'd think they'd suffer some consequences for breaking the law, just as Craig Robertson supposedly broke the law.

And yet, as far as we know, none of the leftists who made threats of violence have even been questioned by federal authorities, much less arrested, much less attacked in their own homes at 6 a.m.

This is footage from the perimeter of a no-kings protest in downtown Chicago over the weekend.

Christopher Sweat with Greystack Media shot this footage.

Here it is, watch it.

You gotta grab a gun.

We gotta turn around the guns on this fascist system.

These ICE agents gotta get shot and wiped out.

This day, the state machinery that's on full display right there has to get wiped out.

You gotta grab a gun.

We gotta turn around the guns on this fascist system.

These ICE agents got to get shot and wiped out the same machinery that's on full display right right there has to get wiped out

now on the longer clip the man says that killing ice agents is necessary to ensure justice for black people and working class people and of course palestine

now by any measure this is unlawful speech the man should be arrested The Fed should seize all of his computers and his cell phones, figuring out who he's been coordinating with, if anyone.

We need to know if anyone is funding him.

These are basic steps that need to be taken to ensure that more conservatives aren't assassinated by people like this.

So is anyone taking those steps?

I mean, we have no idea at the moment.

Certainly, there's been no statement from the DOJ that this person has been arrested or that his home has been raided.

The man has supposedly been identified by random internet detectives as a staff member at Wilbur Wright College, which shouldn't be remotely surprising.

Some of the most deranged violent leftists work in academia.

But we don't have official confirmation at this point, even though we should have it

about who this guy is.

We should have official confirmation because we should have a mugshot of him, because he should be in jail right now.

We need to see mass arrests after these so-called protests.

Here's another threat of violence.

This one was captured by Brandy Cruz of the Undivided podcast.

The footage is from from Seattle.

Watch.

Who are you going to kill?

Nazis.

Who do you define as a Nazi?

What do you mean?

It's pretty.

In this context, who's a Nazi?

Stephen Miller's a Nazi.

So you're going to kill Stephen Miller?

If I had a chance, yeah, I would.

I don't know if that's someone I'd say on camera, bro.

Now, there's another video that Brandy Cruz uploaded shortly after this one in which a random middle-aged guy who looks relatively normal says basically the same thing.

He agrees that it would be, quote, justifiable to murder Stephen Miller.

Again, this is the prevailing sentiment on the left right now, in the mainstream.

Now, the FBI is apparently aware of this footage, according to Brandy Cruz, but we don't know exactly what that means.

The FBI certainly hasn't released a statement saying that they've arrested this person, thrown him in solitary confinement where he should be.

He's a political terrorist.

He's a suspected political terrorist.

He should be in Guantanamo Bay right now.

And until that happens, they might as well do nothing at all.

Until there's an actual crackdown on these people with a tenth of the intensity of the Biden administration's crackdown on conservatives, nothing will change.

They'll continue threatening us and killing us with total impunity.

And indeed, that was the entire point of the so-called no-kings protest.

This is footage from Chicago, in which a woman mocks the assassination of Charlie Kirk as Kirk's supporters drove by.

She mimes a gun shooting someone in the neck.

Watch.

Now, probably the least surprising development of all time, this woman has been identified online as a, I'll give you one guess, a public school teacher in Chicago.

There's no official confirmation, but her reported school, Nathan Hale Elementary School, apparently just deleted its X account and took its entire website offline.

So that seems like confirmation.

And also confirmation that you should homeschool your children immediately, or at least take them out of public school, if that's where they are.

You know, a huge number of public school teachers think like this.

They're truly demented individuals

and

they want your children to be demented just like they are.

And there's a very high likelihood that if your child is in public school and you're a conservative, his teacher wants him dead and you dead alongside him.

It's just the reality.

And again, this woman belongs in prison.

She's threatening Charlie Kirk supporters to their faces.

It's unambiguous.

So why hasn't she been arrested?

Where is the SWAT team for her?

Why aren't we throwing every single thing we can at her?

Why not every,

look, look through the book to find every single single law

that she may have theoretically broken and charge her with all of them?

Make her life a living hell from now until the foreseeable future.

Legally.

Why isn't that happening?

Now, we'll run through a few more examples of leftists glorifying violence at these so-called protests.

Some of these don't rise to the level of criminal conduct necessarily, but they do give you a sense of the prevailing sentiment on the left.

This is footage from the main wire.

Watch.

So, this is your birthday, so you came out on your birthday.

You thought it was important.

Tell me why.

Absolutely, because I have two little boys who deserve a bright future of freedom and democracy.

And

this is a nightmare that I'm living in.

And I'm here to make a difference and to be loud and proud.

And there's no other way I'd want to celebrate my birthday than with my parents and my best friend fighting for our country.

So, Okay, so for a birthday present, what do you hope happens?

You know, you wake up tomorrow morning.

I hope that I see the obituary that we're all waiting for tomorrow.

That's what I hope for.

Wasn't that President Trump is dead?

Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Absolutely.

Now, one of the things you probably noticed watching this clip is that the woman seems happy overall, out there on her birthday, smiling.

Other than being massively overweight, she seems normal enough.

And then, without missing a beat or changing her sing-songy demeanor in any way, she says that she'd be thrilled if the president of the United States is dead.

And the woman behind her clearly thinks the same way.

This is the kind of woman that, if you pass by her in the grocery store, she would seem to be smiley and friendly.

And you would say, Oh, you see, our political divisions aren't that bad.

