The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 315 - Why The Shooter Did It

Episode Date: March 18, 2019

A killer goes on a shooting spree at a New Zealand mosque. Why did he do it? We will analyze his manifesto as well as underreported religious violence around the globe. Then, Nancy Pelosi wants kids to vote, Beto raises a pile of cash, and I defend Chelsea Clinton. Date: 03-18-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A killer goes on a shooting spree at a New Zealand mosque. Why did he do it? We will analyze his manifesto as well as underreported religious violence around the globe. Then Nancy Pelosi wants kids to vote. Beto raises a pile of cash and I defend Chelsea Clinton. Oh heavens. She's my cousin actually, technically. I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles show. A lot to talk about today. Obviously the big story is this slaughter that happened in New Zealand. basically the entire media apparatus is getting this wrong. They are doing exactly what the guy said they were going to do, what he predicted, what he wanted them to do. It's just a mess. It's a mess of a reaction. People are getting it wrong on both sides. So we're going to go in depth

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five bucks like the oral care kit. After that, the restock box ships regular-sized products at regular price. What are you waiting for? Get your starter set for just five bucks right now. Dollar Shaveclub. com slash co-fefe-F-E-F-E-F-E. That is Dollarshaveclub.com slash cofefefefefefe C-O-V-F-E-F-E. What happened in New Zealand? Here's what we know. We know that a 28-year-old personal trainer, former bodybuilder, went into a mosque live streaming with a bunch of guns and killed 49 Muslims at a mosque, at their house of worship. He, just before he went in, he released a manifesto online. It's 73, 74 pages. It explains why he did it. But it's a difficult document. Unless you are steeped in internet language, unless you're steeped in various ideologies on both the left and the

right, unless you have some context with which to read this manifesto, you can get it very wrong as a ton of people on social media and in traditional media the mainstream media did on Friday and Saturday. They just were not equipped to read this document, so they didn't know exactly what it meant. The question is, should people read the manifesto? You know, this document was hosted on a few websites, Scribbed, a few others, and some media were posting it. And some media outlets said, we don't want to publish the manifesto. Daily Wire, I think, said, we're not going to publish the manifesto. We're not going to give this guy extra publicity.

Totally get that. That makes a lot of sense to me. However, the document cloud services like Scribd that people had uploaded it to also took down the manifesto. This, I think, is a huge mistake. because to say a place like Daily Wire or CNN or Fox or whatever that they're not going to publish it, right. There's no reason to totally give this guy an open platform. But to say that the internet is going to censor this document. You can't find it. I wasn't able to find it after I first read it. Then it was gone. I had to search and have people send me copies of it just to be able to read it. This is a bad

idea because what it, the message that it sends is that this document is explosive, it's dangerous. People can't be trusted to read it. Why? Maybe it contains all sorts of truths that the conspiracy doesn't want you to read, which is not what is going on here. What is actually happening is these document cloud services are getting a lot of public pressure. They don't want to give this guy publicity. They don't want to be seen as agreeing with this guy's content. They're very, being kowtowed by censorious mobs that actually, if anything, are giving the shooter more credit than he deserves. The reality is, the ideas that he's espousing are bad ideas. He's asking questions. He's coming up with bad answers to those questions, and then he's using those bad answers to justify

killing a ton of innocent people. Those are bad ideas. The way to stop those bad ideas is to refute them, not to ignore them, not to dismiss them, not to say that they're so dangerous we're not going to put, no, take them on head on. There's nothing mystical or secret or really wise in these documents. They're bad ideas and we should refute them. That I think isn't. You've got to deal with ideology head on. If you ignore it, you give it a dangerous cachet and people are going to seek it out and they're going to read it out of context and they might draw up pretty bad conclusions. What the guy did, is not defensible. It's not defensible ideologically. It's not, obviously not defensible religiously. It's not defensible politically. So the ideas that he espouses are only powerful if they are not shown to be as wrong as they are. So let's get to it. The manifesto. I'm not going to go through and read the whole manifesto or anything like that. If you can still find it online, I guess you're welcome to. I'm just going to go for the most important parts that I think show the questions he's asking, how he goes so wrong, and how he perverts these things to try to justify

killing a lot of innocent people. The manifesto is called the Great Replacement. The Great Replacement. And the introduction says, it's the birth rates, it's the birth rates, it's the birth rates. Ethnic replacement, cultural replacement, racial replacement, white genocide. So what you know from the first, page of this is that this is boilerplate white supremacist ideology. This is not particularly inventive. This is not this one guy's, you know, really profound insight into a certain ideology. This is boilerplate white supremacism. Who is the guy? He's a 28-year-old white guy, he says. He's not terribly educated. He didn't do well in school. He didn't go to college. And he traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, Muslim countries, European countries.

