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Chris Cuomo
People do not want to deal with why we just had this mass shooting in Manhattan, but we have to. And the answer is upsetting, and it pisses people off. And that's too bad. I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project. What happened in Manhattan is not about one guy, okay? I don't care what his name is. We all know how this story's gonna go, okay? Either he was sociopathic or psychopathic. He had mental illness. That used to be the end of the analysis, okay? I've been doing this a long time. Old enough to remember the first real school shooting, Columbine, where I spent months trying to understand the dynamic that led to it. And then it happened so often that we basically just boiled it down to too many guns, too. Too many mentally ill people and not enough done in society about it. And we're just an angry group of people, and we just blame the mentally ill. The mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violence than assailants. Being mentally ill does not mean that you want to kill everybody, okay? That is a caricature. That is a fiction. We have to go beyond that analysis. All we know is that being mentally ill may make you more susceptible to suggestion because of your illness, because of your disease. So it doesn't matter whether or not you're mentally ill. It still matters what you are exposed to. And extremism is killing us. Extremism poisoned the mind of this most recent assassin every bit as much as CTE may have or any mental illness he actually had. The extremism has to stop being dismissed as a yeah, or as an also or as a sure. But that's, like, too deep. It's too subtle. It's like, yeah, it's always the case. No. Social media has changed our dynamic. It has created a separation between. Between the many and the few. Because social media is not reality. Not yet. It is still magnified. Minorities, okay? And when you look at this guy, you look at the guy in Minnesota who shot the lawmakers. You look at the guy who shot the people in the Capitol, in D.C. at the Israeli embassy. You look at the guy who shot the healthcare CEO, and there are others. You look at the guy who ran the lawmaker in Ohio off the road. We used to worry about extremists from abroad. And by the way, you were fucking fine with the idea of extremism when you could blame it on somebody else in their faith. But now the extremists are here. They are us. Okay? All of these people are Americans who are Doing this. If you're one of those people who thinks that, like, if you're an American, you're okay, and you're not an American, you're not okay. That's silly, okay? It's always been silly. It's silly when we do it with the analysis of migrants and people who enter illegally. Like the idea that because they entered illegally, they are therefore criminals who do only bad things. And then you look at the crime rate and you see that you can't justify that supposition, but it's satisfying. It feels good. And that's the same shit we're doing with this latest mass shooting. Of course, he walked brazenly with a weapon outside and a vest on. Why? Because that is the suggestion of how you make your point. Everything is extreme. Everything is violent. Everything is owning. Everything is destroying. Everything is a violent thought or suggestion. That's what social media is. There is no more. Hmm. That's a good point. That was good, what you just said. Yeah, no, I hadn't thought of that. You never see that on social media. It's. You're a fucking idiot to think this. And people who believe this are bad, and those people are wrong, and you have to destroy them. And this guy destroyed this person in a debate. And we do the jubilee debates, where you have this bunch of kids who don't know what the fuck they're talking about and somebody embarrassing them and showing how stupid their point of view is. How do you think it winds up when you're constantly suggesting violence, aggression, owning, dominating, destroying. I mean, all the messaging, everything we hear in our politics is that it's not that this is a better idea. It's that one is good and one is evil. Now, you don't think that that is a part of what's happening here? This guy says that he went in there because he has CTE and he wanted to punish the NFL for what they ignored about him. Now, a lot of people have had CTE. A lot of people have had CTE and hurt themselves because of it. Lyle Alzado, Jr. SEAU. They didn't go and hunt down other people and create a mass murder. Why? Because they weren't under the sway of social media and its suggestions the way this young man was. And, yeah, CTE and, yeah, mental illness, sure. But again, it's about what you are exposed to. All right? Somebody with mental illness is exposed to positivity and productivity and virtue. There is less chance that they will think that a legitimate expression of their political opposition is murder. And, yes, access to the weapon matters. And yes, we have a problem with who gets weapons in this country. But I'm telling you, what sets us apart is not just the access to the weapons. It's why we want to use them. I do not believe that guns don't kill people. People kill people as an excuse for any argument about restricted access. I don't buy that. Okay? Yes, I am a gun owner, okay? I own guns for my protection and because I like to shoot with my son. That's my right. That's my choice. You may think that is not right, that it is introducing violence, that it is introducing anything, something extreme that isn't necessary. I accept that for you, not for me. But just because I own weapons doesn't mean that I think that somebody who is clearly going through something, who's clearly diseased, who's clearly upset, should be able to get a weapon the same way I can. And unless you've ever been committed or you've been adjudicated as mentally ill, you're not going to trigger background checks. And I think that's a problem. But it is not the problem. Well, but for the weapon, he wouldn't have done this. Well, that's not necessarily true. He could have come up with a bomb. He could have run his car, and he could have done a lot of stupid shit. Yes, guns are exacerbating aggravating factors with the ability to commit violence. 