It's all online.

It's all on X.

Out here in the real world, things aren't so bad.

Yeah, little do you know that this same woman will cheerfully tell you, oh, yes, I want my political enemies to die.

Oh, for sure.

This is mainstream on the left.

I don't know how many times I have to say it.

I don't know how much more evidence we need.

Now, of course, if this woman really believed that she was living in a fascist empire under a king,

She wouldn't be allowed to protest at all.

And she certainly wouldn't be happy smiling for the cameras as if she's out for a picnic.

She wouldn't be joking around with her friends.

And she would not be saying, yes, we're living under a fascist dictator king, and I hope he dies.

If you have a fascist dictator in charge and you say that, it'll be the last thing you ever say.

This is the absurdity of it.

All these people,

we're living under king, under a dictatorship, and I hope he dies.

And let's rise up and kill all of his, you know, and kill him.

The fact that you're able to say that is all of the evidence we need that there is nothing approaching a dictatorship in this country.

So, how do we explain this inconsistency?

One way to think of these protests is that for a large contingent on the left, they're an opportunity to do something with their very empty and dysfunctional lives.

They don't believe in God.

Many of them have damaged relationships with their family and friends,

if they have relationships at all.

You know, a lot of them are, you know,

they hate their parents, they are divorced, they just totally dysfunctional lives.

They're profoundly hateful people, indistinguishable from demons, really.

They've been affirmed and indoctrinated for decades, even as the central promises of their ideology one by one have turned out to be lies.

So in their boredom and nihilism, they attempt to express themselves through aimless, astro-turf protests about a monarchy, even though we don't even have a monarchy.

Without any guiding principles or morality and without any fear of consequences, they have no problem making death threats or making light of death or expressing their death wishes.

It's entertainment for them.

You know, it's all they have left.

Now, that's presumably why this elderly man, for example, showed up to a protest dressed as Charlie Kirk's assassin.

A normal man of this age would be playing with his grandchildren

or, you know, going to church or reading a book.

tending to his garden, anything.

He'd also, by this point, have come to terms with his own mortality.

But when elderly, immature men haven't come to terms with their own mortality, when they don't believe in God,

when they have no purpose in their lives, this is the natural result.

You know, age and wisdom, we like to think, go together, and oftentimes they do, but there is nothing uglier and more pathetic than age devoid of wisdom.

There is nothing uglier and more pathetic than an old, decrepit person who has no wisdom.

The one thing you're supposed to gain with age, you don't have.

And instead, you're just this immature child in your late 70s wilting away.

And that's described so many of these so-called protesters.

They use irony to mask their very deep-seated insecurity over their own impending demise.

And to be clear, there's no age limit or age requirement on this kind of thinking.

Here's the Pennsylvania Democratic Party chair in Crawford County.

You can see here, she's holding a sign calling for Donald Trump to be 86th, as in assassinated.

Again, it's all very flippant.

They're smiling.

Why wouldn't they be?

They don't think anyone's going to do anything about it.

In fact, they know it'll make them even more popular in the Democratic Party.

The Daily Signal spoke to a woman at yesterday's protest who voiced similar sentiments.

She repeated a bunch of lies about Charlie Kirk, compared him to Hitler, and said that she was grateful that he's dead.

And in the same breath, she said that she's a very nice lady, a very nice person.

Watch.

Something that I've heard in interviewing Republicans is that they're concerned with the health care going to undocumented immigrants.

What would you say about that?

I don't know that it's true.

Everybody deserves health care, and we can certainly afford it in this country.

So again, they're just, you know,

they're pointing to things and saying it's our fault, we're too liberal.

My.

Yeah, it's really depressing.

I don't know how anybody your age even thinks of having children, okay?

Okay, millions of Democrats did not vote.

Whose fault is that?

We need to get ourselves together.

And we might even need to be a little bit meaner because the Republicans don't mind being mean.

And by mean, what do you mean?

Do you mean protesting?

Do you mean...

Maybe we have to, I don't know, to stop being so nice.

Because you seem like a pretty nice lady.

I'm a pretty nice lady, but I can be pretty mean, too.

Okay, and I have to ask this because people on the other side are going to say that they feel like the Democrat Party has been mean.

Recently, with Charlie Kirk being assassinated, they...

He's a piece of garbage.

Of course we were mean.

I am so tired of people saying, oh, but, you know, it's a terrible thing.

No, Hitler is dead.

I'm glad Hitler's dead.

Evil people have no place in...

in my world.

He was a hateful human being.

It was disgusting the things that he said and did.

I don't have time for that.

I'm sorry.

I have to point my energy in other directions.

She's a nice lady.

She wants health care for everyone, but she also wants half the country to die.

So just to be clear about who gets health care.

That's the kind of health care that she wants for me and you and pretty much anyone watching this.

This is the official position of every single true believer in the Democrat Party, without exception.

All of them, every single one.

That's why there's so much footage like this.

They want you dead.

They will dance on your grave.

And as they do, they will tell themselves that they're very kind people.

They'll claim that by blowing your head off, they're being compassionate.

And they'll inevitably invoke Hitler, not because they understand history or care about factual accuracy, but because it makes them feel like they're a vital part of an existential struggle.

And because it's literally the only historical figure that they know.

Quote, I don't know how anyone your age even thinks about having children, says the older woman.

After all, how could you have children when climate change is going to destroy the world?

How could you have children when we have a king who's going to enslave all the women?