obviously then he's in Australia and he went over to New Zealand. The birth rates, the birth rates, the birth rates. This is pretty interesting timing in so much as you've got governments across the West trying to address this problem. We were just talking on Thursday

about how the new proposals being pushed by Democrats and Republicans, by the whole government, are to deal with the problem of birth rates. Right now the United States has a less than replacement birth rate. Now, what this guy says is it's It's white people. The white people have low birth rates, and this is the problem because the white people are going to disappear.

Actually, the issue of birth rates is not just white people in the United States. You're seeing huge declines of birth rates among all native-born Americans, most especially, actually, not among whites, but among Hispanics. But same thing with black Americans, all sorts of Americans. So it's another one of these examples where a little learning is a dangerous thing. You focus on one partial truth. When you ignore other truths, you can create. this ideology and go down a real wormhole that ultimately he's going to use to justify violence. But the issue is not racial here in America. It's cultural. It's social. The birth rate issue is a broader issue across the entire country, across demographic groups, not just among white people. So why did he commit the slaughter? This is what he says. He says, quote, to most of all show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands. He's referring to

these Muslims as invaders. To add momentum to the pendulum swings of history further destabilizing and polarizing Western society. And finally, to create conflict between the two ideologies within the U.S. on the ownership of firearms in order to further divide the social, cultural, political, and racial divide within the U.S., this conflict over the Second Amendment and the attempted removal of firearms rights will ultimately result in a civil war that will eventually balkanize the U.S. along political, cultural, and most importantly, racial lines. So I said boilerplate white supremacist ideology. This is what they've been talking about for 70 years. It's the same thing. They're just pushing for the upcoming race war. What this guy wants is not to achieve some

limited terrorist objective. What he wants to do is destabilize the United States. So the first thing he obviously gets wrong here is he refers to these Muslims in New Zealand as invaders. they're not invaders. Regardless of what you think about the issue of immigration, of immigration across, you know, various continents, across oceans, into the United States, wherever, they're not invaders.

They're being invited in by the countries. The Muslims who immigrated to New Zealand didn't illegally cross the border to New Zealand. The border to New Zealand is a giant ocean. They were invited in by the country. So just that language invader, disingenuous. This guy's real problem, I guess, would be with politicians who advocate for lax immigration policies or open borders or whatever. But to call these people who were innocent

or peaceful praying in a mosque invaders is simply a lie. It's not true. Then to add momentum to the pendulum swings of history, further destabilizing and polarizing Western society. What he wants is not to make Western society better. That's not the goal. He explicitly says that's not the It's to make Western society worse and worse and worse until it's so bad that there's an all-out war and he can create a new society. This is his ethno-utopian plan. I mean, it says toward a new society

on the title of the manifesto. So the premise here is that the society is already so awful that the best thing to do is make life so much worse for everybody that it'll all turn to rubble and then the ethno white supremacist utopian society can finally take off. That's his premise. And this is important to understand because his tactics will make a lot more sense to observers, to commentators, once you realize that his purpose is to make everything worse.

So here you see this in the next line. He wants to further conflict between the two ideologies. within the U.S. So he's doing this in New Zealand. He's an Australian guy, but his audience is the United States. He wants U.S. politicians to fight over this,

specifically over firearms. So specifically over the Second Amendment. He sees the Second Amendment as this perfect wedge issue because it's in the Constitution. You can't get rid of this right without basically launching another American Revolution.