100%. 100%. But I am more concerned with the extremism that fuels the appetite to hurt. It is the extremism that fuels the appetite to hurt. And if you look at the reaction to this recent spate of what I see as violence, that is political violence by extension. Okay? Why did you kill people you thought were Jews at the embassy and then wait around? Free Palestine, Globalize the intifada. That's politics, okay? And it's all terrorism. I just think we're gonna have a problem with prosecuting it all as terrorism because we're gonna have to change our definition of it. Because it's not about guys with long beards who are brown, going, la, la, la, la la. Death to the West. That's an antiquated view of who wants to use violence to extend their political beliefs. You got people who look just like you, just like me right here, who are susceptible and become vulnerable to and become enamored of ideas of using violence to make their point. Like Luigi Mangione, who looks like he could be my fucking son, let alone my. Or my cousin, okay? He's not some Terrorist from Yemen, he's right from here. And he thought that this is the way you make it happen. And if you look at the reactions, you see the echo of that animus. This is what the NFL gets. This is what you get, man. You haven't been taking care of these people, and this is it. This is how you get them. This is how you pay attention. This is why those CEOs are meeting in the healthcare industry now, to think about what they're doing. Yeah, a little blood goes a long way. That is as malignant an idea and a mentality as any as I have ever heard in this country, and I'll tell you why. Blacks are apes, Jews have horns. Italians are predisposed to crime. These are prejudices born of ignorance. Okay? You are stupid if you think that Italians are predisposed to crime or that Jews have horns or that, you know, whatever. Whatever the stupid ethnic biases are. That's ignorance. You are not experienced enough with people like that or you're too stupid to understand how ridiculous it is. This is different. These people are not stupid. They're not stupid. They're not ignorant. They're bad. They have a. They have lost sense of morality and of ethics and of virtue and of right and of wrong. They don't get it anymore. They have decided to become what they oppose. Why? Because there's nothing changes. Because they're desperate. I don't fault them for how they feel. I fault them for what they decide to do. Just like I do with this young guy. If he had cte, if he was frustrated by the NFL or whatever he thought. But I'm telling you, it's going to be that he was bathed in extreme notions. And that's all our politics is. I mean, look at how it was covered. Look how unfair this bullshit is that CNN wanted it to be a white guy. How the fuck is that what the right is seizing on and going crazy about? Oh, here goes Cuomo defending CNN again, even though they fired him. Has nothing to do with me defending cnn. It's defending the principle. John Miller is one of the best reporters I've ever been around in my fucking life, let alone when it comes to policing. The guy was the head of PR for the FBI, for the New York Police Department, for the LA Police Department. His resume is nuts. He was the anchor of 2020. He's a legendary crime reporter. He is. Source was wrong. They know it's a male, mustache, glasses. True, true, true. Possibly white, okay? That's what he was told. Yeah, but it was wrong. The guy's clearly brown. Yeah, I know. They didn't have a picture at the time. Had they had the picture at the time and he said, that's a white guy. I'd be with you. But there was no picture. His source was wrong. It happens, fuckers, in podcasts, you're wrong all the time on purpose. But this guy you're gonna hang, and the people who wanna hang them are wrong all the more importantly than being wrong all the time. You don't even give a shit about being right. You just worry about being provocative. You don't give a shit if you're right. You don't care if Epstein was murdered or not. You don't care if there are other people or not. You don't care what's true or not true about the intelligence basis for the intelligence community's findings on Russia. You don't give a shit about what's true about any of these things. It's only what's effective and productive for you. But you're gonna get on your high horse that CNN wanted the guy to be white because of some perverse agenda of wanting to protect the brown man and wanting to take whitey down. Are you nuts? John Miller is as white as you get, okay? And there's nothing lefty about him. He was wrong. His source was wrong. And I'll tell you what, it's just as wrong that some of you people said that he said free Palestine when he did this and that he was looking for Blackstone. You're full of shit. You're wrong. And you probably don't give a shit if you're wrong. He didn't say Free Palestine. We don't have any reason to believe he was there because of Blackstone. And I'll tell you, it is fucked up that there's a map going around of where targets for globalize. The intifada that came out after October 7th and that that building is on one of the lists. Extreme agendas often find common ground because you're in the business of hurting people to make a point. Globalize. The intifada has hurt people to make a point. What Mangioni did and these people who are echoing it online, you're worried about CNN getting it wrong that it was a white guy, but you're not wrong that people say, he screamed Free Palestine, but you're not wrong. You're not upset that people are saying, hey, this is what you get, Corporate elite for choosing profits over people. That doesn't bother you, but what CNN did bothers you. I Mean, we are infected with extremism. That's what this is. That's what it all is. Support comes from fume. Boy, have we needed this. I knew when vaping first came out and everybody was using it as a way to get off cigarettes, right? And then the kids picked it up. I knew there was no way that you can go inhaling all those chemicals and nothing is going to happen. That's wrong. And sure enough, what are we learning now? People are vaping even more than they were smoking cigarettes. And there's a lot of different types of health damage that they're getting. 