How could you have children when instead you, you know, could focus entirely on yourself?

Rather than raise a family, you could save civilization from the neo-Nazis who lurk behind every corner.

Like all deeply held beliefs that are rooted in narcissism, these propositions fall apart the moment that you think about them for a second.

For example, in this clip, the woman says that everyone, including illegal aliens, deserves healthcare.

Again, she also wants the government to forgive student loans, punish hate speech, et cetera.

That's her proposal at this no-kings rally.

But the only way to achieve any of these objectives is to massively expand the power of the executive branch far beyond its current capabilities.

They want to force doctors at gunpoint to provide services to people who can't pay for it.

In other words, they do, in fact, want a king.

They just want a king who's on their side.

And just to underscore that point, not that it really needs to be underscored at this point, here's a post from the website of Democrats Abroad, which has been organizing no kings protests overseas for the past six months.

And you can see there, quote, A few notes.

We've changed the no-kings theme of other events around the world to no tyrants, so as not to mix messages in a country with a monarchy.

We're also swapping out no crowns in favor of no clowns.

Come dressed as a Trump clown.

Think bad blonde wig, orange face, long red tie, or whatever gets your creative juices flowing.

Yes, after months of campaigning against a king, let's just have realized that some of their favorite countries like Canada, the UK, have a king.

Meanwhile, the United States, which just voted for Donald Trump, you know, voted Donald Trump in office with a majority of the popular vote and support of every single swing state, does not have a king.

And that's obviously a bit inconvenient for the whole no-kings messaging, which is intended to protest protest Donald Trump.

So now they've called an audible, at least in some parts of the world.

It's enough to make you think that these people may not be completely honest about their intentions.

This footage has the same effect, which you can see here in Seattle, leftists dressed up as LICE agents and rolled around in the dirt on the Constitution.

You get it?

They're LICE agents instead of ICE agents.

Really,

really reaching for the puns on this one.

It's reminiscent of the no-kings protests from a few months ago when leftists paid money to berate effigies of Donald Trump.

This is now a well-established pattern of unhinged behavior and really cringy lame behavior.

It's not a one-off.

So it's incumbent on conservatives at this point

to answer the following question.

How should we respond?

when our political opponents are openly deranged, immature, nihilistic, and most importantly committed to murdering every single one of us.

Well, here's a thought.

thought.

We should not respond by obsessing over naughty jokes in a Republican group chat.

We should not spend weeks fighting amongst ourselves.

We should not be obsessively counter-signaling

each other.

And we should not be doing that when no one on the left, under any circumstance, would do the same thing.

Instead, we should recall what they did to Craig Robertson,

what they'll do to you.

We should think about the FBI SWAT team that shot up his house because he ranted about Joe Biden when they absolutely did not need to do that.

And we should keep Craig Robertson in mind as we pursue the leftists making threats today.

Not because they should suffer the same fate,

but because they are far, far greater threats to us than Craig Robertson ever was to Joe Biden.

And after the murder of Charlie Kirk and the celebration of political violence that just took place all over the country under the guise of no kings protests,

we should treat them accordingly.

Now let's get to our five headlines.

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All right.

Let's see the fish cam.

Pull up the fish cam.

You know, good news about the fish cam, by the way.

We were talking about how it was missing.

There it is.

There's the fish cam.

You can't see it with the shadow, but I actually, this is the good news.

If you get a closer look,

it does have an anal fin.

So that's the good.

A lot of people have been worried about it.

All weekend, you've been worried that my fish is missing an anal fin, but it does have, it's harder to see, but it does have an anal fin.

So it's only missing one fin.

It's missing its first dorsal fin on top.

But other than that, fish is in pretty good shape.

So

now we've centered ourselves again, calmed down a bit.

You know, we're not going to spend a lot of time on the headlines today because I want to leave more time for the final segment, which will be longer than usual.

And, you know, it won't really be a cancellation exactly.

I just have a kind of an idea that I want to talk about.

And actually, I was up till about like 2.30 in the morning last night writing this monologue about this

theory that I have.

And I, because I also made the mistake of drinking coffee past 7 p.m., which I never do.

And this was the result.

But I've been thinking about it, and I believe I've identified the exact moment when our culture peaked and began its decline,

which also kind of tells us what exactly our problem is, what our real fundamental underlying problem is in our culture.

And it's one that is actually not political or ideological.

And it also tells us where things are headed, what comes next.

So I think it's an important conversation.

We're going to talk about that

so we'll only we'll touch on one headline and um

that and we're going to talk about this one which is horrifically awful unfortunately

uh new york post reports two young ohio children are facing attempted murder rape and other charges for an unthinkable assault on a five-year-old girl who was left bloodied, scalped, and unrecognizable, according to authorities and her horrified mother.

The suspects, a nine-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl, were hit with a laundry list of charges, including the shocking September 13th, following the shocking September 13th attack on the little girl.

Prosecutor's Office and Cleveland Division of Police both declined to share additional information or provide comments due to the sensitive nature of the case.

The victim's mother told local allies that she dropped her daughter off at a family member's house for a few hours on

September 13th.

And somehow, the young girl left the property on her own

and was missing, and then was found later that day unresponsive, beaten and bloodied in a field.

So, just unthinkable.

Here's more from this mother talking to local news.

Here it is.

Literally, I saw the worst thing ever.

Like,

Antavia Kenny Brew, a mother, heartbroken and pleading for justice.

Police say her five-year-old daughter was beaten, scalped, and sexually assaulted.

