B (34:08)
So this is obviously just beyond all imagining, one of the darkest, most twisted things I've ever heard of. And for a crime like this to be committed by a 9 and a 10 year old is unfathomable. I mean, I have three kids around that age and they are, I can say, literally incapable of doing anything like this. I mean, it's more likely that they would sprout wings and fly across the room than that they would commit a violent, heinous felony crime. And most parents hopefully can say that about their kids. So what happened with these kids then? And this brings me back to something that we've discussed before. We've talked about the recent cases increasing in regularity where the parents of school shooters are charged for the crime that their child commits. The parents of we must stipulate white school shooters. And I've said in those cases that the only way I could possibly support charging the parents is if the approach is applied consistently. But it isn't. Because every day in this country, in the inner cities and urban areas, horrible violent crimes are committed by children and the parents of those kids are basically never charged. And here we are with the most stark illustration of this point. As far as I know, the parents of these nine and ten year old kids have not been identified. I don't know why they haven't been identified and they have not been charged. Will they be charged? I don't know. But if history is any guide, no. Because this is urban crime, it's street crime. And the culprits we can assume with a high degree of certainty are black. And we can assume that because of where this happened. But also if these assailants were white, we would definitely be told that fact. I mean, in fact, if they were white, this would be the biggest story in the country right now. It would be the biggest headline news right now. So the fact that it isn't kind of tells us it gives the game away. So where are the charges? Why aren't the parents charged not just with a crime, but a capital crime? I mean, why aren't they facing the death penalty for this? The parents? I mean, they should be. And I say that as someone who has been very skeptical of charging parents for the crimes of their children. Skeptical because of the inconsistency, as I said, but also skeptical in principle, because I'm skeptical in principle of the idea of holding a parent responsible, legally responsible for a crime that the child goes off and commits on their Own obviously, if the parent was somehow involved in encouraging it or planning it or something, then clearly everyone agrees the parents would be charged in that case. But I think this case shows us where the line should be drawn. So here's what I think we should do. I don't think that parents should automatically be charged whenever a child commits a violent crime. It is possible for a parent to be basically attentive, basically loving, trying to do their best, and yet still end up with a child who does something terrible. That can happen. It happens all the time. It's scary to think about as a parent, but it's true. Your child is his own person, he has his own mind, he has his own free will, his own conscience. And so he could go off and do something terrible. I mean, you can't absolutely 100% guarantee that won't happen. But here's where I would draw the line. And you have to draw it somewhere and there'll be an element of arbitrariness to it. But I think that this is the least arbitrary line you can draw. If you have a child who is 10 years old or younger and commits a violent felony, you as the parent should automatically be charged and sentenced as if you committed that crime yourself. I think that's what we should do. And yeah, drawing the line at 10 is kind of arbitrary. You could draw 9, you could draw 11 or 12. But the point is that if a very young child does commits a violent crime against another human being, it means that you have utterly failed as a parent at the most fundamental and basic level. Kids get into mischief all the time. They do dumb things. Even if you're a good parent. But that's one thing. On the other hand, if a young child becomes a violent felon and commits heinous, monstrous atrocities, then it means that you are pathologically neglectful, incompetent and probably sadistic. As a parent yourself, obviously. And you know, things can change as kids get older. It is possible that a 15, 16 year old teenage boy could go out and do something violent and bad. Even if you aren't the worst parent in the world, I mean, there's a lot you can do as a parent to protect against that. It's not like it's the luck of the draw completely, but. And if your 15 year old son commits a violent crime, chances are high that you have at least made some significant mistakes as a parent at a minimum. But it doesn't necessarily require you to be a monster yourself. Right, a 10 year old, I mean a 10 year old doing Something like this, well then you're just a monster. I mean you as the parent are a monster. I mean if your 15 year old commits this kind of crime, rape, torture, kidnapping, then you're probably also a monster as a parent. If you're a 25 year old commits this kind of crime, pretty good indication that you're a monstrously terrible parent. But you got to draw the line somewhere. And what I'm saying is that 10 and under the charges against the parent should be automatic. It should just be your kid does something like this violent felony under the age of 10, you just, you're auto like you are required by law to at least get your kid past the age of 10 without committing violent felonies. And if you can't do that, you automatically are going to jail. And beyond that, it's a case by case basis. And there's one other point I want to make about this. You know, we talk so much about political violence. I obviously, I talk about it on this show, we talked about it to start the show. It's a big problem. But the violent crime epidemic is not of course driven primarily by political violence and it isn't driven by mental illness. I've seen some of the commentary about this case and we don't know these kids who did this terrible thing. But a lot of people saying, well, mentally, once again we see the epidemic of mental illness and they must have been mentally ill. But that's not what is playing at play here. And this is not driven by lax gun laws or whatever. I mean the culprits in this case didn't even have a gun as far as we know. And the worst and most prevalent violence doesn't happen in the form of hate crimes. It's not even driven by hate. The real epidemic is nihilistic violence committed by people utterly