Ep. 1818 - The Whole Jimmy Kimmel Firing Saga Is A Lie

The left is rallying around Jimmy Kimmel, who was taken off air for telling an egregious and malicious lie about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

They're rallying around him as some kind of free speech martyr.

Not Charlie.

Not Charlie, who is a free speech martyr.

No, no, no.

Jimmy Kimmel,

who was suspended for lying.

But not only was Jimmy Kimmel suspended over a lie,

it turns out the whole story about his suspension is a lie, too.

I'm Michael Knowles.

This is the Michael Knowles Show.

Welcome back to the show.

The mayor of Chicago has a plan to tamp down violence to reform criminal justice.

His plan is to try to get rid of the jails.

Jails are a sickness, he says, that don't make anyone safer.

Hmm, we'll get to that.

We'll examine that in light of modern evidence, all the way back to ancient evidence.

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Jimmy Kimmel lost his job because

Trump's FCC

wielded authoritarian power to pressure the company to fire him.

That's the official story from the establishment media, which lies.

What actually happened?

We got the inside scoop, not even from a right-wing outlet, it's from The Hollywood Reporter, okay?

It's a trade publication for left-wing Hollywood.

How Jimmy Kimmel's suspension went down, sponsor panic, a defiant host, and a painful call.

Subheader, Disney's Bob Iger and Dana Walden wanted to know how Kimmel was going to address the situation.

What's the situation?

That Jimmy Kimmel went on air right after Charlie Kirk was murdered by a radical leftist dating a trans furry who wrote Antifa slogans on his bullets.

He went on air right after that and said that the murderer was actually on the same side ideologically as Charlie, that the murderer was a MAGA supporter.

Malicious, egregious, preposterous lie.

So how is Kimmel going to handle the situation?

According to the Hollywood Reporter, sources say he planned to defend what he said rather than kowtowing to the outrage.

Disney thought that would fan the flames.

There was much more pressure, according to Hollywood Reporter, leading up to the suspension than was previously reported.

It's a good report.

You should all read it.

Points to the social media SHIT storm that followed Jimmy Kimmel's lie.

But

one thing it also points out is that this suspension did not come primarily from the FCC.

You know, the FCC, Brendan Carr, chairman of the FCC, came out and he said, look,

we need to make sure that the networks are abiding by their responsibilities and their obligations because the news networks are licensed by the government.

They don't have some kind of right to public airwaves.

They don't have private ownership of public airwaves.

They're public.

These are public airwaves.

And so they

can say what they want broadly, but they can't tell malicious lies.

That then triggers the government's legitimate oversight responsibility, as we saw in the case of Jimmy Kimmel.

Disney was already freaking out.

You know, Trump has pointed out that

Kimmel's ratings could be a little spotty too, and that he's not been as talented as he used to be, and he's kind of weak in recent years.

But that's all beside the point.

It's not about the joke, if there was a joke in that monologue.

It's about the lie.

That's what triggers it.

The sponsors, the corporation, Bob Iger, the audience, social media, all had turned on Kimmel.

The FCC signaled that it might engage in its legally required oversight of the news networks.

That's why the FCC exists.

But Kimmel's suspension had relatively little to do with that.

Kimmel's suspension came because of what he did

and the natural consequences that come from companies and audiences and advertisers, all those normal things.

Kimmel has no one to blame but himself.

Nevertheless, nevertheless, the left has kept up this kind of rhetoric, referring to the Trump administration, even in the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder,

as constituting a fascist takeover.

Here's Rashida Tlaib, one of the squad in Congress.

And I think it's really important.

We need to stand up against this.

Fascist takeover.

That's not a bad word.

It's a fact.

And here in D.C.

and across the country, it is so incredibly important, Mr.

Chair, that this committee does not allow rhetoric that defames

or

paints Washington, D.C.

in a way that you all haven't really truly seen.

You're just reading it.

No, you're just reading it or something off of some.

Well, the gentleman.