The people that did it, they believe, are a nine-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl.

I saw my daughter

unrecognizable.

Kenny Brew says she dropped her daughter off with a family member on September 13th.

Somehow, the five-year-old got outside.

The next thing the mother knows, her little girl is being treated by paramedics.

Police say the brutal attack happened in a field near East 148th Street and St.

Clair Avenue.

Her hair was scalped from her head.

She had bruises and blood all over her body.

Her eyes was filled with blood.

Her lips and mouth was filled with blood.

Her nails had dirt, a debris of dirt stuck in it.

19 News spoke to Kenny Brew last week, nearly a month after the attack.

She's still wondering how and why this could have happened.

The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office charging the children with some adult-like crimes, attempted murder, rape, kidnapping, and strangulation.

Kenny Brew telling us her daughter is left emotionally and physically hurt.

I want her to just

to be somewhat of a normal five-year-old again.

The prosecutor's office says they are still going through evidence and getting new information.

Our team reached out to Cabre's lawyer for comment on these charges, but have not heard back.

For 19 News, I'm Arya Janelle.

So this is obviously just beyond all imagining, one of the darkest, most twisted things I've ever heard of.

And for a crime like this to be committed by a nine and a ten year old

is

unfathomable.

I mean, I have three kids around that age.

And they are, I can say, literally incapable of doing anything like this.

I mean, it's more likely that they would sprout wings and fly across the room than that they would commit a violent, heinous felony crime.

And most parents, hopefully, can say that about their kids.

So, what happened with these kids then?

And this brings me back to something that we've discussed before.

We've talked about the recent cases, increasing in regularity, where the parents of school shooters are charged for the crime that their child commits.

The parents of, of, we must stipulate,

white school shooters.

And I've said in those cases that the only way I could possibly support charging the parents is if the approach is applied consistently, but it isn't, because every day in this country, in the inner cities and urban areas, horrible, violent crimes are committed by children, and the parents of those kids are basically never charged.

And here we are with the most stark illustration of this point.

As far as I know, the parents of these nine and 10-year-old kids have not been identified.

I don't know why they haven't been identified.

And

they have not been charged.

Will they be charged?

I don't know.

But if history is any guide, no.

Because this is urban crime, it's street crime.

And the culprits, we can assume with a high degree of certainty are black.

And we can assume that because of where this happened, but also if these assailants were white, we would definitely be told that fact.

I mean, in fact, if they were white, this would be the biggest story in the country right now.

It would be

the biggest headline news right now.

So the fact that it isn't kind of

tells us, it gives the game away.

So where are the charges?

Why aren't the parents charged not just with a crime, but a capital crime?

I mean, why aren't they facing the death penalty for this?

The parents, I mean, they should be.

And I say that as someone who has been been very skeptical of charging parents for the crimes of their children.

Skeptical because of the inconsistency, as I said, but also skeptical in principle because, you know, this

I'm skeptical in principle of the idea of holding a parent responsible, legally responsible for a crime that the child goes off and commits on their own.

And obviously, if the parent was...

somehow involved in encouraging it or planning it or something, then clearly everyone agrees the parents would be charged in that case.

But I think this case shows us where the line should be drawn.

So here's what I think we should do.

I don't think that parents should automatically be charged whenever a child commits a violent crime.

It is possible for a parent to be basically attentive, basically loving, trying to do their best, and yet still end up with a child who does something terrible.

That can happen.

It happens all the time.

It's scary to think about as a parent, but it's true.

You know, your child is his own person.

He has his own mind.

He has his own free will, his own conscience.

And

so

he could go off and do something terrible.

I mean, you can't absolutely 100%

guarantee that won't happen.

But here's where I would draw the line.

And you have to draw it somewhere, and there will be an element of arbitrariness to it.

But

I think that this is the least arbitrary line you can draw.

If you have a child who is 10 years old or younger, and commits a violent felony, you as the parent should automatically be charged and sentenced as if you committed that crime yourself.

I think that's what we should do.

And yeah, drawing a line at 10 is kind of arbitrary.

You could draw it at nine, you could draw it at 11 or 12, but the point is that if a very young child

does,

you know, commits a violent crime against another human being,

it means that you have utterly failed as a parent at the most fundamental and basic level.

Kids get into mischief all the time.

They do dumb things, even if you're a good parent.

But that's one thing.

On the other hand, if a young child becomes a violent felon and commits heinous, monstrous

atrocities,

then it means that you are pathologically neglectful, incompetent, and probably sadistic as a parent yourself.

Obviously.

And, you know, things can change as kids get older.

It is possible that a 15, 16-year-old teenage boy could go out and do something violent and bad, even if you aren't the worst parent in the world.

I mean, there's a lot you can do as a parent to protect against that.

It's not like it's the luck of the draw completely.

But

and if your 15-year-old son commits a violent crime, chances are high that

you have at least made some significant mistakes as a parent at a minimum.

But it doesn't necessarily require you to be a monster yourself, right?

A 10-year-old, I mean, a 10-year-old doing something like this.

Well, then you're just a monster.

I mean, you as the parent are a monster.

I mean, if your 15-year-old commits this kind of crime, rape, torture, kidnapping, then you're probably also a monster as a parent.

If your 25-year-old commits this kind of crime, pretty good indication that you're a monstrously terrible parent, but you got to draw the line somewhere.

And what I'm saying is that 10 and under,

the charges against the parent should be automatic.