And what he wants to do is use firearms to get the left so riled up over firearms that they try to undo and overturn the Constitution, which will get the right so riled up that you will see a civil war in the United States. That's why he used the guns. He could have used other weapons, as he talks about later on, but instead he uses the guns. He then asks himself, what do you want? His answer is the famous 14 words. Partially what gave me some context for reading this manifesto is I did a video for Prager,

University on the alt-right. Back when that word meant something, now the left uses alt-right to describe anybody to the right of Hillary Clinton. But Hillary Clinton did actually the same thing. But the term alt-right in a really narrow sense is an alternative to conservative thought. So this encompasses a wide variety of ideologies, but all of them basically boil down to white identitarianism or white supremacism or white nationalism or whatever you want to call it. this is difficult to discuss because the left abuses these terms so much that they water it down so it means nothing. But there actually is an ideology here that we're talking about. It is a fundamentally racial ideology that is motivating this guy.

And so the 14 words are, we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. That's what it boils down to. When he uses that phrase, he's not coming up with some new ideology. is saying, I am part of this very specific ideological realm that flourishes on the internet. And that is where, that is how you can understand what I'm doing. So the first takeaway, very important to note, this guy is not insane in the way that other mass shooters are insane. When you look at shooters like, who is the one in Newtown? The guy looked like a lunatic or Aurora, Colorado.

you saw his image, he looks like it truly bonkers out of his mind can't string three words together because he's got a severe psychological problem. This guy is different than that. He's got a severe ideological problem.

He might have some psychiatric issues as well. Very likely he does. But his problem primarily is not insanity. It's a wicked ideology. That's a very important difference because you can't engage rationally. You can't refute. You can't debatheat.

bunk, an insane person, he's just an insane person, you can and must refute wicked ideologies. That is incumbent on us to do. And it's why the reaction has to be different. If the guy in Aurora Colorado wrote a manifesto, you know, in crayon backwards and it didn't make sense, there's no reason to read it. There's no reason to talk about it. Nothing would be gained from that. But if somebody under the spell of a wicked ideology writes a manifesto, you do have to read it. so that you can understand and see how things can go wrong and try to prevent other people from going wrong and have answers to bad ideas.

He does have some similarities to the other shooters in that, it appears he has daddy issues. We've talked about this with a lot of these mass shooters. The fathers weren't at home. The fathers had died. The fathers were divorced. This is one common threat amongst so many of these shooters, the vast majority of these mass shooters.

This guy's no different. His father apparently divorced. his mother when he was very young. I guess he still saw his father maybe, or his father was still alive. And all of the neighbors said, oh, he was such a nice boy. Oh, he seemed perfectly fine. His co-workers, oh, he seemed perfectly normal. Until, coincidentally, his father died.

His father died in 2010. That seems to be the moment when this guy cracked. When this guy went on traveling excursions throughout the Middle East, when he started to hatch his plans, when he started to become steeped in this white supremacist. to ideology and ultimately then when he launched this attack. So there is that commonality.

That is the one psychological factor that people should talk about and it's gone basically unreported. So then he doesn't interview with himself because he knows that the media are going to distort this or misrepresent this. He actually talks about that in the manifesto, but he is making

his motivations clear because he is an ideologue. He's driven by ideas, insane as those ideas might, or perverted as those ideas might become. So he says, quote, was there a particular event or reason you decided to commit a violent attack? He said, he traveled around his Muslim areas, he traveled around Europe, he saw that Europe had a lot of terrorist attacks and Europe had a lot of Muslim immigrants. And so he decided that he was going to take revenge by killing a lot of innocent people. And this.

is a question that comes up. Is this guy reacting to events and then having those events prompt his actions? Or is this a guy who just wanted to go kill a lot of people and used events and used observations to justify them? It seems clear to me it's the latter. He's presenting it as though it's the former. He's saying, I'm just reacting. I just saw all these Muslim immigrants, so I'm reacting for my country or something. I think it's a lot of. I think it's a lot of very clear from the rest of the manifesto that this guy wanted to go out there and kill a lot of people

and he's backtracking and justifying it in his head, but we'll see why that is. He then asks, did you carry out the attack for fame? You know, a lot of these guys want to be famous, they want to go down in history. He insists, quote, no, carrying out an attack for fame would be laughable. After all, who can remember the name of the attackers on 9-11? How about the attack in the Pentagon, the attackers in the plane that crashed in the field? be forgotten quickly, which I do not mind. Do we believe him? On the one hand, this guy obviously

