Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 747 | No, “Whiteness” Isn’t to Blame for Tyre Nichols’ Murder

Episode Date: January 30, 2023

Today we're talking about the tragic death of Tyre Nichols and the aftermath, which included riots and calls for social justice, many claiming that the killing was due to "systemic whiteness," despite the cops who killed him all being black. It's a very good thing that the officers are being held accountable, yet it's incredibly sad to see the reaction immediately shift to race. What really constitutes justice in this case? We look at how the officers involved were hired due to lowered department standards and the lie that law enforcement is rooted in white supremacy. Then, we look at Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic's win at the 2023 Australian Open. He is said to be the best tennis player in the world, but was left unable to compete in the 2022 Australian Open after he was deported because he chose to remain unvaccinated. We take a look at his big win and how much sweeter it is after he stuck to his guns. In contrast, we look at a Finnish transgender farmer turned ice skater who was allowed to skate at the European Figure Skating Championships despite being ... not good. We finish off with a look at progressivism and the destruction of beauty that comes from it. --- Timecodes: (00:57) Tyre Nichols (34:00) Novak Djokavic (28:30) Finnish "ice princess" (44:20) Progressive ugliness --- Today's Sponsors: Birch Gold — protect your future with gold. Text 'ALLIE' to 989898 for a free, zero obligation info kit on diversifying and protecting your savings with gold. My Patriot Supply — prepare yourself for anything with long-term emergency food storage. Save $200 off a Three-Month Emergency Food Kit (and free shipping) when you go to PrepareWithAllie.com. Patriot Mobile — go to PatriotMobile.com/ALLIE or call 878-PATRIOT and use promo code 'ALLIE' to get free activation! Epic Will — be intentional about your family, your values and your wishes. Go to EpicWill.com/ALLIE and you’ll save 10% on your complete Will package. --- Links: Neil Shenvi: "A Short Review of Morrison’s Be The Bridge" https://shenviapologetics.com/a-short-review-of-morrisons-be-the-bridge/?fbclid=PAAaZ8FTsd-ACpS4C3OwUdRvRq-taUHavQgqRe9z1SkxLgHIl4CxPhPpE2bSQ New York Post: "Memphis cops charged in Tyre Nichols murder hired after PD relaxed job requirements" https://nypost.com/2023/01/28/memphis-cops-in-tyre-nichols-murder-hired-after-pd-relaxed-job-standards/?utm_source=NYPTwitter&utm_medium=SocialFlow&utm_campaign=SocialFlow%20https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1619463157348442113?s=12&t=2pDV_RaU6O4yjVXTO-MPEg --- Relevant Episodes: Ep 480 | Better Than ‘Be the Bridge:’ Biblical Unity | Guest: Monique Duson https://apple.co/3Yb0ggW Ep 745 | Life as a Duggar & Letting Go of Legalism | Guest: Jinger Duggar Vuolo https://apple.co/406v846 --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV

or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. A black man in Memphis was beaten to death by five police officers and people, prominent Christians included, are blaming whiteness. Are they right? Novak Djokovic won the Australian Open after being barred from the country for not getting the Vax last year. We'll be. look at this epic moment as well as the performance of another athlete, a self-described ice skating princess, whose performance didn't go quite as well. Then we'll look at that new statue in New York. In contrast, the demonic artwork of today to the beautiful art of the past and talk about what this means. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to good ranchers.com.

Use promo code All right. Check out for a discount. Go to ranchers.com. Promocode All Right, happy Monday. Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. All right, we're going to start out this episode pretty intense because I've got a lot that I want to talk about. And then we're going to move into some lighter stuff, still very important. So intense stuff first, a little bit lighter stuff, more fun stuff, ridiculous stuff, still important stuff at the end. All right, let's just go ahead and get right into this. First, I want to talk about this horrible story in the about a man named Tyree Nichols. So on January 7th of this year, Nichols was beaten to death by five police officers in Memphis, Tennessee.

Nichols' interaction with the police that night. If you don't already know about this story, I'm going to give you some of this background. Started with an attempted traffic stop, allegedly for reckless driving. The police chief has since said she doesn't actually know if this allegation is true, but that's what the police officers are saying that he was recklessly driving, so they pulled him over. And when they pulled him over, Nichols ran from the police who pursued them and ultimately apprehended him. Then, as we saw in gruesome body cam footage that was released on Friday night, the five officers that apprehended Nichols beat him to death, literally just took turns beating him into a pulp.