It should just be,

your kid does something like this, violent felony under the age of 10, you just, you're automatic,

you are required by law to at least get your kid past the age of 10 without committing violent felonies.

And if you can't do that, you automatically are going to jail.

And beyond that, it's a case-by-case basis.

And there's one other point I want to make about this.

You know, we talk so much about political violence.

I obviously, I talked about it on this show.

We talked about it at the start of the show.

It's a big problem.

But But the violent crime epidemic is not, of course, driven primarily by political violence, and it isn't driven by mental illness.

I've seen some of the commentary about this case, and we don't know these kids who did this terrible thing, but a lot of people saying, well, mental illness.

Once again, we see the epidemic of mental illness, and they must have been mentally ill.

But that's not what is at play here.

And this is not driven by lax gun laws or whatever.

I mean, the culprits in this case didn't even have a gun, as far as we know.

And the worst and most prevalent violence doesn't happen in the form of hate crimes.

It's not even driven by hate.

The real epidemic is nihilistic violence committed by people utterly devoid of humanity, totally soulless.

Violence committed just for the sake of it.

Now, I've been making this point for a long time that we always hear about hate crimes.

Crimes of hate are not the biggest problem.

And hateful people are not

the most dangerous or necessarily even dangerous at all.

I mean, they can be, but

no, the biggest problem and the most dangerous people are the indifferent people, the soulless,

you know, apathetic.

Crimes of indifference are the worst crimes.

And total indifference is what drives people to do the worst things.

And we have now in our culture,

you know, we have this happening on a mass scale.

You know, when you see the crimes that are committed

in our cities, this is like nihilistic, soulless, passionless crime.

I saw a video a while ago.

I didn't want to see it, but it popped into my feed of a guy who robbed a liquor store or a convenience store or something, gas station, something like that,

and then just casually shot the cashier after

he'd already been given the cash.

He was on camera.

I don't even think the guy was wearing a mask.

Maybe he was, but

no reason to shoot the guy.

Not just no reason to, but like

all you've achieved is that when you get arrested, you're going to go to jail for a whole lot longer.

Or you should anyway.

You never know with these DAs these days, but it just shot him anyway.

No reason.

Didn't appear to be like angry, wasn't yelling at him.

Just shot him.

Shot him for the sake of it.

And that's the kind of violence that infests our cities,

making it down even to

young children.

Only way out is real accountability.

And we talk about it all the time for the criminals themselves and how there needs to be real criminal justice again but uh this this this accountability has to go to the parents to the families as well grand canyon university an affordable private christian university based in beautiful phoenix arizona is one of the largest universities in the country praised for its culture of community and impact gcu integrates the free market system a welcoming Christian worldview and free and open discourse into 369 academic programs with over 300 online.

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Thursday night on the debut episode of Friendly Fire, we announced Daily Wire lifetime memberships.

We also mentioned only 10,000 exist, but here's something new.

Now you can win a lifetime membership.

Download the free Daily Wire Plus app in the App Store, then open the app, tap Explore, and follow me.

That enters you for a chance to win a lifetime membership.

You also get alerts when I release new episodes, breaking news, live chat during the show, and much more.

If you've already downloaded the app and followed, you are already entered.

For everyone else, get to work, download the Daily Wire Plus app, and follow me today.

Now let's get get to our daily cancellation.

I want to talk about a theory that has been bouncing around in my head for several years now.

And it's not just my theory.

I'm sure other people have landed on this conclusion too.

The theory is that pop culture peaked at a specific and identifiable point in our very recent past and has fallen off a cliff, perhaps irretrievably since then.

And I want to discuss when this peak occurred, why it dropped, where this is all leading.

I want to make the case that pop culture is now dead because the culture itself, in a very real sense, is dead.

And this is not just reflexive, pessimistic doomerism.

Something very real and very important is happening here, as I will explain.

Now, pop culture, of course, is the artistic output.

of a society.

It's why it's important.

It's the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.

And a healthy culture tells great stories well.

A sick culture, a dying culture tells bad stories, or sometimes worse, tells good stories badly.

We used to be the former, and now we no longer are.

And I think I can show you exactly when everything took a turn.

The peak happened during the years 2007 and 2008.

And I don't think we appreciated it at the time.

You never do.

That's how peaks usually work.

You don't notice them until you've already started, you know, the descent.

You started going over the other side.

But that was the zenith.

That was the top of the mountain.

2007 saw the release of two of the greatest films ever made, There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men, which not only came out in the same year, but also, it just so happens, were filmed at the same time in the same town, only miles apart from each other.

But there was more.

You know, there's a lot more.

The David Fincher masterpiece, Zodiac, released in 2007.

So did Michael Clayton.

George Clooney film, Into the Wild.

Super Bad, the last good teen comedy.

2008 gave us The Dark Knight, The Wrestler, Tropic Thunder, which was one of the last great comedies of any type to be made by Hollywood.

We get a few more decent comedies between 2009 and 2013, and that would be it.

The entire genre essentially died after that point.

Now, back of 2007, 2008, every genre was thriving.

They were still making great children's movies.

Ratatouille in 2007, Wall-E in 2008.

Even the smaller movies that didn't light up the box office were exceptional.

The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford is a really good movie.

The Mist Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Once in Bruges.

I didn't personally enjoy Juno or Gran Torino all that much, but they came out at this time and they're both better, more daring, more original than the vast majority of the slop Hollywood puts out these days.

Gone, Baby, Gone.