devoid of humanity. Totally soulless violence committed just for the sake of it. Now I've been making this point for a long time that we always hear about hate crimes. Crimes of hate are not the biggest problem. And hateful people are not the most dangerous or necessarily even dangerous at all. I mean they can be. But no, the biggest problem and the most dangerous people are the indifferent people. The soulless, you know, apathetic crimes of indifference are the worst crimes. And total indifference is what drives people to do the worst things. And we have now in our culture, you know, we have this happening on a, on a mass scale. You know, when you see the, the crimes that are committed in our cities, this is like nihilistic, soulless Passionless crime. I saw a video a while ago. I didn't want to see it, but it popped into my feed of a guy who robbed a liquor store or a convenience store or something, gas station, something like that. And then just casually shot the cashier after he already. He already been given the cash. He was on camera. I don't even think the guy was wearing a mask. Maybe he was, but no reason to shoot the guy. Not just no reason to, but like it's your you all you've achieved is that when you get arrested you're going to go to jail for a whole lot longer. Or you should anyway. You never know these days. These days. But it just shot him anyway. No reason. Didn't appear to be like angry. Wasn't yelling at him. Just shot him. Shot him for the sake of it. And that's the kind of violence that infests our cities, making it down even to young children. So only way out is real accountability and we talk about it all the time for the criminals themselves and how there needs to be real criminal justice again. But this accountability has to go to the parents, to the families as well. Grand Canyon University, an affordable private Christian university based in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona, is one of the largest universities in the country. Praised for its culture of community and impact, GCU integrates the free market system, a welcoming Christian worldview and free and open discourse into 369 academic programs with over 300 online join a nationwide community of learners redefining online education through GCU's 100% online MBA degree program. Learn ethical entrepreneurship and scale your business to serve your community. In addition to federal grants and aid, GCU's online students receive nearly $161 million in institutional scholarships in 2024. Find your purpose at Grand Canyon University Private Christian Affordable. Visit gcu Edu myoffer to see the scholarships. You may qualify. Thursday night on the debut episode of Friendly Fire, we announced Daily Wire Lifetime memberships. We also mentioned only 10,000 exist. But here's something new now you can win a lifetime membership, download the free Daily Wire plus app in the App Store. Then open the app, tap, explore and follow me. That enters you for a chance to win a lifetime membership. You also get alerts when I release new episodes, breaking news, live chat during the show, and much more. If you've already downloaded the app and followed, you are already entered. For everyone else, get to work, download the Daily Wire plus app and follow me today. Now let's get to our daily cancellation. I want to talk about a theory that has been bouncing around in my head for several years now. And it's not just my theory. I'm sure other people have landed on this conclusion, too. The theory is that pop culture peaked at a specific and identifiable point in our very recent past and has fallen off a cliff, perhaps irretrievably, since then. And I want to discuss when this peak occurred, why it dropped, where this is all leading. I want to make the case that pop culture is now dead, because the culture itself, in a very real sense, is dead. And this is not just reflexive, pessimistic doomerism. Something very real and very important is happening here, as I will explain now. Pop culture, of course, is the artistic output of a society. It's why it's important. It's the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. And a healthy culture tells great stories. Well, a sick culture, a dying culture, tells bad stories or sometimes worse, tells good stories badly. We used to be the former, and now we no longer are. And I think I can show you exactly when everything took a turn. The peak happened during the years 2007 to 2008, and I don't think we appreciated it at the time. You never do. That's how peaks usually work. You don't notice them until you've already started the descent. You started going over the other side, but that was the zenith. That was the top of the mountain. 2007 saw the release of two of the greatest films ever made, There Will Be Blood and no country for Old Men, which not only came out in the same year, but also, it just so happens, were filmed at the same time in the same town, only miles apart from each other. But there was more. You know, there's a lot more. The David Fincher masterpiece Zodiac, released in 2007. So did Michael Clayton. George Clooney film Into the Wild. Superbad, the last good teen comedy. 2008 gave us the Dark Knight, the Wrestler, Tropic Thunder, which was one of the last great comedies of any type to be made by Hollywood. We get a few more decent comedies between 2009 and 2013, and that would be it. The entire genre essentially died after that point. Now, back in 2007, 2008, every genre was thriving. They were still making great children's movies. Ratatouille in 2007, Wall E in 2008. Even the smaller movies that didn't light up the box office were exceptional. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward. Robert Ford's a really good movie. The Mist before the Devil Knows yous're Dead. Once in Bruges, I didn't personally enjoy Juno or Gran Torino all that much, but they came out at this time and they're both better, more daring, more original than the vast majority of the slop Hollywood puts out these days. Gone, baby, Gone. Ben Affleck film was another very good film to come out during this time. Apocalypto, for my money, a nearly perfect movie almost came out in 2007. It premiered in theories in December of 2006. So did children of Men. In fact, you can make an argument for expanding the peak to include 2006, a three year period then covering 06 through 08. 