She said that eight days after charlie kirk's assassination

eight days and she said it's unbelievable how how little function there is in between her ears because she says on the one hand

that the trump administration constitutes a fascist takeover and then in the very same breath she says and this committee will not allow for defamation we will not allow And she kind of catches herself.

She goes, I mean, other, well, it won't allow the Trump to defame.

Anyway, moving on.

I'm glad she said this because it shows you something that I think a lot of us have inferred since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which is that the left

wants to murder us broadly.

The left would be fine with our murder.

In some cases, they would celebrate it.

What's my evidence of that?

The

widespread minimization.

and mockery and outright celebration of Charlie Kirk's assassination from cable news, from MSNBC, from the kinds of left-wing streamers that have been platformed, popular left-wing streamers that have been platformed in establishment outlets, people like Stephen Bonnell, who called for Republicans to fear for their lives when they got to public events, a man who should be prosecuted for that.

Hassan Piker, very popular left-wing streamer who has called for the streets to soak in the blood of capitalists, who has suggested the assassination of a Republican senator, Tom Cotton.

These guys are the faces of it, but all the way down to your

coworkers that you see on Facebook, the people you went to school with were posting on Facebook that it's fine that Charlie Kirk was murdered or further, that it's actually a good thing.

And now we have Rashida Talib.

Eight days later, what does she say?

She says

that

Trump is a fascist.

What is the import of that statement?

What does it mean when the left calls right-wingers fascists or Nazis?

For a long time, conservatives thought that what that meant was, these people are hysterical.

These people are hyperbolic.

These people are so silly, they don't even know what fascism and Nazism really mean.

Oh, those silly, crazy leftists.

That's not the import of that kind of statement.

We now can see in the wake of the assassination of Charlie and in the wake of the reaction to the assassination of Charlie that the political significance of the left calling the right fascist or Nazi is to justify our murder.

Because

in our culture now, if you walked up to someone and said, Hey,

Hitler is on the rise,

the implication is you should go kill that person.

To compare someone to Hitler is to say that any means it would be acceptable to take that person out of society, go kill that person.

And

in the case of the events of last week, that's exactly what happened.

One of the bullets said,

hey fascist catch.

So when Rashida Talib says the Trump administration, they are fascists and they constitute a takeover of our government.

What she is saying,

especially in the context of last week's assassination, is murder President Trump.

Now, of course, the left had already been doing that at the highest levels.

Joe Biden launched his own presidential campaign on the lie, also egregious lie, that Trump had called neo-Nazis fine people at Charlottesville, and that Trump posed an existential threat to democracy.

If you say that someone poses an existential threat to you, you are justifying the killing of that person.

And of course, we saw in the wake of President Trump's near assassination, many people, including that streamer that I just mentioned, Stephen Bunnell,

excusing it or encouraging it.

Eight days after Kirk's murder, a Democrat member of Congress comes out and effectively says, you should murder the whole Trump government.

And so we can't tolerate this.

The firings need to continue.

The social stigma and ostracism needs to continue.

Rashida Tlaib, if she could be thrown out of Congress, if the Republicans could muster the votes, they should do that.

If they could deport her, they should do that too.

We cannot tolerate.

this kind of behavior in society.

And that's not from a place of vengeance.

Vengeance is mine, says the Lord, and I will repay.

That's not even merely from a place of retribution, though retribution is important and it's the primary object of the justice system.

That comes from even a defense of the free marketplace of ideas and the broader public square and stable government and government by the people and a constitutional system.

You cannot have any of those things

if people are threatening violence when you engage with them.

You can't have it.

You cannot have a marketplace, as I've been saying now for almost a week, you cannot have a marketplace of ideas or anything else if certain actors keep coming in and shooting up the marketplace.

In order to defend and even expand the marketplace, you have to exclude those actors and you have to exclude those suicidal ideas.

So the consequences need to keep up.

The firings need to keep up.

There's some good news on that front.

We'll get to that in one second.

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Welcome to the table.

Final point on this, one of these left-wing streamers.

I talked about Hassan Piker earlier.