Ben Affleck film was another very good film to come out during this time.

Apocalypto, for my money, a nearly perfect movie.

Almost came out in 2007.

It premiered in Theories in December of 2006.

So did Children of Men.

In fact, you can make an argument for expanding the peak to include 2006, a three-year period then, covering 06 through 08.

2006 gave us not only Apocalypto and Children of Men, but it also gave us Departed, The Departed, Borat, The Prestige, Rescue Dawn, Idiocracy, Pursuit of Happiness.

You could throw a dart at a list of every movie released during this period, and the chances are pretty high that you'll hit something good, maybe even great,

and maybe even a masterpiece.

And this holds truer for television shows.

Now, if you were to make a list of the 10 greatest TV shows ever made,

five of those shows that you would likely put on your list were on the air during this time.

The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Office.

A lot of people would make an argument for The Shield as one of the great shows of all time was also on the air at this time.

Lost had its best seasons during these years.

Kirby Enthusiasm was hitting on all cylinders.

South Park hadn't fallen off a cliff yet, like it has now.

30 Rock.

Not my bag, but it was a solid network sitcom also airing at this time.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was in its prime.

The extremely underrated, hilarious Flight of the Concords premiered on HBO in 2007.

For my money, one of the funniest shows of all time, Extras, Ricky Gervais' show, was airing on the same network at the same time.

I would argue that if you factor both movies and TV shows together, you cannot point to a one or two or even three-year period that beats it.

The volume of great cinema and television can't be matched.

Now, 1999 was a great year for movies, so was 1996, so was 1975.

1939 gave us both Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.

But 2007 to 2008 or 2006 to 2008 gave us masterpieces on both the big and small screen.

Both art forms seem to have reached their pinnacle at the same time.

And what we could say for sure with absolute certainty is that no year or two-year period or three-year period after 07 to 08 comes anywhere close.

And that's the most important point, because even if you argue that there were better years before 07 or 06, the point is that nothing comes close in the years since.

Now, you may not think that 2007 was the best period.

I think it was.

Doesn't matter.

All that matters for my theory is that it was the last great one.

If it wasn't the peak, it was the last peak.

Now, there have been great films since then.

Some of my favorites, Whiplash, Sicario, The Social Network, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, plenty of others.

I mentioned In Bruges, which came out in 2008, the Banshees of Inishirin is a better film by the same director and same lead actors, which came out in 2022.

But these films are spread out over a period of nearly two decades, and they're drowned in a sea of slop.

Remakes, franchise films, sequels, superheroes.

And there have also been good TV shows since 2008.

The first season of True Detective came out in 2014, Chernobyl in 2019, an absolute masterpiece, in my opinion.

But again, nothing like the murderer's row of The Wire Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Madman, The Shield overlapping each other.

Throw a dart at a list of any movie or show that came out after 2008, and especially any that have come out in the past 10 years, and especially any that have come out in the last five years, and your chance of hitting something even watchable, much less good, much less great, is significantly smaller.

I mean, sure, you might hit something like Severance, which is a true artistic triumph, I think, but you're much more likely to land somewhere in the sea of just mediocre mediocre streaming sludge that we're all swimming in.

Why?

What happened?

Well, two other things premiered in the 07, 08 period that might help explain the problem.

The first, the one that conservatives will most likely point to, is Barack Obama's presence.

Obama was, of course, elected in 2008.

He took office in 2009.

And with the election of our first truly far-left president, a radical black activist who used his race as a cudgel against the entire country, we entered the era of what we would come to call wokeness.

All forms of risky, interesting, provocative artistic expression began to die off as a result, starting with comedy.

It is really striking, as many people have pointed out, to look at a list of the best comedies of this century and notice how the genre simply disappears from the face of the earth by the end of Obama's first term.

Not a coincidence.

But that is not the whole story.

And it isn't even half of the story.

Because something else happened in 2007 that would prove to be a much more determinative factor.

The iPhone was, of course, released in the U.S.

on June 29th, 2007.

And again, it is startling to look at a list of the greatest films and TV shows of this century and see how many of them were packed in and produced from the year 2000.

right up until the release of the iPhone and how quickly everything drops off almost from that moment precisely, or within a year or so of it.

The iPhone came out, social media proliferated alongside it.

2007, only about 23% of American adults had ever used social media.

Twitter had only just been launched.

TikTok didn't exist.

Instagram didn't exist.

Today, of course, basically everyone uses social media, basically every waking moment of the day.

Now, here's the point:

as our lives have become increasingly centered around these devices, centered and condensed into these little glowing boxes.

We have lost something very important.

We no longer have a shared cultural experience, what some have called the monoculture, or what you might just call mainstream culture.

The monoculture began its march to extinction in 2007.

Today, the march is over.

Process is complete.

There is no shared culture.

The monoculture gave way to the fragmented culture, a culture broken and divided into 300 million little pieces, a culture driven by algorithms designed to feed us a nonstop diet of lowest common denominator slop all the time.

Now, for as long as modern pop culture has existed, going back to the mid-1900s at least, there have been subcultures.

You know, there have been divisions, divisions along generational lines, short.

Monoculture didn't mean that everyone's cultural experience was exactly the same with no variations whatsoever.

All All it meant was that generally speaking, we all watched the same movies, same TV shows.

And even if we didn't watch them, we knew about the popular ones that other people were watching.

You know, not everybody watched Seinfeld in the 90s, but most people did.

And if you didn't, you still knew about Seinfeld.