has a grandiose vision of himself. He's clearly a loner. He was isolated. He got isolated on the internet. He traveled alone. So, on the one hand, he seems to have this inflated ego and want this inflated ego, so it seems to me he might want fame. On the other hand, again, a difference between lunatics, true mentally ill people and people who are under the sway of a perverse ideology, this guy's a true believer. This guy's ideology, while not coherent in a broad sense, has some trappings of internal consistency. I bet he believes it. I don't think he's using the ideology as some facade. I don't think he's fooling us with the ideology. I think he really buys it. And so in that sense, maybe he doesn't really care about fame.

In that sense, maybe his motivations are different than other killer's motivations. So he says, why did you choose to use firearms? He says, I could have chosen any weapons or means. Gas, fire, vehicular attacks, plane attacks, any means were available. I had the will and I had the resources. I chose firearms for the effect it would have on social discourse, the extra media coverage they would provide, and the effect would have on social discourse. The politics of the United States, the political situation of the world.

The U.S. is torn into many factions with enough pressure. The left wing within the U.S. will seek to abolish the Second Amendment. This will start a civil war. Okay. He has now stated this twice in the manifesto. We know that this is a major motivation. What happens within hours of the attack? Politicians in New Zealand focus on the guns,

politicians in the United States focus on the guns, the media in the United States focus on the guns. People on social media, focus on the guns. But the guns are not the issue. He's right, I mean, he's right when he says he could have used other weapons. Of course he could have used other weapons. And he chose the guns specifically, not to make the world a better place,

not even to make his bizarre vision of society happen gradually get closer to that, but to actually plunge society into some chaos, and then in the rubble, he thinks in his fascistic vision, he's going to be able to remake the world as he wants to. Now, it's an attack on a mosque. So for getting the guns, he's kind of trying to, he's setting up the guns is the big debate? But the question is, is this guy primarily motivated by religion? is that, because it's obviously an attack on a house of worship. So is he, well, he asks himself, he says, do you personally hate Muslims? He says, a Muslim man or woman living in their homelands?

No. A Muslim man or woman choosing to invade our lands, live on our soil, and replace our people. Yes, I dislike them. This is a very important line because what it shows us is that this attack is not primarily about religious bigotry. This attack primarily is motivated by racial bigotry. So you're hearing people say that this is a prime example of Islamophobia. Now, obviously, Islam plays some role in this. But it's pretty clear from his ideology, from this line, from the whole rest, the whole context, the whole title of the manifesto, the replacement, that this is actually not really about religion.

He says he's fine with Muslims having their own lands. Now, what does it mean for a Muslim to have his own land before Islam existence? those lands belong to other people of other religions. Why isn't it their lands? Because this guy's ideology is purely racial. He doesn't really care about the ideas. He doesn't really care. Some people, you know, genuinely have great disputes with Islam. For them, the religious battle is the first and most important battle. Not for this guy. It's about brown people. It's about people with a different culture, but it's about race. Finally, it's about race. Finally, it's about race. It's about the race of people living in New Zealand.

He asks, where are you a Christian? He says, that's complicated. When I know, I will tell you. Which is to say no. When you ask someone, are you a Christian? And they say, well, it's really complicated. Well, I, you know, it just, the answer is no. If you're a Christian, you know, and you say yes.

And you profess your faith. This guy is not a Christian. So now we have both sides of it to say this is not primarily a religious. terrorist attack. This is a racial terrorist attack, something we already knew. Now, the right wing in the U.S. in discourse is calling this a leftist attack, because this guy has a lot of leftist ideas. The left is calling this a right wing attack, because this guy has a lot of very far right ideas. So which is it? He says, he asks, where are you a conservative? No, conservatism is corporatism in disguise. I want no part of it. Again, if you want, if you want, if you want

A little more insight on this. Go to my video that I did for Prager U on the alternative right. The alt. I think some people hear that word as alt-right, like ultimate or final or most right. No, no, no, it's alt for alternative. It's an alternative to what would be called the conservative tradition, from, say, Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk and those kind of people. This is an alternative to that.

