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- [00:08]
Historian/Political Commentator
I think all New Yorkers have got used to occasional acts of extreme violence. I'm thinking of attacks on the subway in particular. And we sort of got used to occasional acts of really extreme violence, which, as you say in this case, to my mind is most notable for three things. One is, as you mentioned, somebody carrying an assault rifle and not being stopped. It's just an example of that breakdown of trust that can occur where nobody intervenes because they see that the threat to them from intervening could mean threat comes from them and so on. The second is obviously the target, and then the third is the way in which people wanted to interpret the target, I might add as well. I mean, you could throw in the system failures. That would mean that somebody who had this number of flags could be walking around Manhattan. And sadly, again, all of us who live in New York are used to the fact that very ill people roam the streets and are completely missed by the system. But that last one of the way in which people reacted to it is especially troubling because it's not a new phenomenon, but it's a replay of a phenomenon we've seen before. I think of the violence carried out by groups like the Red brigades in the 1960s and on in Germany. Similar sort of left wing Marxist revolutionary groups in Italy would make a target of industrialists, people they saw as capitalists. There were years in that period in which the Italian, German and other European authorities had to deal with effectively a form of glamorized violence from the radical left that believed that kidnapping businessmen, killing capitalists was some kind of noble revolutionary act. And that at the time also as today, seeped into a form of the mainstream culture. It was not at the center of the culture, but it was this radical fringe that would always give a pass to the groups who did this, make excuses for them, say that it was a sort of noble endeavor. And much more so, as I say, it's not a new phenomenon, but it is a replay of something that has been seen sadly before.
- [03:04]
Political Analyst
I've been thinking about that recently, this sort of the extent to which this is a new phenomenon versus old. Because one argument there is you look at 1960s in the United States, there was clear defense of the Black Panthers or the Weather Underground. If you think about radical chic, you know, the classic Tom Wolf essay, a great essay about New York elites celebrating the Panthers and trying to free the Panthers on trial for murder in New Haven. It does seem like if you roll the clock back to the 1960s, that is more of an elite phenomenon than it is a sort of a mass cultural phenomenon. Which is to say, the example I always like to give is that if you surveyed Americans about the Vietnam War, they were generally against the Vietnam War and they were really, really, really against the Vietnam War protesters. They're really against the sort of vocal, the anti war left. By the end of the 1960s was here there's been this sort of association of the Luigi Mangioni phenomenon with almost the everyman. It's not obvious to me that it's an elite phenomenon so much as something that happens across social media. Do you think that distinct, coherent.
- [04:17]
Historian/Political Commentator
Yes, I think there's something to it. I think the, the, the, the in, in the cases you mentioned, particularly in the 60s and 70s, it's true that the participants, the main participants came from a kind of elite class that was a case in America and in Europe disproportionately involving highly, highly privileged individual who seemed to believe that, that they needed to, for whatever reason, exculpate their own feelings of inadequacy or guilt or whatever by involving them in proto revolution, involving themselves in proto revolutionary politics. It's true, it never did quite catch on as a grassroots phenomenon. The Internet of course allows that to happen and it certainly allows the encouragement of a kind of, you might say that the meme culture encourages people to say things behind the guise of an avatar or whatever, which they probably wouldn't say in their own voice, with their own identity, which is to continue to make excuses or valorize this. And I said actually after the Mangioni case began that what you really saw with this was a test which was are we as a society in any way going to allow a type of vigilantism to emerge, an extreme vigilantism whereby people decide that some people are fit to be killed in an extrajudicial manner and murdered. And if the, if you do go down that path, watch out, because it's just hell all the way down.
- [06:08]
Host/Moderator
It's been exactly one week since Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University. New details have emerged though, about his alleged killer in the past week. Tyler Robinson, 22 year old, who reportedly was texting his trans roommate that he was disturbed by the hatred and Charlie Kirk's rhetoric led him to murder Charlie Kirk. I know we're gonna get into this today, but a lot of the prosecutors and Utah officials said that Robinson was chronically online and participated in a lot of these dark places on the Internet, very niche subculture discussion forums like Reddit and Discord. And there was even a note that allegedly was found under his keyboard saying, I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I'm going to take it. So really heavy stuff. I'm glad that I have you two here to break this down for me. It didn't seem like Robinson though was always like this. From what I heard, he grew up in a conservative leaning household. Even his father, when he turned him in, brought the family minister to try to persuade Robinson to turn himself in. But yeah, Robinson was a part of a conservative household. He then goes to college. I wanna start with you, Rob, and do you think you could pinpoint one thing that you suspect caused the shift in Robinson's change of thinking or that kind of escalated into this radicalization that we saw?