You recognized the characters.

It was still part of your cultural experience.

It was a cultural benchmark for everyone, even if you didn't watch it.

And that's because, you know, we went to the same places to access all this stuff.

We went to the same movie theaters.

We browsed through the aisles at Blockbuster.

We turned on our TV.

We scanned through the same channels.

We went to the same places.

We were exposed to the same things.

We had a culture.

That's what a culture is.

It's a shared experience.

There's a reason why music, which, you know, of course, is an essential part of the culture I haven't mentioned yet.

and which doesn't really graft onto this timeline exactly the same, it peaked a little bit earlier than movies and television.

The musical monoculture broke up almost a decade before that with the advent of Napster and file sharing.

Napster arrived on the scene in 1999.

This was also arguably our musical peak.

And it's not that 1999 had all the best music.

I mean, that's up to, you know, it's whatever your taste is, but every genre of music was thriving in 1999.

Rock, pop, rap, country, RB.

We had big musical acts that were like actual bands that

played instruments.

And today, rock music doesn't exist in the mainstream.

All the other genres have melded together and become indistinguishable from each other.

Before file sharing and eventually iPhones and streaming, if we wanted to hear new music, you turn on the radio and you listen to the stations, or for my generation, MTV.

When I was a teenager, almost everyone I knew went home after school.

You put on MTV, you watch TRL.

where we'd all see the same 10 music videos.

Our opinion of the music may have varied, but we we were all exposed to the same things.

We had a shared experience.

We had a culture.

And this meant that even the generational divides were not nearly as stark as they are today.

I mean, there was a divide, but it wasn't a brick wall.

You know, it was not this impenetrable fortress like it is now.

In the 90s, my parents did not much care for the pop stars and rock bands that the kids were listening to, but they generally knew who those stars were.

I mean, they weren't big fans of Eminem Eminem or Britney Spears, but they would have recognized those people if they walked into the room because we all had the same stars.

We all had the same celebrities.

Now, today, if your 14-year-old son has a phone, which most of them do, unfortunately, he also has his own personal list of stars and celebrities that he looks up to and follows obsessively.

And these are people that you've never heard of.

You don't know their names.

You don't know who they are.

You don't even know what they do.

It's not even as simple as, oh, yeah, well, that's a famous pop star.

It's like they might not even do anything.

And there isn't one place for you to go and find out who these people are.

Because they're streamers and they're influencers and they're various other random people with huge followings who enjoy a very peculiar and very modern kind of fame.

One that is

vast but narrow.

Millions of fans know them intimately, and the rest of us have never even heard their names.

And I can't stress enough how new and weird

internet fame is.

And I say this as someone who has some experience with it, as you know.

At any other point in history, up until very recently, if you had 5 million fans,

then you were famous.

If you had 5 million fans, it meant that there were 50 million other people who at least vaguely knew who you were.

Now you can have 5 million fans and be totally obscure to every other person on the planet.

I mean, there are YouTubers with 100 million subscribers who I wouldn't recognize if they walked up to me and introduced themselves by name.

And I am a YouTuber with millions of subscribers.

Not 100 million, but millions.

There's something poetic in the fact that Michael Jackson, the last celebrity of the monoculture, the last true global star, died in 2009.

Coincidentally.

When the monoculture was extinguished, so was its biggest star.

The death of celebrity, true celebrity, is a symptom of the death of the monoculture, the extinction of the shared cultural experience.

Radio is long since dead, so is MTV.

Blockbuster went the way of the woolly mammoth a long time ago.

Movie theaters still exist, but they don't have anywhere near the kind of cultural importance that they used to have.

And nobody watches TV channels anymore.

All of that,

all of it, has been consumed by an infinite scroll of content created by an algorithm algorithm specifically for you.

There is no local radio DJ telling you and all your friends about the coolest new band.

I was a radio DJ right at the tail end of Music Radio's relevance in its twilight.

I also worked at Blockbuster at the tail end of that.

So I kind of checked in on these industries right as they were all dying.

And I remember I would hear stories from the veterans.

of the radio business about what it was like back in the good old days when your local DJ was a household name in the community.

He was almost like the unofficial mayor of the town.

And I felt like a guy who got to the party right when everybody was putting on their coats to leave.

And now the party's over.

Now there is a faceless, nameless, mindless, soulless, lifeless code, an algorithm, a formula, feeding you content specifically designed to keep you staring at a screen.

Now the code doesn't care what you're staring at or why you're staring.

Only that you stare and for as long as possible.

If a cute cat video will keep you staring, it'll show you that.

If a video of a guy getting shot in the head will do it, then it'll show you that.

It'll serve you anything and everything all the time, as Bo Burnham sang.

Now, in this environment, it's extremely difficult for any piece of art, especially something longer than 75 seconds, to break through and grab the attention of the masses.

And even if it does grab all of our attention for a brief moment in time, We're not going to experience the thing together or even in the same context.

We'll experience it alone on our phones, on our feeds, sandwiched between other content, pulling our attention back away from this thing that we all briefly noticed at the same time and forgot about just as quickly.

You know, today we still have hit songs that lots of people stream, and we have hit movies that lots of people watch.

But very rarely does any show or film or song become a cultural touchstone, a true sensation, a thing that you cannot avoid, that you almost cannot help but experience.

You know, in 1997, when I was in middle school, every person I knew, adult and child, had seen Titanic.

And even if they hadn't seen it, they had a strong opinion about it.