Now, does that mean that it's not right-wing? it's not that simple. Does he have a lot of left-wing ideas? Yes. What is one of his essential motivations? Environmentalism. How is that possible?

We'll get to it in a second. A lot more of this to get to and ultimately to try to answer the question, why did the shooter do it? But first, we have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube. If you're on Facebook and YouTube, go over to DailyWire.com. $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.

You get me, You get the Andrew Claven show, you get the Ben Shapiro show, you get the Matt Wall show, you get to ask questions in the mailbag coming up on Thursday, you get to ask questions backstage, you get another kingdom, you get all this stuff. You get the Leftist Tears Tumblr. Very important, the only FDA approved vessel for salty, delicious leftist steers. Go to DailyWire.com. We'll be right back with a lot more.

Is this killer right wing or left wing? He says very explicitly, I'm not a conservative. I want no part of conservatism or the conservative tradition. So then he says, were you a fascist? Yes, for once the person that will be called a fascist is an actual fascist. And he is a fascist. He's very specifically an eco-fascist, an environmentalist fascist. We'll get to that in a second. Now, I know a lot of right-wingers want to say, fascism is purely a leftist ideology. It's socialism. It's the National Socialist German Workers Party. It's socialists in Italy. It's socialism, so it's on the left.

There's some truth to that. Fascism does have a lot of elements that are very left-wing, specifically economically. However, fascism does have a kind of idolatry of the tradition. It takes a lot of elements that are right-wing and really perverts them.

But it does draw on elements that are right-wing as well. So a little bit, it's a little mixture here. So where are you a socialist? Depending on the definition, sure. Worker ownership of the means of production depends on who the workers are. really what he means there is my race. If it's my race of workers working for someone who's not of our

race, then I want the workers to take over like communists. So, yes, that's a very left-wing point of view. He's a socialist economically, possibly. Did you always hold these views? No, when I was young, I was a communist, then an anarchist, and finally a libertarian before becoming an eco-fascist. What is an eco-fascist? An eco-fascist, he's a fascist. He's a collectivist, nationalist, a racialist, authoritarian who says that the environment is utterly important to fascism. The natural environment is part of the people. And this is where you get to where he goes so wrong religiously. Because it is almost a worship of the creation, not the creator.

but the creation. He is saying because I so idolized the nation and the race itself that even the trees next to where the race was born, even the landscape of the nation, that is so much more important than other aspects of society, prophets or immigration or cosmopolitanism or culture, or what I was saying, the race, the soil, the trees, the dirt, the hills. That's the eco part of that. Now, you might say he was a communist, that's left wing. Then an anarchist is that, I think that's left wing. Some people say that's right wing, but I think it's left wing.

A libertarian, well, there are two kinds of libertarians. The left libertarians and the right libertarians. Then an eco-fascist, okay. The truth about his political views is they don't fit neatly on the right or the left. Anybody who tells you he's a left-winger is oversimplifying. Anybody who tells you he is a right winger is oversimplifying. This is something so out of the mainstream that cynical politicians and cynical media people are going to want to use this and say, see, it's my opponents. It's not my views.

It is more complicated than that. That's just an oversimplification. He, I mean, just that combination. He talks about the tradition, our people are, we. We have to draw back on our, you know, make our tradition great again and saying there's no traditionalism without the environmentalism. This is a connection that we don't talk about very much, but because now the left basically owns environmentalism and the idea of the right is that the right just likes profits at all costs

and economic progress and we don't really care about the natural environment. That's a kind of new development in the history of political philosophy. That breakdown of the left and right doesn't hold up for long. periods of history. And so basically, whoever is trying to sell you a simple view of this guy's politics, reject it. It's not a simple view. It's its own ideology. It's its own perverse ideology. Okay. So he knows the media are going to start pointing fingers. He wants them to start pointing fingers. And so beyond just the left and the right, who can we blame? He asks himself, were you a supporter of Donald Trump?