He apparently calls out to his mother at one point. in this incident, I could not stomach watching the whole thing. I mean, I just, I can't imagine. I cannot imagine, like, the fear and the pain of feeling that vulnerable of looking around at those five faces as a human being and thinking, I'm going to die. And there's nothing that I can do about it. I can't imagine also how callous you have to be to intentionally hurt someone and then to keep hurting them. Like most of us, if we accidentally bump into someone in the hallway, we profusely apologize. Like, if you accidentally tripped someone, you're walking on the sidewalk and they fell, you would feel terrible. You would do everything that you could to make sure that that person is okay,

that stranger that you don't even know. So what depth of heartlessness is required in a person to knowingly and purposely hurt a defenseless person to the point of death? And I ask myself that question a lot when I see these stories of senseless, violence. Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens or not bad, or happens a lot, bad or not. We all have the capacity for evil. So I don't want it to seem like I'm being self-righteous and saying that I can't understand that level of cruelty, but I can't. I really can't. I cannot understand how someone would go that far. And I know there are some people who say that he shouldn't have run away, but honestly, in this scenario, like, I don't want to hear that. I know that you never resist.

arrest. That's true. You shouldn't resist arrest. You shouldn't run away. But the officer's response in this case is not at all proportionate to Nichols running away. This was an intentional, malicious, continual beating of an unarmed person completely unnecessary. And just by the way, Daniel Schaefer, Justine Damon, Tony Tempa. You might not know their names and we'll talk about why in a second, but none of them were resisting arrest. And yet they were all murdered by the police. So I don't think that just saying, hey, if you comply, everything is going to be fine is always true. Now, it goes without saying for any of you who have been listening to me for any amount of time that I am so thankful for good law enforcement and what they put on the line every day. So thankful.

But we should always hold people who hold that much power to high standards of behavior, of integrity. And that means that we do not unconditionally support the police as a whole just as we don't unconditionally. support any other profession as a whole. We call out good and bad and we hold the bad to account. Nichols actually survived this attack. He was able to call an ambulance that transported him to the hospital. He died of his injuries three days later. So awful. While Nichols was in critical condition at the hospital, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation was contacted to do a use of force investigation and this interaction with his police. The officers involved were fired on January 20th.

20th. They were charged with murder on January 27th. And so the bad is being held to account in this case. I'm thankful for that. After the body cam footage was released on Friday, there were protests in Memphis and across the country. People once again calling to defund the police to abolish the police. And then there's another response to all of this that maybe

you expected the condemnation of white supremacy, the insistence that this is yet another consequence of the system of whiteness that has plagued our country for so long that this is a result of racism. You've probably been seeing that take circulating on Instagram and Twitter. And this would be a more predictable response if the perpetrators in this crime were not black. But they are. All five police officers in this awful, tragic incident are black. But here's what Van Jones says at CNN. Headline, the police who killed Tyree Nichols were black and they might still have been driven by racism. Quote, society's message that black people are inferior, unworthy, and dangerous is pervasive? Is it? Okay. Cops of all color,

including black police officers internalize those messages and sometimes act on them. In fact, in black neighborhoods, the phenomenon of brutal black cops singling out young black men for abuse is nothing new. Huh, interesting. Black police officers abusing young black men in the community is nothing new, he says. Now, that's a theme that I actually saw on Twitter over the weekend as I was looking at commentary on this from all different angles. Black men on Twitter talking about their negative interactions with the police and how actually

most of those interactions have been with black police officers, they're saying. Now, these are just anecdotes, but it seems to be echoed by a lot of different kind of people in the media and just in the public. That's interesting. And yeah, we are still told this is a problem of racism by white people of white supremacy. Activist Bree Newsom said this. Quote, diversifying the police force doesn't end racism because racism is inherent to the organization of the institution and its daily operation. Racism is what policing is, she says. To which Atlantic writer, Jamel Hill, replied,

I need so many people to understand this regarding Tyree Nichols. Several of the officers who murdered Freddie Gray were black. The entire system of policing is based on white supremacist violence, she says. We see people under the boot of oppression carry its water all the time. These are just a few of the many instances of left-wing activists arguing on Twitter that five black men beating another black man to death is because of white people. This message is also being circulated in the Christian world, namely by an organization called Be the Bridge, which claims to be on a mission to reconcile white and black believers,

but by my observation, simply adopts, for the most part, left-wing, divisive secular perspectives on race and simply repackages them for a Christian audience. I've talked about the biblical issues with Be the Bridge in the past. I'll link a blog post by Neil Shinvi as well as an episode I did with the amazing Monique Dusan about this a while ago. And Be the Bridge posted this. I'll read you part of their caption and you can go read it for yourself. So here's one thing that they say. What about the race of the police officers?