This one, Stephen Bonnell, relatively popular, went on Piers Morgan's show,

not only to call for the

existential fear of conservatives in the public square, to say that they need to fear for their lives so that they shut up, so that if they didn't want to be murdered, then they shouldn't have elected Donald Trump, as he has previously said.

But also now,

just when you think this person has reached the depths of degradation in his extraordinarily deviant and degenerate life, he goes on to mock Charlie Kirk's widow for crying over her

I don't understand you, Destiny.

You have so much hatred in your heart.

And at the same time,

if you're going to weaponize somebody's grief against the other party, well, then of course people have a right to fight back against it.

I think that she has every right to grieve in whatever way she wants.

But when that grief is going to be weaponized to do recruitment, political recruitment, and further radicalization of the other side, then of course you not only have the ability to mock it, I think you have the obligation to mock it.

It's insane.

Stephen Bonnell, a very prominent young left-wing broadcaster, says you have not only the right, but the responsibility to mock Charlie Kirk's widow.

Why?

Because she spoke in public.

The same reason that they're excusing or celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk.

He says, oh, she has every right to be sad, but the moment she is sad in public, then we have to mock her.

Oh, Charlie Kirk and the other conservatives, they have every right to their opinions, but the moment that they state their opinions in public, we have to murder them.

It's perfectly fine for them to feel things, but if that leads to any effect in public whatsoever, as he says, her speaking will lead to recruitment because it will generate sympathy and empathy and it will be logical and it will attract people.

And we can't have that.

Which is also part of the reason they murdered Charlie Kirk.

It's not just that they murdered Charlie Kirk because they didn't like the way he phrased something.

It's that he was extremely politically effective, more politically effective than anyone else of his generation.

Got to murder.

You got to murder the conservatives who speak up.

You got to mock the conservatives who speak up.

When their husbands are murdered, you have to stop any of them from being effective.

This person

is

not fit for polite society, and he should be excluded from it.

He should not be welcome into places of employment.

He should not be welcome into clubs and associations.

If he wants to go have his his horrible ideas somewhere in a cabin in the woods, I suppose he can do that.

None of us will stop him.

But in terms of society, he cannot be welcomed into that.

He should not be welcomed into the marketplace of ideas.

What he advocates is the abolition of the marketplace of ideas.

And so that's the kind of thought that stops thought and the sort of thought that ought to be stopped.

Happily,

he has been demonetized on YouTube.

So he makes his money by doing this.

He's been demonetized on YouTube.

That's good.

Years ago, he was already banned from

social media platform, Twitch.

That's all good.

It should go further.

He should be deplatformed from all of these places.

He has no right to be in the public square.

He damages the public square by his very presence in it.

He should go away from public life.

He should retreat to a much more private life.

And he should not be welcomed in public life.

Elon Musk has called for him to be prosecuted.

I also have called for him to be prosecuted.

He is at this moment calling for violence against conservatives who speak on campus,

who speak at public events.

There is a kind of a specificity, there is a kind of urgency, there is a kind of immediacy to his incitement of violence here.

And this is not just a generic, abstract opinion.

This is immediately in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination when more events

like the one at which Charlie Kirk was assassinated will be occurring quickly.

And this guy is calling for our murder at those events.

That guy needs to be in jail and he needs to be in jail for a long time.

And there is nothing hypocritical about this.

There is nothing authoritarian about this.

This is the basic enforcement of the law.

This is the basic enforcement of the norms and standards that must exist for any kind of free society to continue.

Now, not everyone agrees.

I think most people agree with that at this point, but not everyone does, including Barry Weiss.

You know, Barry Weiss, she's

perfectly nice lady.

She runs the free press.

She is a former left-wing liberal who is now a slightly more centrist liberal.

And therefore, in our kind of crazy society, she seems almost like she's on the right.

But she's not really on the right.

She's

basically a left libertarian.

And she runs an outlet called The Free Press, which publishes some good work.

But this was not good work that she just published.

She just published an argument against

the right

basically doing anything right now.