- [07:36]
Security Expert/Journalist
Yeah, well, my understanding is that online extremism does play an important role here, but it's always hard to predict in advance. So if you have 100 young guys like Tyler Robinson who are maybe a little bit mentally disturbed and kind of hostile and have this aggression in them, 99 of them won't go as far as actually shooting someone. And so these things are impossible to predict. But if you have a country of 350 million people, some non trivial percentage of them, or rather a trivial percentage of them, uh, but, but in terms of raw numbers, it could be, you know, a few dozen or a few hundred are capable of something like this. And yeah, it's, you know, this is sort of the version of more left wing radicalization. My understanding is, you know, the engravings on the ammunition showed signs of interest in sort of far left politics. I read this interview in the free press with the journalist Andy Ngo and he talked about how, you know, obviously like a lot of people are aware, one bullet said, hey, fascist, catch with exclamation points. But then another bullet had the phrase, it was a title of a song called Bella Chow, which apparently is an anthem for antifa in the US and it is rooted in the anti fascist movements in Italy in the early mid 20th century. And you know, a lot of people who aren't sort of deep into the antifa lore or whatever wouldn't understand that. I didn't understand that until I'd seen that article that, you know, this is something we should be aware of. A lot of people are concerned with right wing extremism, but left wing extremism can be obviously just as deadly.
- [09:26]
Media Analyst
So I'm actually, we were talking about this earlier, coming off a two week digital detox, we tried to be. Not online, not on social media.
- [09:35]
Host/Moderator
Yeah.
- [09:36]
Media Analyst
So sort of a crazy time to Come back online.
- [09:39]
Host/Moderator
You missed a lot.
- [09:40]
Media Analyst
Yeah, but honestly I, I think this is like so relevant because some of the things that we sort of, our takeaways from this, first of all, we failed. Like we could not stay fully offline. Our lives are just so online in ways that we are not even thinking about like right now. And it's sort of important to recognize like, oh, I thought we could do this and actually we couldn't fully do it. But also because taking even substantive dial down or dial back on things, you actually taking a step back notice sort of like how quickly things are moving, how quickly information is shared even when we don't have the full picture.
- [10:23]
Crime and Social Issues Commentator
Always.
- [10:24]
Media Analyst
I mean this Jimmy Kimmel thing, you know, and again, I'm just coming back off this digital detox, but apparently, you know, he made some comment about the shooter before we knew all the information that ended up being wrong or maybe it wasn't fully wrong. You know, whatever it was, we didn't have the full picture. And we're all sort of unfortunately culpable for like we all are doing this. And so it's, I think we need to think very seriously about how fast information is spreading. The scale, the scope and the speed. That's sort of when I think about policy change, I think about how scale, scope speeds were, the three S's and I think maybe it's important to think about information spread this way as well. Like how many people is this information reaching, how quickly is it reaching them and how much is reaching them? And you know, those are important attributes for making sure that we're not riling people up into like a mob mentality.
- [11:25]
Host/Moderator
Yeah. I think one could also argue that with social media, being the first to get a scoop is extremely beneficial. So people would rather go back and correct a story than have the facts straight from the beginning. So yeah, things are moving at a rapid pace, but we don't exactly always have the accurate version of reality. So.
- [11:47]
Media Analyst
And it's really hard. Rob probably knows this better than I do knowing the psychological literature very well. But when we hear information it's really hard to sort of than believe it's like to correct our misunderstandings or to tell ourselves that something is actually false. Once we learn something, it's hard to unlearn that thing. And so if we take in information that ends up being wrong, we sort of have that initial idea in our head and then. And the fact that people are just getting really different information now is I think also sort of problematic. I mean what I see on X working at A right of center think tank and what some of my more left leaning friends see on X, I mean, it's just totally different information and it's not always helpful.