Immediately, the left wanted to blame Trump for this. He says, quote, as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose, sure, as a policymaker and leader, dear God, no. So what we have here is he says, do you support Donald Trump? He says, in theory, if Donald Trump were what I want to. wanted Donald Trump to be, then yes, I would support Donald Trump. But in reality, dear God, no. So he says explicitly, I don't support Donald Trump. Cynical people who oppose Donald Trump are going to try to exploit this and say, see, he views Trump as a symbol of white identity and white common purpose. But then he says, one sentence later, in reality, I don't support Donald Trump.

It's an important distinction. So he doesn't support Trump. And actually, it's worth pointing out when he says, Dear God, no, God is with a lowercase G. This will tell you another something about his right-wing views or his traditional views

or his conservative views. He's not capitalizing God. He's not showing a whole lot of respect for God or religion. Because his religion is not Christianity. His religion is not the traditional religion of his so-called people. His religion is the religion

is the race itself. That's how it gets so perverted. He then asks, were you taught violence and extremism by video games, music, literature, and cinema? His response, yes, Spiro the Dragon 3 taught me ethno-nationalism. Fortnite trained me to be a killer and to floss on the corpses of my enemies. No. So this, he's trolling. He's making a joke. Even while he's making direct points, he is making jokes. So obviously, no, Spiro the Dragon didn't teach him about ethno-nationalism, right? He learned that by reading blogs

on the internet, presumably. What that line also tells us is this is a guy steeped in internet, steeped in internet culture. First of all, I don't know any of these video games. I don't and I'm on the internet. You're watching me on the internet or listening to me on the internet right now. This is a guy who is

inside gamer culture. He, like the verb to floss. This is, I guess, some sort of dance move. I didn't know that until I Googled it. So this is a guy who's, he's traveled around the world, but he lived on the internet. I mean, that's where he was.

You get an image of a guy who's isolated, who's talking to presumably the most sinister people on Earth, who is blurring the line between reality and humor and earnestness.

This brings us to the most controverted part of the manifesto. So in the manifesto, he asks himself, is there a particular person that radicalized you the most? And his answer is, yes, the person that has influenced me above all was Candice Owens. Each time she spoke, I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into this belief of violence over meekness. Though I will have to disavow some of her beliefs, the extreme actions she calls for are too much, even for my tastes. Now, this, especially read in context with the video game answer, is obviously irony. It's sarcasm. He was not radicalized by Candice Owens.

What he's actually saying is, he's laughing at the question. He's saying, no, there's not a particular person who influenced and radicalized him the most. He does actually refer to certain fascist thinkers in other parts and certain schools of fascist thought over time. So, and that might be a more earnest answer to the question, but he's laughing at the question. He's then calling Candice Owen stupid. He's saying she doesn't have insights and her views

are not terribly insightful. And then he says, I mean, this is how you know for sure that he's making a joke, is he says, her extremism is too much for me. This is a guy who just killed nearly 50 people. in a mosque. Candice Owens talks on the internet. Obviously, she's not too extreme for him. And so he's making fun of her. Why does he mention her? It's also ironic that a white supremacist would say that this

black girl is the great insightful person. He says that he rejects conservatism. She is now one of the biggest spokesman for conservative thought. He says he hates Donald Trump in reality. She is one of the favored spokesman from Donald Trump. Donald Trump references her. So obviously he's being ironic here. The media ran with this. I mean this, they said Candace

Owens was the inspiration for this attack. That is simply not true. That's just not true. And the other place you see this internet humor, he responds to a point where the point was, you're a bigot, a racist, a xenophob. And then

he responds to that by saying, what the F did you eff and say about me, you little B. I'll have you know I graduated the top of my class of the Navy Seals. I've been in numerous secret raids. He goes on and on. He's making fun of an internet thread discussion. He's making fun of internet anonymous Twitter culture. He's making fun of the place that he lives, which is the internet. So then why does he commit violence? He commits violence. He talks about the failure of assimilation. This is another thing that people are getting really, really wrong because the object of his ire in the manifesto is not really the people that he just slaughtered. The object of his ire is his own culture. It's a sort of self-hatred of his own culture.