With regard to Jimmy Kimmel and with regard to the broader deplatforming and

discouragement of some of these kinds of ideas, Barry said, for those on the right who might like what they're seeing from this FCC, remember the Democrats will wield this power again.

Now, I have a lot of grace for Barry Weiss here.

She is new to the right.

She's not really on the right, but she's new.

She used to be on the left, used to be at left-wing outlets.

And so she's new.

And I'm not surprised that she's making these kinds of arguments, but it's not correct.

The argument that she is making is

basically boils down to the right at this moment should not wield the power that we have for justice and the common good.

In other words, we should not govern

because

in the future, The Democrats might have power again and might use that power again

in ways that are contrary to justice and the common good.

And therefore, we should not govern now.

I'm not persuaded.

I'm not fearful of using the power that we legitimately have in ways that are just today after the people gave us that power.

because the left might in the future hypothetically do the thing that they always do that they've been doing for many decades.

I guess I'm not afraid of that hypothetical, which already exists.

And furthermore, I don't think there's anything unprincipled about wielding that power today.

If you're an anarchist or an extreme libertarian, then I guess, yes, it would run contrary to your principles to govern.

But I'm not any of those things.

I'm a conservative.

And I recognize that the FCC exists for a reason.

The FCC exists.

to regulate these kinds of things, to regulate broadcast news,

the broadcast stations.

In the article itself, not just the tweet, but the article itself.

I have it right here.

The jawboning in Jimmy Kimmel.

The editors, the editorial board writes, the suspension of his late-night show isn't a great loss to the culture, but the FCC's coercion undermines our most fundamental values.

Our most fundamental values?

What's our most fundamental value?

Lying

about the assassination of a civil debater is our most fundamental value.

Letting a hack comedian tell an egregious and malicious lie on public airwaves is one of our most fundamental values.

I don't know.

I guess we have different political philosophies.

I don't think that's what James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and

Alexander Hamilton consider to be one of the most fundamental values of America.

At no point in our history have we believed that letting people, much less a hack comedian, egregiously lie about important national events on public airwaves is a value.

My question to them is, what's the point of the FCC?

If the point of the FCC is not to regulate what happens on public airwaves, what is the point of the FCC?

There isn't one.

I guess the argument you hear from some of these guys is just, well, maybe we shouldn't have an FCC.

Maybe we should just let the invisible hand of the free market.

Okay, whatever.

All right.

You have a different conception of government.

I'm talking about our government, though.

I'm talking about our system.

I'm talking about our fundamental values.

Not only does it not run contrary to the purpose of the FCC to call this stuff out,

that's the whole point of it.

And I am afraid that the laissez-faire liberalism that allows the left to get away with its increasingly murderous designs, overtly murderous designs, not just the wacko who shot Charlie,

but all of the many people throughout all of the strata of the left

who celebrated it.

That,

I'm not letting that go.

I think we've all had enough.

And I think we're going to do something.

We've tried not doing something about it.

That led to the destruction of our public square and the assassination of the most civil, generous,

prominent public debater we have.

So we tried that.

That didn't work.

Now I think we're going to

do our jobs and accept our responsibility in society.

Let's give that one a try.

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Speaking of strange theories of criminal justice, here we have Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson arguing that if you want to stop crime, you have to let people out of jail.

The fact of the matter is we are driving violence down on this city and we're using every single resource that's available to us.

Jails and incarceration and law enforcement is a sickness that has not led to safe communities.

Jails are a sickness that do not lead to safe communities.

You hear this sometimes, not just from the libs on the left, but even from the libertarians.

They say, we have an over-incarceration problem.

What's Brandon Johnson saying?

He says, oh, a crime.

It's going down in Chicago.

It's great.

You think that?

Does anyone really think that?

Hey, hey, if you think that, then go out to the south side at about 11 p.m.,

maybe around midnight, just walk around in a nice polo shirt and Chinos.

Tell me how you do.

Oh, you don't want to do that?

No,

you don't want to leave your car unlocked.

You don't want to come to a complete stop at a traffic light in a certain place.