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First part of the problem is you've decided with your algorithms to reward that if you were to design the algorithm such that only virtuous things get reach, you don't think there'd be more virtuous things? I do. Why? Because of the susceptibility of repetition and of cultural conditioning. You are who you're around most often. By extension, you are what you are around most often. Let me tell you something. As somebody who has spent decades talking to bigots, they rarely spend a lot of time around diversity, okay? People who fear any type of people, they usually have very little exposure to them, okay? So they are making a choice that's easy. That the natural human condition, aggression, violence, opposition, that they're just playing to that they don't have to. They could make other things resonate as much. They choose not to. They choose not to. It's a two part problem. The second part is violence comes easy to us. In America, we are a culture that is consumed with aggression. Now, sometimes there's reaction formation to it, right? Like look, I see. Me too. As a form of aggression. I see. Cancel culture as a form of aggression. Yeah, sure. You're targeting alpha males. Like, I saw this meme the other day that was so weird to me. And it was this guy who was like, hey, I brought this girl home from a date and I was trying to get to third base and he's talking to this guy and the guy's like, oh, great, you wanted to hear her hopes and dreams. I love third base. And the guy's like, no. I was trying to get her to take off her. To take off her preconceptions about how males are vindictive and out just to use them for their bodies. And the guy's like, no. And it's a series of these things. And I was like, so it's wrong to find the opposite sex sexually attractive. That you have to find them attractive on the basis of what their deepest thoughts and philosophies are. That. That there's no more physical attraction, there's no more animal attraction, there's no more sexual attraction. It's gotta be all intellectual. What the fuck are we doing? And you wonder why the left loses. And that's the kind of shit that you want to put out. Oh, well, the opposite is misogyny. No, it isn't. No, it isn't. You can find a female physically attractive and intelligent and attractive on the basis of what's in their head and their heart. Someone can have a nice body and a nice Brain. You just want both. You don't have to make one the commodity over the other. But that's what we keep doing. Oppositional, conflictual, hostile. That's what we do. You are wrong to like tits. You are bad. Bad man liking tits. Looking at an ass, you are bad. And objectifying. You must look at her sense of math. You must look at her choices of what types of vegetables she prefers and her ambitions and what she wants. Oh, because that's what you do when you're analyzing men, right? It's not like there's a sole criterion for men, Right? What does he do? What does he do? That's what you ask most often about men. Oh, I met this great guy. Really? What does he do? Right. What does he do? Oh, what are his dreams? That's not what you say. Oh, what makes him most comfortable? No, that's not what you say. You say, what does he do? Why? Because Chris Rock is right. Because only women and dogs and kids are loved unconditionally. Men are only loved when they provide something. It's true and it's extreme. And we've made it extreme like every else. And that's why our politics has become reduced to who you can destroy and how. Look at the competitive banter taking place on Piers Morgan. There are no good points made there. It's just all competitive banter and hostility and outrage and provocation. I can watch it and get it with the volume off. What does that tell you? It's all provocation all the time. You have people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about being platformed just because they're good at being hostile and aggressive. It's crazy. It's extreme. And it's what we're rewarding and it's what we're seeing more of. And that's why a kid who's disillusioned with a system decides to kill somebody. Support comes from Ridge. I am a wallet guy, okay? And I miss my father used to have this beautiful bill. Fold the long one like it was for checks or for dollar bills to be able to be straight. And I always loved that thing. But he wore suits and he put it in his suit jacket. That doesn't work for me. So where I had sunk to was I was using a of bunch binder clip for all my cards and cash in the other pocket. Why? Well, a little bit of it was being city savvy, right, That I had it in each pocket so you could never get me all at once. But then I discovered Ridge And I was really happy that they wanted to advertise with us here at the Chris Cuomo Project, because I didn't want this big fat thing that if you keep it in your pocket long enough, it starts to make your back uneven, like that's like a real thing. So they have figured out how to make a wallet that folds, that can fit everything you need and your cash and be low profile enough so that it's not, you know, a bulge or a burden. For a