- [12:35]
Psychologist/Family Expert
I think, you know, it's so interesting. We, we, by not acting with dignity and authority with our kids, we don't give them anything to aspire to. You know, we're just cool versions of them. I mean, that's the idea, right?
- [12:49]
Crime and Social Issues Commentator
Kids want boundaries, they want, they want something model of authority.
- [12:53]
Historian/Political Commentator
Right, right.
- [12:53]
Psychologist/Family Expert
But they also want something to, to have achieved when they reach, they want milestones, they want that. You know, naturally when they have boundaries, they want to achieve the next level. But when your parents are just a version of you, and really they're not an more elevated version, there's nothing to aspire to. And watching them grovel to you your whole life, honestly, it really does encourage contempt when they get older. And I'm not just saying this. I interviewed in the book Joshua Coleman, a wonderful psychologist, and he works on family alienation. And one of the things that he found after sitting with hundreds of families is that very often the kids who are alienated as adults, who refuse to talk to and become estranged from their parents were treated the most gently and were constantly placated by their parents. And when they got to adulthood, they had really contempt for their parents.
- [13:54]
Crime and Social Issues Commentator
I wonder if this is feeding into some of the radical politics we're seeing among people who are coming of age in their early 20s.
- [14:03]
Security Expert/Journalist
Yeah, that's interesting. What do you mean by that? What would the connection be?
- [14:06]
Historian/Political Commentator
Just raised by very permissive parents, but filled with a kind of anger and a contempt for authority?
- [14:14]
Psychologist/Family Expert
Absolutely. I think, I mean, look, they're looking for a daddy and if they don't find one in the home, they go looking for one on college campuses. And that's what you get. You get the extreme authoritarian figure of these, you know, people shouting and marching, you know, giving marching orders to vast numbers of kids. And I do think it encourages authoritarianism or a hunger for it. That's right. I mean, we have an entire industry of parenting experts who are giving lousy advice to parents, undermining their authority. And parental authority is the one thing we know every kid needs. We've known this since the 1960s. It's one of the oldest psychological studies. It's also one of the sturdiest, from Diana Bomerand in the 1960s who found that loving rule based parenting, not unloving, not cruel, but loving rule based parenting, where the parents are the authority. And yes, they punish bad Behavior turns out to produce the healthiest, happiest, and most successful kids. And instead, what parenting experts have gone out and do because they don't like this result. So what they do is they rebrand authority, authoritative parenting, as the opposite. They say, oh, yes, of course, authoritative parenting. And then what they do is they describe a parenting that is groveling, that is therapeutic, that is pleading with kids to behave, that is explaining ad infinitum. And it doesn't work. It produces more dysregulated kids. And what they also do is they rebrand bad behavior as a psychological ailment. Or sometimes they even invent terms like, I know Dr. Becky has the deeply feeling kid. This is it, a made up term for basically a very dysregulated child who's had no punishment and no accountability.
- [16:03]
Crime and Social Issues Commentator
I think part of. Because of the work that I do and the topics that I write about, you know, crime being sort of number one on that list, I often am sort of tempted to start with the. It starts at home, right? I mean, fathers are incredibly important. They should be your first role model, right? I mean, your first sort of mold in terms of how to be a man should be looking to your father for those cues. But you're right. I mean, this is a young man, Charlie Kirk's assassin, who came from a conservative family, right? His father was a police officer. My father was a police officer. And it is scary to think that even that cannot protect against this, which I think makes the role that Charlie played in his life all the more important, because obviously this kid was radicalized outside of his home. And I think there is an asymmetry in terms of the amount of content being pushed on these issues between conservative ideas and far left ideas. And I think it's much easier to be radicalized to the left online than it is to be radicalized on the right. And it just makes me appreciate Charlie's work as yeoman's work to such a higher degree now that he's passed. And why I think it's so important that the right starts having real conversations about what needs to fill that void. And so as we come up on time, I want to just close our conversation out by asking the two of you, you know, if there are, you know, if you could sort of point young men on the right to one or two male figures for them to look up to, for them to get to know through their work, who would they be and why?