Come on.

No one thinks Chicago is safe.

Crime is out of control in Chicago.

Many people are murdered every weekend.

But we're not putting people in jail.

Right.

Maybe that's the problem.

It actually relates to the same error that is being made here by the people complaining about the FCC or the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel or any of it.

They say, if we ever do anything, it's only going to try to address a problem.

It's only going to make the problem worse.

And it's the same kind of glib libertarianism that says that, you know, the government never does anything right.

And really, the ideal form of government is to get rid of the government altogether.

And then the magical invisible hand,

which is providence for atheists, that will

fix everything.

If only we stop incarcerating criminals, then we'll have less crime.

That is defied by

all of the crime statistics we ever have had.

But furthermore, it gets to a deeper question that is philosophical.

And it's how do you help criminals?

How do you help criminals?

People are committing crimes for all sorts of reasons, because of defects of their will, because of bad circumstances in which they grew up, because of the ignorance in which they're mired.

And so they commit crimes.

And we have to protect society from those people, and we have to give those people retribution because of the crimes that they committed.

But we also want to rehabilitate those people.

So the question becomes, how do you help the criminals?

Do you help the criminal by letting him get out of jail?

That's the argument made by Brandon Johnson.

That's the argument made by the left.

That's the argument made by Rashida Talib, who wants to abolish prisons.

That's the argument made even by some on the right who were pushing President Trump in the first term to let criminals out of jail, the Kim Kardashians of the coalition.

Is that the way you help them?

Or do you help them by punishing them?

And on this point, I think I'm going to turn away from the mayor of Chicago.

I'm going to go back to Plato, who wrote a whole book about this called Gorgias in Antiquity, in which he argues in the voice of Socrates that

the way to help someone who is doing injustice is not to let them off the hook, but actually to punish them as a kind of medicine.

Because, Socrates argues, it is worse to do injustice than to suffer injustice.

To suffer injustice might damage your body.

To do injustice damages your soul.

For those of us who have a sense of the eternal destiny of man, we would say that to suffer injustice might have temporal effects,

but to commit injustice has eternal effects.

It could affect our lives in the hereafter.

But it even affects our lives now.

If you allow someone to persist in vice and ignorance all the time, their lives are going to get worse.

And so it's actually an act of mercy to punish the guilty.

It will help them to reform.

You might not always like the medicine that the doctor assigns you, but if you don't take the medicine, you're going to die.

And

if you allow criminals to persist in their crime and to keep getting away with it, they're going to suffer a kind of a spiritual death.

It's just like when you're raising kids.

If you don't want to punish your toddler because

it feels bad and you want your toddler to like you or something, and you don't, so you let him get away with it, let him get away with it, let him get away with it, you're not doing him any favors.

You're damaging him, and he's going to get worse and worse and worse.

It's going to have bad effects.

It's the same thing in society.

It's the same thing when we think about the relation of the government to criminals.

And it's no surprise that Chicago is a third world country under that kind of idea.

Well, that idea hasn't worked.

Maybe we need to try something else.

Laissez-faire, hands-off, let the left threaten to murder us hasn't worked.

Maybe we need to try something else.

Maybe this really is an inflection point.

He's not the only one who says it, the mayor of Chicago.

Jasmine Crockett, the new AOC in Congress,

she goes even further.

She says that committing a crime does not make you a criminal.

I understood what was kind of pushing them there.

And so I do want people to know that just because someone has committed a crime, it doesn't make them a criminal.

That is completely different.

Being a criminal is more so about your mindset.

Committing a crime can come for a lot of different reasons.

Said contra.

Committing a crime does in fact make you a criminal.

And the ideology that she's advancing here here is so pernicious.

It's so subtle, but you see it throughout liberalism.

It says, no, no, no, what you do has no connection to who you are.

Yeah, you might do crimes all the time, but on the inside, if you don't think of yourself as a criminal, if you don't identify as a criminal, you're not a criminal.

What makes you a criminal is when you identify as a criminal.

It's a mindset.

Well, this is what the left says about identity broadly.