They say no matter the DNA of those who killed Tyree, the system is the same. the system was built on a structure, a foundation of whiteness. Whiteness always harms. When asked about police brutality, theologian William James Jennings says police brutality is an example of sinful disconnect. The way whiteness has formed in some people has caused a deep disconnect from their environment and their world and from other people. Then they end saying, finally, don't burden your black friends with questions and thoughts.

Mourn with the black community and remember who you are. in their space. It is not a moment to center your own thoughts, but bring more volume to our sisters and brothers who are non-broken mourning crying out. And yes, angry. So this is a consequence of whiteness. They say this is an organization that is touted by a lot of evangelical Christians, even those who consider themselves conservative evangelical Christians. So consider that. Now, they would argue that quote unquote whiteness doesn't necessarily mean white people because why would why would anyone possibly think that but they they would say rather that it is whiteness is a system that privileges white people and oppresses black and brown people but like let's not play

dumb let's not play dumb even with that definition the argument is that it was a system built by white people and is upheld today by white people, by white individuals. And the allegedly unfair system in place is described by the color of people they claim constructed it. So they don't just say the discriminatory system in which we live, which was set up by sinful people. They call it whiteness because they hold to this erroneous, literally superstitious belief that virtually all bad things that have happened and continue to happen in the U.S., particularly to black and brown Americans, is because of white people and the system they've deliberately created to maintain power. A white supremacist country where Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, Nigerian Americans,

among others, are more financially successful than any other group in the country, a white supremacist country where white Americans are not supreme. Incredible. But we could spend an hour, have spent many hours debunking that claim. For now, let's focus on the problem of this, the problem of blaming this horrible, Incident on whiteness, on white supremacy, on white people, whatever you want to call it. First, let's just take a short look at the claim that policing in America is a tool of white oppression. Therefore, anyone operating in it is a tool of white oppression no matter what their

color is. I read an article on this yesterday to refresh myself on the historical reasons that some people make this claim. And I think that there is some, there is truth. to there being a slave patrol at one point in the United States that used law enforcement as an excuse to re-enslave, basically, black people, post-imantipation, brutal treatment, false accusations, disproportionate punishment for crimes, awful, the definition of injustice. But the claim is that because that existed, mostly in the South, that that is the root of all law enforcement in America today. which is just not true. And just because something started one way does not mean that it functions in the same way or serves the same purpose today. But even if it did mean that, law enforcement in the U.S. wasn't all started as a slave patrol in all parts of the U.S. And here's the most important part.

Law enforcement predates the United States. Like it predates the West. The first thing that came to mind when I was thinking about law enforcement was Romans 13. Romans 13, 4, for he, the government, is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God and avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Now, obviously, we know that that does not mean that the government is always good or is always a tool of God's justice. That's why in the U.S., we believe that there should be huge checks on government power, including police power, because we know.

the nature of power is that it corrupts those who have it, but that does not mean that there is not a need for the government or not a need for law enforcement. God's word clearly says that we do need the state. We do need someone to exact punishment for crimes. We need the state to enforce the law to avenge God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Read that right in Romans 13 far before the United States and American slavery ever existed. Does that mean that police should be beating defenseless people up? Absolutely not. But they are an arm of the state to ensure that people are held accountable for doing wrong so that, according to the U.S. system, after a fair trial, that person bears punishment for their crime. So we can acknowledge that at one point the United States

had slave patrol and it was bad. I am even open to the argument that in some places they routinely use disproportionate force that mirrors the practices in place then. But to say that the entire policing system then is a system of evil whiteness. It's just bad logic. Sadly, the police abuse power everywhere. We need law enforcement. It is absolutely necessary for safety. I don't care what any left winger tries to tell me. But when you put power, the power to abuse and to kill in the hands of the wrong people who are untrained or who lack honor, there is going to be injustice. That is the sad truth of it in many places much worse than what we see here in countries where people have never even seen a white person. Police and militia oppress the populace. Are they also somehow

constructs of whiteness? Now, there are many in this camp, believe it or not, who would honestly say yes to that question because they believe that all oppression, especially of black people, is a product of racism from white people. But that argument, whether you're trying to argue it universally or just here in the U.S., especially by Christians, is as morally repugnant and biblically inaccurate as it is straight up stupid. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political.

They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed,

you can watch this T-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. So the argument that black people do bad things and especially bad things to each other where all the bad things that happen to black people are all. all because of white people's racism or a white system or whiteness is morally repugnant. It's biblically inaccurate. And it is also, yes, stupid. Black people are humans.