He says he's not blaming immigrants for not assimilating into Europe or America or Australia and New Zealand. He's blaming the culture itself. He says expecting immigrants to assimilate to a dying, decadent culture is laughable. Now, if his ideas were actually coherent, were really coherent, then he would unleash his terrorist attack on his own people, his own culture. But because of the idolatry of the race, because he doesn't ultimately need all these ideas to make sense, because he hates the racial other, then he just goes out and attacks the brown people. But if his ideas had more coherence, then you can see where that insight would be in that line. And so what does the future look like? The future basically looks pagan. People are

blaming white people for this attack or Christians for this attack or what no. They're missing the point. The future, as this guy sees it, is pagan. He says green nationalism is the only true nationalism. We were born from our lands and our culture was molded by these same lands. It's the lands. It's the folk in the lands. It's this worship of the creation. He says there is no green future with never-ending population growth. So he comes out against population growth too. We talked a week or two ago about how this is one place you can always see where ideas go perverse when they start trying to limit the number of humans who are born. This is where you see the mark of the devil. It happens in abortion. It happens with people trying to kill off

old people in euthanasia. When you're just trying to kill off humans to lower the populations, it's the mark of the devil. The devil does not want more people. And neither does this guy. He says, we can't have all of this population growth. Now why? In part, it's because of the idolatry of nature. it'll hurt the environment if we have too many people born. The natural environment does not exist so that human beings can serve it. That is an inversion of the natural order. The natural environment exists so that we can steward it and enjoy it. But the cart cannot wag the dog.

I'm confusing two metaphors. But the tail cannot wag the dog here. That is an inversion. He says, the present is a gift from those in our past. So here you see, there's the nature worship and the ancestor worship. This is a gift from those in our past, the worship of the fathers. Here you see maybe questions of these daddy issues. Now, I love our ancestors.

I love the giants on which we stand. I think it's wonderful. I think it's wrong to spit on them and tear down their statues. That's wrong. Neither should we worship them. I mean, this is a big difference. What he is talking about, which is an essentially pagan idea, is quite different from the Christian idea. In James, it is written. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above

coming down from the father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. Now, what this guy says is every good gift comes from the past, comes from below, comes from the earth, comes from our human fathers. But that is utterly at odds with the Christian idea. So he says, venerate the ancestors, but work for the children. He's not talking about worship in God. That's where the real perversion sets in. Then he says, we need a soldier's fight, expect a soldier's fight and have a soldier's death. Here he's just a coward. Here he's just a pitiful coward. He didn't have a soldier's fight. He went in and he slaughtered innocent people who were unarmed, who were praying. It just, it's like sucker punching a guy.

It's just, I mean, obviously it's much worse than that, but that's what the analogy is. It's not a fair fight. It's not a soldier's fight. There's nothing glorious about what he did. he's just a mass murderer. He didn't have the thing that he's calling for. He didn't have the glory that he's calling for. He's basically, they would call it larping. He's just playing around in his head. He's got a little story of himself in his head,

and he's playing it out. But there's nothing but cold-blooded killing. And then he says at the end, I will see you in Valhalla. Not I will see you in heaven. I will see you in Valhalla. What is Valhalla? In Norse mythology,

Valhalla is the whole of the slain. It's overruled. It's ruled by the Norse god Odin. This is ultimately paganism. And all this white supremacist stuff, when you go back far enough, it just ends up becoming a sort of neo-pagan ideology. It's not Christian. It's a worship of the creation, of the attributes of creation. race, ethnicity, land, hills, mountains, fathers, grandfathers, tradition. Now, these things in their proper place, look, tradition is very important to all political views. Tradition, either you're rebelling against the tradition or you're trying to channel the tradition is the newest thing.

But a worship of the tradition is when things go totally wrong. this becomes a pagan ideology. And so who's to blame for the shooting? The media offer us a lot of options. Guns, Islamophobia, immigration, the news media, gun laws. Who's to blame for the shooting? This guy. This guy is to blame.