Your physical conditions, your actions, your social relations have nothing to do with who you really are.

It's just all in the imagination.

That's all.

The imagination is all that matters.

Of course, that is not true.

We are what we habitually do.

We are creatures of habit.

Virtue and vice are habits.

Virtuous people do a lot of virtuous things.

Vicious people do a lot of vicious things.

None of us is good.

None of us can be holy on our own.

We are born with a fallen nature.

And the law exists to show us our sin and to direct us to the need for a savior and to direct us to pray for grace.

And then we can cooperate with grace and cultivate habits of virtue.

And then we can be, we're not still not like good people, but we can be better.

We can be more fully human.

We can be more fully what we are supposed to be.

Or we can persist in our vices and pretend that what we do has nothing to do with who we really are.

And then we can live in imagination land, but the reality around us is going to fall into crime and decay and destruction.

And this ties in with the latest update about the alleged shooter, the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk.

There's a report from the New York Post that says that the alleged shooter was a a big fan of playing a video game.

He was a big video gamer, and he was apparently quite addicted to pornography, and so much so that he actually played video games that are pornographic.

Apparently, there are porn video games now.

We will live to see horrors beyond our imagination, as I think Nikola Tesla told us.

He was a big fan of this porn video game.

He played it quite recently.

And not only was he gay, and not only was he dating a self-identified trans, but he was also something called a furry.

A furry is someone who is sexually attracted to human beings in anthropomorphic animal costumes.

And so I guess the video game was a gay, furry video game.

According to the post last week, this account associated with the shooter on the site had recently watched content.

not only depicting this kind of stuff, but also created by a user named Red Rusker, who is an artist known for furry pornography, who is admitted to drawing images showing underage characters having sex.

So, cover your ears if you know your young people are listening to this.

We now find out that the shooter

was addicted to

pornographic video games depicting a kind of sex with animals that was also pedophilic.

How did we get there?

How did we get there?

How did we get to that point?

When I was a kid, I remember when I got my first computer, and I certainly remember before we had the internet in our house.

In part, that was because we didn't have a lot of money.

But

there was a time.

I'm not even all that old.

I feel like an old man sometimes, but I'm not that old.

But there was a time within living memory when people didn't have computers in their house and they certainly didn't have the internet.

And let's just say they they certainly didn't have furry shades of gay

on their computers.

There was a time when pornography existed as it's existed since antiquity, but when to purchase it, you had to go into a CD store, you know, in a trench coat, trying to hide your identity and ask for the magazine that was covered up in foil.

There was not assumed to be some constitutional right to pornography in magazines.

It was in like packaging where you couldn't see it because kids would go into magazine stores.

And you would have to talk to a human being and hand him some money and buy the magazine that showed naked ladies.

It didn't show Farichades of Gay Three.

It showed like naked ladies.

And that was considered obscene enough.

Now

we've let this problem fester.

In the 90s, when computers and the internet became popular, There were two laws that were passed.

The Communications Decency Act, from which we get the now famous Section 230, which is supposed to regulate the big tech companies, but actually gave them kind of a carve at.

It was very important to political debates over speech on the internet a few years ago.

The Communications Decency Act, primarily, was about decency in communications.

And the Child Online Protection Act.

Both of these had broad bipartisan support, were signed into law.

Liberal judges gutted them.

Everyone at that time agreed, we need restrictions on obscenity because it can really pervert people's minds, especially the minds of children.

That's why we call it the Child Online Protection Act.

And then we just kind of looked away because of liberal judges and because of a laissez-faire ideology.

I said, oh, what's the big deal?

All right, it's some naked ladies on the internet.

Okay, it's some naked men and ladies on the, okay, now it's some naked, now it's like animals on the, that look like, okay, now it's underage.

Okay, now it's, now it's in video games.

Now, whoa, whoa, whoa.

You very quickly get to a degree of degeneracy that previously was more or less unimaginable.

The laissez-faire hand of the free market hasn't corrected that.

The government exists in part to correct these things.