Are they not? They are image bearers of God. They are people with souls created by God in need of redemption by Christ. You believe that, right? Christian, I do. that means that they, just the same as me, have agency. They have the ability to make good and bad decisions. They have the capacity to discern right from wrong and then do it.

They, just like me, are dead in their sin apart from Christ. When they get to the judgment throne, there will be no whiteness excuse for their sins. No justification for unrighteousness that falls under the category of but white supremacy. There will be no consideration of melan count or generational trauma and determining the fate of their soul. It will only be whether they have been made clean by the blood of the lamb, just like me, just like you. So when we deny individuals' accountability because they are black, when we won't hold

them to the same standards and we use white people or the system as a scapegoat, we actually deny their humanity. Their God-given ability to choose. And we ultimately obscure their need for a savior and thereby pervert the gospel. It's a big deal. we also do something that God tells us repeatedly that he hates. We show partiality. This is something that we talked about a lot in 2020.

People who would excuse rioting and looting and arson because the perpetrators were black. People who would only care about a story when the victim was black and the perpetrator was white. People who say didn't have any public lament when Eliza Fletcher just a few months ago was kidnapped and murdered by a black man in Memphis. one incident in a string of similar kidnappings there, but who call for a national reckoning in a case like this, people who ignore the instances of similar black-on-black crime happening every single day at rates wildly disproportionate to their population size, but speak up when a news story enables them to push their talking points, people who don't even know, much less speak the names of Justine Damon, Tony Temper, or Daniel Shaver, because they're white people murdered by the police,

as if God cares about their lives less. Pastors and Christian influencers having two different messages for their audience based on their ethnicity, tough talk about the sin of racism to white folks and just apologies to black folks. This is all partiality. This is showing favoritism to one group over another for arbitrary reasons. And God says it is the opposite of justice. Leviticus 1915, you shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be part.

to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor. Deuteronomy 1619, you shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous. Second Chronicles 197, now then, let the fear of the Lord be upon you. Be careful what you do, for there is no injustice with the Lord, our God, or partiality, or taking bribes. 1. Peter 1.17. And if you call on him as father who judges impartially, according to each one's deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile. And then James 317, a little out of order. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason,

full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. You see how much God cares about just the facts at hand when it comes to weighing a case of right and wrong, don't show favoritism to the poor or to the rich, he says, but judge people in righteousness. Look at the truth at the facts, not at their status. God judges impartially, according to our deeds, First Peter says. Godly wisdom is open to reason and impartial. James says it's not showing favoritism to one group because you think that their ancestors have been historically oppressed or because you believe that maybe they exist in some kind

of unfair system because of their melanin count. You don't show them favoritism or go softer on them when it comes to determining right or wrong. That's not justice. That's injustice. We don't have time to get into it now, but you'll remember from 2020 how we talked about what I call God's four attributes of justice that we see over and over again throughout the Old Testament, truthful, proportional, direct and impartial. These are all characteristics that we see of God's law giving to ancient Israel, that we would do well to apply to our understanding of justice today, the exact opposite actually of social justice in many ways. Thomas Chatterton Williams is a writer for the Atlantic. He's very heterodox, I think, in his view is very interesting. And he had a good response to the

assertion that black police officers killed a black man because of white people's racism. He said this. He said, What if? Stay with me. These five men were actually agents responsible for their own reprehensible actions and not merely hapless puppets being manipulated by the invisible hand of inescapable, omnipotent white supremacy. I don't know if Williams is a Christian. I don't think he means this to make a theological point, but it does. This, again, superstitious. assertion that there is essentially a ghost of white supremacy always lurking around and spooking black people into being mean to other black people robs these men robs people of their agency you can say whatever you want about policing in america and there are things to be said but these men could have made

another choice and they didn't that's what the law must hold them accountable for that is what god will hold them accountable for. And there will be people who hear this and say, oh, why are you being divisive? Why can't you just have empathy here? Me have empathy. You who made this about whiteness, you decided to make a man's brutal death

about your bogus racial narrative instead of addressing the actual situation and proposing real solutions. You used this man's death. to push your agenda. You fit his murder into your preconceived narrative, fit him into your politics, placed him as a bow in your quiver for the culture war when you made this about whiteness. You couldn't resist. Instead of looking at the situation as it is, you said, yeah, but how can I make this about white supremacy even when a white person was nowhere to be found? And you want to lecture

anyone else about empathy and division? No. No. No. I don't. I'm not. I don't. I I'm tired of you sewing discord in the body through your worldly ideologies and then accusing anyone who calls you out on it an enemy of unity. No. No. So how did this happen? We don't buy the lie that whiteness made them do it. So for those of us living in reality, actually more interested in protecting lives than pushing some kind of crazy academic narrative that helps no one, let us actually address this question. Well, there are multiple reports now saying these men were hired after Memphis PD relaxed job requirements for the sake of diversity. This is New York Post reporting.