limited time, my listeners at the Chris cuomo project get 10% off at Ridge. Just use the Code Cuomo. At checkout, go to ridge.com use the code CUOMO and you'll be all set. Now, after your purchase, they're probably going to ask you where you heard about them. Please show some love to the Chris Cuomo Project and tell them Cuomo sent you. Now, am I blaming a comic or a commentator or a podcaster for what someone else chose to do? No, but I am blaming, in part, the environment that we're creating that is producing more of this. Cops are bad. Cops are bigots. Defund the police. Tear down the system. Take away the means of production. Destroy, destroy. Destroy. Disruption, Destruction. I mean, look, it worked for maga, it worked for Trump, right? One of the reasons he's getting his ass kicked by the Epstein thing is what? The extremism. Epstein was murdered to protect all those Pizzagate Democrats that fuck kids. We missed out on that pizzeria without the basement, where it was all happening in the basement. But now we got him with Epstein. He surrounded himself with people who were peddling that piffle, and now he's got to own them. I've got the client list right on my desk. Got the client list right on my desk. That's what happens to a good person. Ag Bondi. Pam Bondi, in my experience, good, solid. Agree with her positions, disagree with her positions, that's fine. Not a bad person. But she's so conditioned by the extremism of the propaganda that she lost the sense of reward. What's true? She never had a fucking client list in front of her. There is no client list. Oh, I'm gonna put out the flight manifests. Oh, great. And you're gonna get sued. And look, maybe it's worth it. It's not their money anyway. It's your money, right? That's. That's what's gonna pay off these lawsuits. But you don't think they're gonna be lawsuits. You put out somebody's name and that. There is a suggestion that they had something to do with pederasty or pedophilia. You don't think they're gonna sue the government and said, this is slander, per se. You knew that what you were doing was going to be bad for me, and you did it anyway in reckless disregard of the truth, which is, you know, I was looked at, and there was never found anything actionable or criminal or any reason for responsibility. And you put it out anyway. There'll be lawsuits, but maybe that's what we need. I mean, you won't care about the lawsuits, but you'll care about the names and people. Weaponize them, and they'll make things up. More extremism, More extremism. We're going to see more of this violence. There's going to be more of this killing, because this is who we're becoming, and this is how we are becoming. Defund the police. Cop is crying. Good. Good. Good for them for crying. They should feel pain for what they do. That's the new normal. Put those migrants in cages. Alligator, Alcatraz. That's what you get. You come in illegally, treat you like the shit that you are. It's extreme. It's extreme. It's extreme as wanting to cover women. You know better than that shit. Extreme is extreme. Saying that this guy, I get why he went in there and shot up those people. He just shot up the wrong ones. But maybe now the NFL will take CTE seriously. Even if you got the change that you wanted from United Health Care or from Israel or from politicians or government, you don't think how you get to that place matters. You don't think becoming what you oppose is going to redound to some further detriment? Really, you better look into human behavior a little bit more. Because live by the sword, die by the sword is a thing for a reason. And if you don't think that this kind of extremism that you think works for you right now won't be revisited upon you, you're crazy. I remember my father saying something that really shook me up. I thought he was wrong when I first heard him articulating his position about being a Catholic politician with respect to reproductive rights and that he respected and adopted personally his church's position, the Catholic Church's position that he would never end a pregnancy that he was part of, because that's the Catholic position, but that as an elected official in a secular society, he can't just put his faith on other people. And I kind of disagreed with him. I was like, well, you're being Elected for who you are. And like there are people who believe that blacks aren't equal to whites. And if someone says that and they get elected, then they are expected to put that perverse sense of morality or immorality, in my opinion, front and center because they know who you are and they elected you. So they know you're a Catholic and they elected you. So why wouldn't you put your faith front and center even in a secular society? Because you are there to see things through the lens of your own experience and your own ideas. And that's your idea. Then he said, well, the reason we got to be a afraid, worried, fearful of doing that is that right now we're a Christian majority country. So you're not that uncomfortable with Christianity being put in position. Judeo Christians, who, even if you're a Jew, it's not the scariest thing in the world unless everybody's got to wear a picture of Jesus around their neck, right? A lot of it is familiar. A lot of it seems basically inoffensive to most people who have some type of tradition of faith in their lives. But what about when we are a Muslim majority nation? What about when it's 50 plus 1 Muslims and not Christians and they want to make it about the Quran and they want to make it about Ramadan and they want to make it about how they see their things and that we should all accept it that way because they're the majority, then how would you feel about it? Pretty scary, right? That's why you don't do it. That's why you don't go extreme. That's why you don't put your faith on other people. That's why you don't blur the line between church