And so while everyone's focusing on the ideology of the shooter, on the

defenses of political violence that have come from the left, Let's not lose sight also of the obscenity.

Because the guy was a complete sex freak.

Our culture broadly has said you're not even allowed to use phrases phrases like perversion anymore, but he was a profoundly sexually perverted person.

I think we all have to admit that candidly.

And he was encouraged in his perversions by public resources like the internet.

And

one of the things that is supposed to be kept out of the public square that is not protected by the First Amendment is obscenity.

Why?

Well, it's for the same reason that we don't allow direct threats in the public square, square, why we need to deplatform people like the streamer Stephen Bunnell.

Because if you allow direct threats in the public square, if you protect those, it undermines the public square.

It undermines discourse.

It shuts people up.

It doesn't encourage people to speak more freely.

If you permit fraud, lies, the sorts of lies that Jimmy Kimmel said on public airwaves.

If you allow fraud in the public square, that doesn't expand the public square.

It doesn't add another voice.

It undermines, it shrinks the public square because it undermines market integrity.

It tells people that you can't trust what is being said.

If you allow obscenity and appeals to the prurient interest into the public square, that doesn't expand the public square.

It is not, as some perverts in judicial outfits in the 20th century said, it does not constitute protected speech because it undermines speech.

Speech is rational.

Speech makes use of our reason and allows us to arrive at the truth and to live in in accordance with the truth.

That's what it's for.

Obscenity appeals to the prurient interest.

When you're looking at pornography, don't even think about furry shades of gay.

Talk about like regular normal pornography that you'd buy in the magazines in the 1990s before all of this internet stuff.

Even that, any kind of pornographic material.

When you see that, does it make you more rational or less rational?

We all know it makes you less rational.

This is why advertising tries to get up to the line of obscenity because they know that sex sells because it prevents you from thinking in a rational way and it gets you to be more emotional and ginned up and lustful and irrational so that you can be more easily manipulated.

It is an open question.

Had we properly regulated pornography as both parties tried to do in the 90s,

would that assassin have picked up that gun?

Would that, he says he was driven by a sexual ideology to protect his trans-furry boyfriend.

Would he have become so hardened in

those deviant desires and in that deviant identity?

Would he have been exposed to it in the first place?

Would that have happened?

You know, we sometimes draw a distinction between public and private sins.

There's really no such thing because society is made up of people and people are the same people in private and in public.

Are we going to take that seriously too?

It seems to me the obvious reform that that has to come after the assassination of Charlie is a reform

to the free marketplace of ideas

to protect it, to prop it up again,

not to abolish it or something, but to re-fortify it such that we can have a healthy conversation and a self-government.

A big part of that is going to be obscenity, too.

It's not just a weird, creepy fact that the alleged shooter was a gay furry attracted to transgenders who played porn video games and liked the work of artists who depicted minors.

That's not just a coincidence.

That's part of the whole degeneration of this person's mind and the degeneration of our public square.

For over a week, we paused advertisements and any appeals to Daily Wire memberships to focus on the only thing that really matters in this moment, which is remembering and honoring the legacy of Charlie Kirk.

Without even being asked, you still showed up.

You watched, you commented, you shared, you supported us by becoming Daily Wire members.

You reminded us once again that we are not alone in this fight and that we will not be silenced and that together we will keep building the future.

Thank you for standing with us.

You are what makes America great and inspire all of us here to continue the work we do every day.

My favorite comment yesterday is from S.

Brownie130, who says, what is sad, the left is more upset about someone losing their show than someone someone losing their life.

Yep.

Yeah, that's not true for all liberals,

but it's uncomfortably true for a broad swath of them.

Finally, we arrive at the mailbag.

Our mailbag is sponsored by PureTalk on puretalk.com slash Knowles Relish.

Your free one-year membership to Daily Wire Plus.

Take it away.

Hi, Michael.

I have a bit of a mixed message today.

I am saddened by the news of Charlie Kirk, but at the same time, on the same day, nearly the same time as the announcement of his death, my brother is having a baby.