And the Celine Dion song from that movie was so pervasive, it was so totally ubiquitous that I heard it five times a day, whether I wanted to or not.

And I didn't want to.

I have a distinct memory of going on a hike with my dad at the height of the Titanic craze and hearing my heart will go on wafting through the trees from somebody's campsite somewhere, I assume.

You couldn't even escape it in the woods.

It was everywhere.

There are movies today that make more money at the box office than Titanic did.

And there are songs that probably get more streams than My Heart Will Go On got radio plays, but none of them, no matter how widely consumed, are the same kind of cultural sensation.

Not even close.

Not close.

There hasn't been one that even comes close to it in 15 years, at least.

You know, a movie these days can make a billion dollars and have virtually no cultural impact at all.

A movie can be seen by millions and barely noticed at the same time.

Consider this.

When is the last time a movie produced an iconic moment or line?

You know, one that's like repeated and parodied and known by everyone.

Something like, to stay with Titanic, Kate Winslet, you know, with her arms outstretched at the front of the ship.

Everybody knows that image.

My kids were born 16 years after the movie came out.

They've never even seen the movie, and they know that image.

When's the last time that any film produced an image that widely recognized?

I mean, think about it.

I was racking my brain.

I can't.

It's been like 20 years, longer.

It's been a very long time.

Why?

Well, for a simple reason.

An iconic image is like an impact crater on the surface of the culture, a thing that imprints itself indelibly onto it.

But it's impossible to make a cultural impact when there is no culture to begin with.

It's like an asteroid hitting a gas giant like Jupiter.

There's no crater, there's no impact.

The thing just gets sucked into a giant ball of gas and incinerated.

Speaking of asteroids, by the way, just in parentheses, the movie Armageddon came out a year after Titanic.

It also had a song on its soundtrack that was instantly iconic and inescapable.

I mean,

this was common back when we had a culture.

You know, it's popular these days to rail against gatekeepers.

Everyone does.

Oh, the gatekeepers, the people gatekeeping.

You know, it turns out that gatekeepers aren't always a bad thing.

In fact, they are necessary.

Radio DJs used to be gatekeepers.

So were movie theaters.

So were video rental places, concert venues, TV channels.

They maintained the boundaries of the culture by deciding what we were all exposed to.

If a movie was not in theaters and Blockbuster didn't have it and it wasn't playing on TNT or AMC, That meant you just couldn't watch that movie.

In fact, most movies that you would want to see, you just could not watch them.

You just couldn't, you couldn't do it.

You couldn't listen to most music.

If there was a song, this will really blow the minds of kids these days.

If there was a song you wanted to hear and you didn't have it on CD or cassette, your only other choice was to physically pick up your phone and call your local radio station and ask them to play it.

Now, this was gatekeeping, yeah, but within the gate, was our shared cultural experience.

Within the gate was culture.

And those gatekeepers are all gone.

Doesn't mean there's no gatekeeper now.

Now there's one.

And it's not flesh and blood.

It's the algorithm.

And this one is far more tyrannical and sinister than any of the other ones ever were.

And worse, it's invisible.

We don't even know that it's there, but it is.

And it has, again, one mission and one mission only, to keep us staring at the screen.

And to keep us staring at it alone, isolated, fragmented.

Now, if this all sounds kind of bleak,

well, I'm afraid that it gets worse.

AI is about to take the fragmented culture and explode it into an infinite number of microscopic pieces like dust floating in space.

Now, up till now, the algorithm has been showing you, for the most part, content created by other people.

Well, soon it will show you content that it creates.

This is already happening, and soon it will be the only thing you see.

Or that it has given you the illusion of creating yourself,

which means that in the not too distant future, if the AI industry has its way, your favorite film will be one that nobody else on earth has seen.

And your favorite song will be one that nobody else has heard.

Because you will generate your own pop culture by feeding prompts into a machine.

And by the way, the machine will prompt you about what sort of prompts it wants you to type in

so that it's telling you what to want and then create and then giving you the thing that it's letting you pretend you created.

You know, I've talked a lot about how AI art is soulless and dead,

but that's true, but perhaps the bigger problem.

is that it's lonely.

It exists for you and you alone.

It kills for good whatever is left of the shared cultural experience.

That's our future.

It's already here.

I wish I had better news to share, but like, that's the news, like it or not.

Now, if I'm very optimistic, which I'm not, I would hope that people will rebel against this fragmented, algorithmic, digital pseudoculture by building strong communities where there can be a shared culture, at least on a local level.

Building actual communities physically, in physical space with people that you're actually around in person.

You know, over the summer, we visited a place that had a small theater where the local troop would put on plays for the community once or twice a week.

And people came out.

It was a community event.

People would come out and watch the plays.

Maybe that sort of thing will become more popular.

Maybe...

You know, if I can't have a shared culture with the entire country, I'll at least have one with my neighbors.

That's the optimistic view.

Of course, the other possibility is that we'll all stay plugged into the matrix in a world that the machine designs for each of us individually to live in alone, distracted and amused, but never happy.

A post-culture, a non-culture, a culture that isn't real because it isn't shared.

That could also happen.

I know which possibility I would put my money on, but in the end, it's up to us.

Because the last decision that we will make as a culture is whether we want to have one or not.

That'll do it for the show today.

Thanks for watching.

Thanks for listening.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Have a great day.

Godspeed.

Hey there, I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley.

And I'm Georgia Howe, and we're the hosts of Morning Wire.

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