Tedarius Bean and Demetrius Haley both joined the Memphis Police Department in August 2020. NBC News reported more than two years after the department dramatically loosened the education qualifications to become an officer. recruits no longer needed an associate's degree or 54 college credit hours to join the force and could get by with five years of work experience action five reported the department showed signs of struggle with recruiting new police officers offering $15,000 signing bonuses in 2021 and 2022 Fox 13 reported last year the department lowered its standards again for new recruits nixim the timed physical ability test in cutting college education requirements from 54 credit hours. to just 24. The department also revealed that it was even offering waivers for people who have been convicted on felony charges. Yikes. Now, to be honest, I feel for the department, I'm sure it is tough to get officers right now. I mean, what person who is well qualified also for a non-police job would want to enter the force right now? I know that the there are plenty out there, plenty of you listening and your husbands, and I think God for that.

But there are a ton of would-be great, honorable, effective police officers who look at the scrutiny, even good officers face and say, no, it's not worth it. That on top of putting your life on the line every day, no thanks. So a lot of departments have to lower their standards. In the case of Memphis, it wasn't just to get new recruits. It was reportedly to get black recruits because we constantly hear this. representation matters. That's what DEI training constantly tells us. So they have a black female police chief. We have a bunch of black officers. Most of the city council and Memphis is black.

And the theory has always been, well, that's going to alleviate tensions. Put more black people empower, fill the police force with diversity that's going to relieve the oppression of black people. but as we pointed out earlier, black officers inflicting violence on black people happens. Apparently, isn't all that rare. So Memphis really got nothing good out of that deal. And this has been going on for a while. I received a message from a follower who said that they went through training with the Memphis Police Department in 2010.

So 13 years ago, he said that even then they weren't giving them adequate training, that they gave them like a couple jihitsu lessons. and told them, well, that's about it. You're going to have to get more training beyond this. Didn't train them on how to deal with unruly suspects, nothing like that. Just said, here's your gun, here's your baton. Go out there. Now, apparently, police officers don't even have to pass any fitness standards.

And women are being recruited for the same positions that men are. In the name of inclusion and equity, I'm sure, but also probably in the name of desperation. And if there's any city in the country, maybe more than Chicago or L.A. or New York, York or Philly even that needs actual good policing, it is Memphis, Tennessee. Parts of Memphis have been dangerous for a very long time, but the pockets of safety there are getting smaller and smaller. And 2020 showed us what demonizing and defunding the police departments did. Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, New York, Austin, et cetera, all of these blue cities,

crime, violence, murder, all went up. How'd those BLM and Tifa Autonomous zones work out? Oh yeah. They ended in murder of 16-year-old. old. Remember that? How did the riots work out? Oh yeah, and the deaths of innocent people. Including an eight-year-old little girl in Atlanta named Sequoria Turner that was shot by a writer in the parking lot of a Wendy's. It ended in the destruction of poor, mostly black communities. How did BLM end up working out for the communities they said that they were fighting for? Oh, yeah,

and funneling millions of dollars to the founders in doing nothing for people. This is what happens. When you blame everything on why. whiteness and on the system rather than looking at each evil situation as it comes and trying to figure out what were the real motivations? What were the real factors that went into this? What changes can we make to stop that from happening? It's real convenient to always say that everything is the problem of whiteness because there's never any real solution for it except that you need to keep on reading that person's books. Keep on hiring that person to speak. keep on doing that person's program.