I don't know how to feel about this.

I'm saddened by the news of Charlie Kirk, and

I need some guidance here.

I don't know how to feel.

I don't know how to act.

And

I think your words of wisdom might be able to help.

Please

help me.

Thank you for all you do and God bless.

Godspeed.

Okay, good question and congratulations on your brother's kid.

You're saying, is it all right to be happy about good things even when really bad things happen?

Yes, of course.

If that were not the case, you could never be happy.

I don't mean to make light of anything.

I don't mean to be overly reductive.

But yes, of course, very horrible things happen all the time.

The assassination of Charlie was a particular national trauma, and the reaction to it was a secondary trauma.

But very, very horrible things happen every day in the fallen world, and good things happen too.

And what likely will happen is that the bad thing will

depress your spirit just a little bit.

You're going to walk around and you're going to be a little bit glum, certainly in the immediacy after,

in the immediate days after the tragedy.

It would be good, I think, especially that you're a man, not to dwell on it too much, not to sob and sit around and cry all the time.

Have a little bit of a stiff upper lip, you know.

I was saying this after Charlie's assassination.

A few days later, I really let it wash over me.

And

I let the tears come right up to my eye.

I let them come right up.

And then I pushed it all right back down.

I let it come up.

I let it wash over me sitting alone in my office at night.

But, you know, you're a guy.

You got to be tough.

You got to be tough.

You're not allowed to say that anymore, but it's true.

So, yes, let it affect you.

Mourn, grieve.

That's all real.

But recognize that

the

world is not totally lost.

And there are, in fact, glimpses of good things in the world, and they point to the ultimate good that

we can find.

Because

there's darkness all over, but light shines in the darkness and the darkness will not comprehend it.

Okay.

Next question.

Who can be compared like unto God, my brother Michael?

Hail Mary.

You have been critical of dual citizenship, but you've also stated in the past that patriotism is a duty to one's country,

not

conformity of intellect and will to the ideals of that country.

But if one is raised in two countries and two cultures with two family ties, then does not one also have a duty to honor both so long as they cohere to the higher principle of the faith?

Second, isn't it interesting how Leibs will use the violinist argument to justify abortion

because the violinist has no right to your body.

But if you are near death, then the violinist has a claim to your organs before you're even dead, since all arguments are about utility and not principle for them.

Your thoughts?

Great observation.

I love that observation at the end.

The violinist argument, I won't recite it now.

It's one of these stupid arguments from the 70s or something about abortion.

And it defends a mother's supposed right to murder her kid

in the vein that the child has no right to the body of the mother.

Just as if you woke up in a hospital strapped to a violinist who was living off of your body, that he would have no right to do that and you would have every right to cut him loose.

But so they make that argument about abortion, but then the moment anyone's in a car wreck or something, they all claim that they have a right to every single one of your organs, even though the harvesting of those organs very likely would be the thing that kills you.

That's a good observation.

I like that.

I don't like that that happens, but I like that observation.

To your first point, though, on dual citizenship.

What about people who are raised in two countries with two cultures?

Yes, they will feel a kind of a familial

draw and reverence and filial piety to those cultures.

And that's just not ideal.

It's like children of divorce.

You might grow up, I mean, divorce is a horrible, horrible evil.

And

so if parents are divorced, you could have a kid who spends one week at one parent's house and then the next week at the next parent's house.

And in principle, they have two homes, right?

But really, no.

Because you can't have two homes.

So that will result in competing loyalties and

a kind of a, I don't know, a kind of a schizophrenia, I guess.

So it's just not good.

You should not be raised in two countries.

It's fine to travel.

It's good to have affinity for other cultures.

Some of my ancestors come from Italy.

I have a great deal of affection for Italy and I like to go visit, but you really should have one home and one culture.

To raise someone with two homes is really to deprive them of a home.

Okay.

Rest of the show continues now.

We have the iPad.

I will be talking to you.

You do not not want to miss it.

We have more voicemail bag.

We have more written mailbag.

We have a lot.

See you over there.