Not Donald Trump, not Candace Owens, not Chelsea Clinton. Someone blamed Chelsea Clinton for the shooting. some Bernie Sanders supporter. Not any of that. This guy is to blame. This guy wanted to kill a lot of people. That's ultimately what it comes down to. If he were motivated purely by ideology,

this is how you know. It goes so if, let's say that his ideology for whatever internal consistency it has, if he were motivated purely by ideology and the replacement is the issue and the demographics are the issue and we're not having kids and we don't have a traditional,

culture. If he were motivated purely by ideology, he would have gotten married and had kids. Instead of becoming a 28-year-old loner loser who shot up a mosque, he would have done, but he wasn't motivated purely by ideology. He's clearly an angry young man who wanted to kill some people, who had an ideology that helped him along to do it. Maybe he believed in very seriously, but there was that aspect as well. If he were motivated by the preservation of his own culture, would have participated in his culture. He would have participated in the religion that made his culture. He didn't do that.

His ideology did not ultimately cohere. It's ultimately, it has a rough sketch of coherence, but it's not ultimately a coherent ideology. What's the right reaction to this shooting? Don't exploit it for your own purposes. Try to understand it. You should try to understand it because there was some ideological motivation.

Figure out why it was wrong, be able to explain why it was wrong. And also the other part is not just to look at this totally in isolation. This is not the only terrible event that's happened in the world. This is not the only racial or religious motivated killing that's happened in the world. And this is where the media actually come into play. This is where some hypocrisy comes into play. About a month and a half ago, January 27th, Islamic militants bombed a cathedral in the Philippines,

killing 20 and leaving dozens wounded. ISIS took responsibility. jihadists in Nigeria have killed 120 Christians in the last three weeks in multiple attacks. 52 Christians killed last Monday, another 17 the day before that week before that killed 30, right before that killed another 38. Just today, a Turkish terrorist murdered three and wounded nine people on a tram in the Dutch city of Utrecht.

So you're going to see people cynically say this is the big problem. The only problem that matters is white supremacist ideology. Of course that isn't true. Of course that's not the soul. And as a numbers game, it's not even close to the biggest religious persecution and religious killing in the world. Nowhere near, I mean, not orders of magnitude away. So honest people, genuine people, can look at that attack. Go through it with a fine tooth comb.

Find everything that was wrong. What motivated it? Look at it head on. say, hmm, some right-wing ideas helped this along. Some left-wing ideas did too. Look dead on at it. And yet, probably those other killings, you might not have heard about them in the last three weeks.

Why? Because of that double standard, because of that hypocrisy. And that is the soft bigotry of low expectations. That is, it's a line from Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for Bush. The reason, I think, that the media only focus on the rare attack from a white supremacist or somebody motivated like that.

They focus on that with so much more attention than on Islamic terrorist attacks, which happen more frequently. And they do that because of the soft bigotry of low expectations. Because basically they think, oh, you know, Muslims just do this. They attack people like this all the time.

We can't expect more of them. But when white people do it, that's the big issue. Because we should expect so much more of them. That is an essentially racist or Islamophobic or whatever word you want to use. That's a bigoted position. And that is the position that dominates our public discourse. So I want it, you know, we have so much more to get to. We can't get to it today because we had to focus on this the whole time.

But I wanted to be really, really thorough because I think at least somewhere on the internet, somewhere in discourse over this, people should really analyze this for everything it's got, the perversity of the ideology, the wickedness of the attack, and the shallowness of the reaction. Because if you only go for those cynical, shallow, exploitative reactions, then you're doing what the guy wants you to do and predicted that you would do. All right, that's our show. We have got a lot more that we'll get to tomorrow, but we'll have to get to it tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles show. I'll see you then. The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Robert Sterling. Executive producer Jeremy Boring,

senior producer Jonathan Hay. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover and our technical producer is Austin Stevens. Edited by Danny Domeco. Audio is mixed by Dylan Case. Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera. Production assistant Nick Sheehan. The Michael Nulls Show is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2019. Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall show today. I want to offer my prediction for who will be the Democratic nominee for 2020 and it has absolutely nothing to do with fundraising or polling data or anything like that. Also, we will ask and answer the question, should 16-year-olds vote? The answer is no, by the way, but I'll explain why. And finally, I watched a classic of the Christian film genre, God's Not Dead, after many people recommended it to me. And I found it to be utter

and complete garbage. And it also exemplifies everything that's wrong with the Christian film industry. And I want to explain why today. So all of that over on the Matt Wall show.