Just keep doing the work and paying the money and spending the time. There's never any concrete, immediate steps to be taken because it's not about change. It's not about saving lives. It is about political activism and power. The reality is that we need to fund, rigorously train, and weed out the police. drop the DEI training everywhere, but especially police departments, drop the representation quotas, quit the criminal justice crap where the law favors criminals over victims. We need to end police unions controversial because we need to end public unions because public unions are

unethicals. I've talked about many times, especially teachers unions. And they just seem to breed corruption. I do think that there is a lot of corruption in our, There could be a lot of corruption in our police system in different ways across the country, not because of white supremacy, but because you'd be hard pressed to find any government agency that's not corrupt. Add to that the level of power, lethal power that the police has and they're untrained and they're, I mean, it's just a recipe for a disaster. It's actually a wonder that this kind of thing doesn't happen more often than it does. And it probably does. It just doesn't always get publicized because it's not the right racial makeup for most people in the media to care. The police need to be held to extremely high standards while at the same time not being constantly

lambasted so that the good officers can do their job. These men in this case are being tried for murder. Good. Good. They should get life in prison. If it were up to me, it found guilty of premeditated intentional murder because there are actually some like conversations going on within Memphis right now that this was actually like a personal vendetta.

between one of the officers and this guy, like if this was a premeditated thing that makes it even worse, they should get the death penalty. That's what I would say. If this was premeditated, malicious attack, you know, intentional murder, then this should get the death penalty. Absolutely. You want to start reform. You want to send a signal. Well, if you're going to intentionally murder a defenseless human being, then I don't see why you shouldn't get the death penalty. as for Tyree Nichols, I mourned for him.

I think about how much he suffered in those moments, how much he suffered for those three days in the hospital when the doctors couldn't save him. I mourn for his family. His mom, who has to think for the rest of her life about the pain and the fear that he went through. That's the worst, worst, worst, worst thing that could happen to you as a mother. His family will be haunted by this long past this new cycle. So we need to think of them and pray for them as.

well, past the politics and the arguments about it all. But we also need to make sure that we as Christians are thinking about these situations in a clear-headed biblical way. All right. Deep breath. I told you it was going to be intense at the start. Let's move on. All right. So let's look at two tales. Two tales, one of success and one of failure. One of rewarding competence and excellence and hard work. And one. one rewarding identity on no merit basis whatsoever. So let's start with the good story. The good story comes out of Australia.

Novak Djokovic. He is possibly the greatest tennis player of all time. He won the Australian Open. And the reason why this is such a big deal is because he was barred from playing in the Australian Open last year because he refused to get the Australian Open last year. because he refused to get the vaccine. I mean, he held strong on this in Australia because they're just crazy, decided, no, you can't come in, you can't compete.

Here's a clip of Djokovic explaining why he doesn't want to get the vaccine. Are you prepared to forego the chance to be the greatest player that ever picked up a racket statistically? Because you feel so strongly about this jab? Yes, I do. Why, no fact? Why? Why?

Because the principles of decision-making on my body are more important than any title or anything else. I'm trying to be in tune with my body as much as I possibly can. Wow, so he was willing to forego his title. He would have won the Australian Open last year. He actually was barred from the country until 2025, but then that decision was reversed. last year. And so this year he came back and won. Like, what an amazing comeback story. And good for him for standing on his principles. Do you know how few people in the entire world would do that? So few. So few. So here he is winning the Australian Open after being told last year,

sorry you can't play because you won't take this jab that you don't need. Here he is. I just have a huge smile on my face because wow, that is so amazing. It couldn't have been a better ending to this story. And he's also been very outspoken about his Orthodox Christian faith. He said before I'm an athlete, I'm an Orthodox Christian. So I'm sure that his decision and his security and his decision also probably came from his faith as well. So that's just amazing. I mean, honestly, praise God for that. And then these pictures were circulating on Twitter, which I just got a good chuckle out of. And it's Bill Gates, who was at the office. Australian Open watching Djokovic win.

And obviously we know that Bill Gates big supporter, developer of these vaccines. And he's just, if you're listening to this, he's just sitting there like not cheering and kind of with his mouth set, like upset about it. Now, to be fair, I don't know if they, if like this really capture. the moment. Like his expression, I don't really know if they captured Bill Gates' expression at the moment that Joukovic won. These are just like pictures that they paired together, probably just to make a point.

But pretty funny. Like the irony there. Also, like the picture of health in Djokovic, someone who didn't get the vaccine yet is completely totally healthy would probably fare better with COVID than someone like Bill Gates. He was looking more and more like the Michelin, man. Come on now. Right. So that's story of success, incompetence, and excellence, in working hard, things that are often, I think, demonized increasingly in our culture. And then we move over to Finland. Finland. This is from Redox. The headline says a 59-year-old farmer from Finland who uses the name Minamaria Antiquan. Sorry, don't know how to pronounce that. Performed at the opening ceremony of the European. P& Faker Skating Championships in Espooh this week, he said it was to fulfill a childhood dream of being an ice princess. We'll put up this one picture of him. Of course, he goes by she, her showing off his skates.