- [17:44]
Education and Culture Commentator
You know, you mentioned online, I think that we've all been doing a little too facile the immediate recourse to. Well, it's the online radicalization that's going on that well may be, and I am not in that world, but I would say that that lets off the hook the establishment. It is impossible to overstate how widely a whole set of ideas are, are absorbed and mirrored back out into the world in every establishment institution. One of the most shocking things that's come out of the aftermath of the Kirk assassination is all These K through 12 elementary school teachers who are celebrating this. It's part of the air you breathe. And I did look up Utah Valley University and while they don't have women's studies and, and gender studies and black studies, they do have people in the communications department that are feminist. You know, doing all that theory. They honor somebody from a nearby Utah college who was the epitome of the intersectional gay, Latina, feminist, anti colonialist, pro Hamas person. So even there, every part of the education establishments, we gotta airlift these kids out, we gotta get em out of K through 12, get em into homeschooling, get them into classical education. And so online it's harder to take care of. As far as the male role models, boy that's tough. I mean I would say for young boys, put them in the. I can't use the phrase Boy Scouts, it's already been feminized. But in theory, the Scouting handbook is one of the great books, as Paul Fussell said, of male virtue. It's all about how to be a positive, courageous, loving, philanthropic male. To be patriotic, to care about honor and self reliance. So that's maybe for younger ages. And of course the scouts have become co ed and so that's gone. But it's still those types of books. I guess I would go through books, I would give your boys some of the classics of, of male literature, of adventure, of heroism, of history, battles. So I'm spinning my wheels here and I'll let Daniel go and if I think of any male role model right now, I will come up with it.
- [20:19]
Political Analyst
So what's interesting to me is just like Andrew Cuomo was able to successfully clear the field and there was no, there was neither a coordinated effort in the primary to pick up somebody other than him. You know, like it's not, it wasn't going to be Whitney Tilson, but like Whitney Tilson who is a, you know, a hedge funder, very good guy, moderate Democrat, would have been a great mayor in my opinion. You know, there was nobody in the Whitney Tilson lane who the. The city's elites do not coordinate around somebody like Whitney Tilson, an alternative who's going to own the modern lane. That wasn't Cuomo. That didn't happen in the primary, and then it didn't happen after the primary is over. And clearly there was a comprehensive failure to do that kind of, you know, I know that people were talking about, can we get Jessica Tisch, the NYPD commissioner, to step up? Is that possible? And it just, it didn't work. So, like, what is the failure of elite coordination and how do you get around that? Because it seems like you guys succeeded at elite coordination. You know, Gary Tan succeeded in elite coordination in San Francisco. God bless Gary Tan. Like, what, what do New York City's movers and shakers need to learn? What have they, what do they get wrong?
- [21:26]
Local Political Insider
Man, that's such a good question. I have no idea. It's, it's just like all of the money and all of the money and all of the smart people are on the center sort of centrist side. In San Francisco, once we started talking about who was in charge and who was in power, it was very obvious that we did something different. And the things that we needed were really ground floor things. It was like, you know, crime should be illegal again and people should stop shitting in the streets and the school should be open and we shouldn't be trying to rename them rather than reopen them. Like just basic shit like that. And in New York, I don't, I just don't. Honestly, like, I feel like it's not going to work out for you guys. I think that the demographics are totally different. I think that you have a smaller concentration of smart people and you have a lot of smart people who are.
- [22:25]
Political Analyst
You can see that in the polling data.
- [22:29]
Local Political Insider
And, and I think it's like, I mean, you even see the different, the way that finance is leaving the city. It's. I, I saw polling or some numbers on that that was down to like 7% or something. You know, I, it's just, it's such a different city. But I, I think it starts with just being ferocious. If you have some high status people who are like, no, socialism's really bad and these radical leftists are fucking crazy, and it's fine to make fun of them. In fact, it's good. In fact, it's high status to make fun of them. You don't want to be seen on their side. If you can do that, then I think that's helpful. In San Francisco, that was a little bit easier because, you know, it's like, it's A one industry town. And so if you had all the elites in that industry who were on the same side, it was like, oh, we're allowed to believe this now.
- [23:17]
Crime and Social Issues Commentator
I think a lot of people who are worried about Hazel Rahmani, who, by the way, like, he won with a majority of the vote, but there was also about a million people who came out to vote against him and his agenda.
- [23:31]
Political Strategist
Right.