and state, because it gets extreme real fast. And we are supposed to be against extremes, except for one thing. There's one thing that you can't do extremely enough. Love mercy and practice kindness. But we're nowhere near being extreme about that. We are extreme about violence, aggression and hostility. Destroy the police because of how they police. Destroy government because of what it does. And then what? See, people who are extreme are not in the business of better. They're in the business of worse. They're in the business of payback and retribution and vengeance and bringing down. None of that makes anything better. It may get you to a position where you can't have anything but upside because you've reduced it to zero. You've destroyed everything. So now you have to rebuild. Any jackass can kick down a house. It takes a good man or woman? Woman. To build one. True, true, true. Easy to tear down. I do it all the time when I'm doing projects on my cars. Taking apart is so easy. I love it. I love ripping a fender off the side of a car when I gotta refit it and put it back on. It's a nightmare. Hard to build, easy to destroy. That's why we are susceptible to extremism. That's why it works in social media. It's easy to say nasty shit. It's easy to be snarky. It's easy to criticize. It's easy to blame. And it's easy to go way deep down and accelerate down that slippery slope. And we have embraced extremism in this country in the wrong ways. And it is growing and accelerating. And we see it all the time. You see it in how this latest shooting was immediately weaponized. It's a white guy. And then they attack that as some kind of agenda. He said, free Palestine. He went into the NFL. It's a corporate. It's this, it's over Intifada. It's that they have all these extreme agendas. They have to process everything. Everything. Taylor Swift has to get processed through the agendas. That's the appetite of extremism that is devouring us. The appetite of extreme thinking is devouring us. And now the mistake is to say, oh, come on, it's not that bad, Chris, you're overdoing it. This was just one fucking crazy guy who did a crazy thing who may have been, God bless him, suffering under a horrible disease that does deserve more attention. You can never condone or make, okay, violence to advance an agenda, okay? You can never make that accommodation in a democracy that is supposed to be about forming a more perfect union. There is nothing in that pursuit that involves embracing what we just saw and what we see on social media every fucking second more and more. Why do you think AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene and other provocateurs are the names that you know in our politics? What have they made? What have they passed? What have they built? They are just about attacking the other side and tearing down. And they are increasingly extreme in their ideas. You don't think it's extreme to say, take back the means of production? You don't think it's extreme to say, we're going to have the rich pay and everything's going to be free for everybody else? You don't think socialism is an extreme idea in a capitalistic society? Of course it's a mixed bag. Of course you have entitlements and other socialistic programs, but we are fundamentally a market economy. You don't think it's extreme to want to say we're going to erase that and start with something else? Because it is every bit as much as fuck the police and they deserve what they get when there's violence is extreme just as much as saying, hey, that's what happens. You know, the healthcare people, they're fucking us over. Eventually you're going to catch a bullet. That's extreme. Yeah, but otherwise nothing changes. That's not true. That's not true. And you'll never get the kind of change you want through violence. Show me that I'm wrong. Show me why Dr. King was wrong to have prevailed. Well, he got killed over it. Really. You know how many times I've heard that, by the way? I don't platform it on my show or on the podcast, but you know how many people tell me that Dr. King was weak and soft and that's why he got taken out? And that's not what got suffrage done. Really? Really. It's hard. It's hard to pursue virtue and to pursue better. It's easy to be mean. It's easy to be a Megyn Kelly or a pod bro who just attacks everything and uses outrage as a sword and a shield. But look where it's getting us. We are more and more violent in more and more ways, and that's why we just had the latest mass shooting in Manhattan. But more importantly, that's why we're going to be talking about this again and soon. You want a solution? Simple to say, really hard to do. We have to get back to the business of better and of rewarding people for saying and doing the right way. And it's easy to say, but it's really hard to do because you have the social media platforms working against you. You got the cultural zeitgeist working against you, and you got the players in power working against you, and you got our culture working against you. So the solution is easy, but it's hard to do. It's simple, but it's hard to do. Simple, not easy. And we are choosing simple and easy and it's getting us to a worse place. Am I wrong? Let me know. I'm Chris Cuomo. Thank you for subscribing and following. I wish I had a better reality, but all I can do is tell you how it is and we have to decide together what's the best thing to do about it. I'll see on News Nation, 8p and 11p every weekday night Eastern 8p and 11p Eastern every weekday night. Please subscribe at the substack. And when I do my lives, I'm going to take your questions and your comments. And if you want to be an independent critical thinker and beat this bullshit two party system, buy the free agent gear and wear your independence. I'll see you soon. My brothers and sisters, the problems are real. We know the right approach. Let's get after it.