I mean, that's just a dainty ice princess if you've, if you've ever seen one. So this is at the 2023 European Championships for. For some reason, they had this person, this man who pretends to not just be a woman, but pretends to be a girl, like a princess. That's a theme. Keep that in mind, as we've talked about many times, decided to have him skate, I guess, in the opening ceremony in front of everyone. And honestly, no one, no one can figure out why.

Just watch. And then there's nine-year-year-old. So, when we're going to from zero, then we're just that we're in a place with a

half-jail-jol, and then after starts to do something there's a lot of there's going to start a piquilia to kisama. Should we feel bad

for laughing? I don't think that we should. I mean, if this were just like an old man or an old woman or a special needs

person going out there and they were just trying to, you know, help them fulfill their dreams and that person fell, I think that would be sad. But why does this person have special status? Because he's a man who likes to wear makeup and call

himself an ice princess and wear a skirt. Like, it's kind of opening my eyes to why some people, like, treat this group the way that they do. Do you see them as having special needs or something? Like, is that why you elevate them to this point? Like, would you ever put any other kind of person out on the rink like that who clearly cannot skate? Like, if you were just listening to this, he literally just like fell and sat on his knees and just like sat there until an actual skater had to come up there with the finished flag and like help him up. I mean, I do feel sad for this person. I do. But also, dude, like you took someone else's spot. They could have had a competent skater who had been, you know, working on skating for the past 20 years of their life go up there. And they didn't. They

chose someone who decided to transition recently, transition, quote unquote, and who decided to take up skating recently to go out there and embarrass himself and embarrass his country. What is wrong with you people? What is wrong with you people? But this is not his first stellar performance. Here he is, which is it will just take your breath away, performing as a geisha. It's like a toddler. It is.

Like I think that if I practiced for like a week, I could probably do that. I could probably, not that I think that I would be a great ice skater, but I would be on the same level. So we've got like appropriation of gender. We've got appropriation of age. We've got appropriation of Japanese culture here. We've got a lot of appropriation. But it's fine because somehow you become part of the oppressed class. If you are a white man who decides that he's a little girl, you're just acting out your fetish.

He's acting out his fetish. And we are all just affirming it and applauding it and giving him special treatment because of it. It's disgusting. Ugh, the godlessness. All right. I got one more thing I wanted to talk about. And it's also comparing beauty and good things and excellence to the deterioration. to the deterioration that always comes from progressivism, always.

All right. So a lot of you have been asking me about this new statue that was placed on a New York an appellate courthouse statue. Apparently, the statue is supposed to be an ode to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and is a statement on abortion right. So if you're watching this, you see this gold statue. And the first thing that comes to mind is that it's demonic. If you've seen other kinds of like demonic depictions, it's kind of this hybrid typically between like a human and a ram or some other kind of animal. And that's what's going on here. She looks like she's got ram's horns. She doesn't have arms. She has what looks like

snakes instead. It absolutely looks like a golden idol. But it also looks like. looks like it looks like a satanic symbol. And that is very fitting. If you are going to make an ode to so-called abortion rights and an ode to killing unborn children, then of course you're going to make it look demonic. The artist, Pakistani-American Shazia Sikinder, said the sculpture was part of an urgent and necessary cultural reckoning underway as New York, along with cities across the world, and reconsider traditional representations of power in public spaces and recast civic structures to better reflect 21st century moors. Yeah, it does definitely reflect more of our cultural values today, and that is idolatry.

And that is the worship of Satan and submission to evil and the love of child sacrifice. And so this is absolutely an appropriate representation of, I think, certainly where New York has gone, but where many people in the United States have gone. Now, if you look at other statues that are on this particular courthouse, this beautiful statue, it's supposed to be a statue of truth, a statue that represents impartiality of wisdom. you can see that they've got their books there and all of the symbolism. I mean, that is what art used to be. Just a representation of virtue of actual beauty. This is what an actual human being looks like. This is what a formidable woman looks like.

Supposed to represent values that we would like to uphold like honor, not satanic values like murder. And then we also see here, we see this other statue. which is supposed to be a depiction of wisdom. As you can see, he is consulting what I supposed to be the scriptures, or at least the wisdom of old. You can see wisdom inscribed at the front of the statue. This person is supposed to be depicting the care and the caution that goes into making judicial decisions. And then you also have a statue that represents force. I would guess this means law enforcement.

He looks like a Roman centurion. Again, these are just beautiful statues, very realistic and show the different parts of the justice system. So we've got truth, we've got wisdom, we've got force, all represented. And now it's been replaced by a golden statue that is supposed to represent murder. And this is not the only new artwork. that progressives have put up over the past couple weeks. We've also got this new monument in, let's see, in Boston to Martin Luther King, Jr. And we'll pull that up. If you haven't seen it, you've probably seen it.