- [23:31]
Crime and Social Issues Commentator
So it's a, there's a very split electorate and I suspect that there is a lot of anxiety about what he's going to do. And like, just to refresh the memories of people watching, like, this is a man who has committed to abolishing the NYPD's gang database, to dismantling the strategic response group within the nypd, which is the group that responds to a lot of these protest gatherings, mass shootings, other large scale events. He has now appointed a couple of police abolitionists to his transition team, which is very, very concerning. He has the. He was the only candidate who said he didn't want to increase the number of NYPD officers, which is currently on a downward trajectory due to attrit. Um, so, so there are some concerning things just within the public safety space. Then you have all of the socialism stuff. So, so there, there's a lot there that I think people are worried about. But it seems to me that President Trump, his administration has a lot more leverage and a lot more on their menu to frustrate Mamdani than the other way around. Am I wrong about that?
- [24:45]
Political Analyst
Sure.
- [24:46]
Political Strategist
I mean. No, no, you're wrong. You're right.
- [24:48]
Crime and Social Issues Commentator
Excuse me? I mean, you almost broke my heart.
- [24:51]
Political Strategist
No, no, what you're saying is absolutely right. I mean, listen, I mean, I mean, Trump cares about New York because it's the biggest city and, and he's from here.
- [24:59]
Security Expert/Journalist
Right.
- [24:59]
Political Strategist
He's a New Yorker, he cares about it, but it's not like New York is the, the core of his political base. Right. So, I mean, you know, he, he's. The issue will be for Trump, does he want to expend that political capital? And it seems like in a lot of these cities, the answer's been yes, to try to maintain order. I mean, the public safety stuff. Listen, I do think Madani is more of a true believer in this maybe than de Blasio was. I mean, certainly his public positions. I do think there's significant risk and, you know, I think that's political risk for Madani too, whether he realizes it or not. It's one thing to run a campaign with nice graphics and great social media. And an attractive candidate who's friendly and focus on affordability, which is what people care about. It's another thing if public safety deteriorates. And we saw this when his predecessor, Eric Adams was elected. Part of the reason he was elected from sort of the right half of the Democratic spectrum was people were worried about the breakdown in public order. Now, we've seen improvement on that over the last four years, which is one reason why I think Mabdani wasn't paying a big political price for that. But if it reverses course, if he does some of these extreme things and shootings are going up and just the quality of life things are going down, then he's gonna pay a political price for it. But do I think he's going to do some of it? Sure. And the question will be, what exactly will Trump do? But he's got a lot of degrees of freedom to do things.
- [26:26]
Political Analyst
Yeah.
- [26:27]
Crime and Social Issues Commentator
I mean, one thing that I don't think that, you know, the, the sort of Mamdaniites have fully considered is the, the, the scope of political unpopularity of things like mass scale protests. I mean, you mentioned Eric Adams, who was elected, yes, in the wake of a crime increase and because he was sort of promising to crack down on that. But there was also a massive increase in the number of public protests and riots in New York City in 2020. I mean, the summer of 2020, you know, the Summer of Love, is, it's, it's affectionately known. I mean, I came into Midtown Manhattan on June 1st of 2020, and Madison Avenue looked like a war zone. Broken glass, emptied storefronts. Not because the storefronts had shut down, but because they were looted. You know, the night before I went into, I walked past, I think, two or three different coffee shops trying to get a cup of coffee. Finally found a Starbucks that was open, but you couldn't tell they had boarded up the windows that had been smashed out and inside was, you know, insane. That was really, really unpopular. And if we start to see more of what we're already starting to see, even before Zoramdani takes office, I suspect that, you know, he's looking at a one term mayoralty. But I may be overstepping.
- [27:48]
Political Analyst
I think even more than the striking image of a looted storefront or a demonstration featuring masked protesters chanting unhinged things. Even more than that is the sense of disorder, the sense of chaos, the sense of not knowing what tomorrow will bring. Will the Brooklyn Bridge be blocked by protesters that the mayor just allows to run free? Like, will it suddenly be open on CEOs in New York City with the groundswell of popular support. Those things do not actually have to take shape for people to say, you know what, I've had enough, and take the well trod Trump path down to Florida, and that could be enough to precipitate a massive political change.