A lot of people are saying that it looks weird. I will not say this is a family-friendly show. I will not say what people are saying that it looks like. I will say that it looks inappropriate. But I could also just say that it looks ugly. Like it's very confusing as to what it is actually supposed to be. It's supposed to be an embrace apparently. It was unveiled Friday, January 13th.

Interesting. But it's just ugly. It's just ugly. And that is what art seems to be today. And actually, like the MLK Memorial in D.C., it looks better, but I don't like the MLK Memorial in DC either. Like I also think that that's kind of ugly. I think it's supposed to be like unfinished because his work is unfinished,

but I think he looks like very stern and not very inspiring. And I actually don't think that artwork is great either, but I think it's better than what was just put up in Boston. And this is just a theme that we see. A theme that we see is that the left pushes the austere. They push it, they push the disturbing. They push the dark. They replace beauty and goodness and light and grace and wisdom with its opposites continually.

And then they get mad when you don't clap. They're in the business of perversion and the business of depravity. And like if you see people who go from being like, they're like, hey, yeah, I was a Christian. And I was like, you see these TikToks all the time. there's like, yeah, I, you know, I was a Christian, but secretly I was suppressing my sexuality or I was suppressing my activism. And then you see what they look like after they become the secular progressives. It's always toward ugly. Now, I'm not saying that, um, I'm not saying that they are actually like innately ugly, like their faces are ugly, but they have chosen to take on ugly characteristics.

That's always what happens. Like you never see a glow up of someone going. from being like in a stable, uh, state in a stable position, like Christian conservative, whatever, to being progressive and looking better. They just always look like they've been destroyed or in disarray. There was also this, uh, Burberry ad, uh, going around. And it is, um, it's two people. I don't know what they are. One of them obviously has. has scars on her chest because she got a mastectomy and now she wants to look like a man. Then the other person, I think it's supposed to always also look androgynous. And this is apparently what Burberry is putting on their Instagram in order to sell their clothes.

I'm not saying that these two people, again, are innately ugly. Like I'm not saying that their faces are ugly or anything like that. But what is being represented here is ugliness. It is supposed to be ugly, the scars, the eyebrows, the haircut. the tattoos, the look of it. It is supposed to be shocking. It's not supposed to be beautiful. And by the way, there's no like free market explanation for this.

Like no one is buying more Burberry clothes because they're putting these kinds of images on their Instagram. They're making some kind of statement. That's what Progressivism does. It makes a statement with the grotesque. If you look at some previous Burberry ads, we'll pull some up. Like from, even from 2014, normal, beautiful people. You've got this all the way back to 1951.

I mean, see how far we've fallen. I don't know if we can put these upside by side. But look at this, 1951. This is a barbarian. Okay. Two beautiful women, classy women and their classy clothes and the classy designs. And then go back to the one, the Instagram one that we have now of the two. Like, how far have we fallen?

That doesn't just happen, by the way. That is a choice. that is replacing a good value system with a bad value system. That's what happens. You get destruction and you get ugliness. We've got a Kate Moss ad from Burberry 2005. Also gorgeous, beautiful. The same thing has happened to other companies like Calvin Klein.

They used to show beauty and fitness and things like that, and now they don't. They show things that are objectively unhealthy, objectively confusing. And it's all because we have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, even down to our very nature as human beings. And so just as Satan hates beauty and hates truth, it hates love and hates goodness and hates light, so those that follow him are going to distort and dismantle these things as well. And so we can be champions of beauty and of clarity and of truth to fight

against this just ugliness that really comes from the soul. It might seem like it doesn't matter, but I really think it does speak to where we are as a culture. All right, another long one today. I had a lot to talk about, though. I had a lot to talk about. And there were even things that I didn't even get to today. We've got a lot of good stuff coming down the pipeline this week. You guys absolutely are loving that Ginger Dugger Volo episode that we did. Go back. Listen to that on, was that Thursday? No, that was Wednesday. Watch it on YouTube. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts, and share it too, because I think it's helping a lot of people, just how open she was about her testimony. And so I'm so thankful for you guys listening to that and watching that. And if you're new here,

because of that episode, welcome. As you can tell, we talk about a lot of things. Not all episodes are this long, though. Try to keep it to 45 minutes. But man, on Monday, it's hard because so much happens. All right. That's all we got time for today. We will be back here tomorrow. See you guys then. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave,

even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this T-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.