2006 gave us not only Apocalypto and Children and Men, but it also gave us Departed, the Departed, Borat, the Prestige, Rescue Dawn, Idiocracy, Pursuit of Happiness. You could throw a dart at a list of every movie released during this period and the chances are pretty high that you'll hit something good, maybe even great, and maybe even a masterpiece. And this holds truer for television shows. Now, if you were to make a list of the 10 greatest TV shows ever made, five of those shows that you would likely put on your list were on the air during this time. The Wire, the Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, the Office. A lot of people would make an argument for the Shield as one of the great shows of all time was also on the air at this time. Lost had its best seasons during these years. Kirby enthusiasm was hitting on all cylinders. South park hadn't fallen off a cliff yet like it has now. 30 rock, not my bag, but it was a solid network sitcom also airing at this time. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was in its prime. The extremely underrated, hilarious Flight of the Concords premiered on HBO in 2007. For my money, one of the funniest shows of all time. Extras Ricky Gervais show was airing on the same network at the same time. I would argue that if you factor both movies and TV shows together, you cannot point to a one or two or even three year period that beats it. The volume of great cinema and television can't be matched now. 1999 was a great year for movies. So was 1996. So was 1975. 1939 gave us both Gone with the Wind and the wizard of Oz. But 2007 to 2008 or 2006? 2008 gave us masterpieces on both the big and small screen. Both art forms seem to have reached their pinnacle at the same time. And what we could say for sure with absolute Certainty is that no year or two year period or three year period after 07 to 08 comes anywhere close. And that's the most important point. Because even if you argue that there were better years before 07 or 06, the point is that nothing comes close in the years since. Now. You may not think that 2007 was the best period. I think it was. Doesn't matter. All that matters for my theory is that it was the last great one. If it wasn't the peak, it was the last peak. Now, there have been great films since then. Some of my favorites, Whiplash, Sicario, the Social Network, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, plenty of others I mentioned in Bruges, which came out in 2008. The Banshees of Inisherin is a better film by the same director and same lead actors, which came out in 2022. But these films are spread out over a period of nearly two decades and they're drowned in a sea of slop. Remakes, franchise films, sequels, superheroes. And there have also been good TV shows since 2008. The first season of True Detective came out in 2014, Chernobyl in 2019. An absolute masterpiece, in my opinion. But again, nothing like the Murderer's Row of the Wire, Breaking Bad, the Sopranos, Mad Men, the Shield, overlapping each other. Throw a dart at a list of any movie or show that came out after 2008, and especially any that have come out in the past 10 years, and especially any that have come out in the last five years. And your chance of hitting something even watchable, much less good, much less great, is significantly smaller. I mean, sure, you might hit something like Severance, which is a true artistic triumph, I think, but you're much more likely to land somewhere in the sea of just mediocre streaming sludge that we're all swimming in. Why? What happened? Well, two other things premiered in the 0708 period that might help explain the problem. The first, the one that conservatives will most likely point to, is Barack Obama's presidency. Obama was, of course, elected in 2008. He took office in 2009. And with the election of our first truly far left president, a radical black activist who used his race as a cudgel against the entire country, we enter the era of what we would come to call wokeness. All forms of risky, interesting, provocative artistic expression began to die off as a result. Starting with comedy. It is really striking, as many people have pointed out, to look at a list of the best comedies of this century and notice how the genre simply disappears from the face of the earth by the end of Obama's first term. Not a coincidence. But that is not the whole story, and it isn't even half of the story, because something else happened in 2007 that would prove to be a much more determinative factor. The iPhone was, of course, released in the US on June 29, 2007. And again, it is startling to look at a list of the greatest films and TV shows of this century and see how many of them were packed in and produced from the year 2000 right up until the release of the iPhone, and how quickly everything drops off. Almost from that moment precisely, or within a year or so of it, the iPhone came out. Social media proliferated alongside it. 2007, only about 23% of American adults had ever used social media. Twitter had only just been launched. TikTok didn't exist. Instagram didn't exist. Today, of course, basically everyone uses social media basically every waking moment of the day. Now, here's the point. As our lives have become increasingly centered around these devices, centered and condensed into these little glowing boxes, we have lost something very important. We no longer have a shared cultural experience. What some have called the monoculture, or what you might just call mainstream culture. The monoculture began its march to extinction in 2007. Today, the March is over. Process is complete. There is no shared culture. The monoculture gave way to the fragmented culture. A culture broken and divided into 300 million little pieces. A culture driven by algorithms designed to feed us a non stop diet of lowest common denominator slope all the time. Now, for as long as modern pop culture has existed, going back to the mid-1900s at least, there have been subcultures. You know, there have been divisions, divisions along generational lines. Sure, monoculture didn't mean that everyone's cultural experience was exactly the same, with no variations whatsoever. All it meant was that, generally speaking, we all watched the same movies, same TV shows, and even if we didn't watch them, we knew about the popular ones that other people were watching. You know, not everybody watched seinfeld in the 90s, but most people did. And if you didn't, you still knew about Seinfeld. You recognized the characters. It was still part of your cultural experience. It was a cultural benchmark for everyone, even if you didn't watch it. And that's because, you know, we went to the same places to access all this stuff. We went to the same movie theaters, we browsed through the aisles at Blockbuster, we turned on our tv, we scanned through the same channels we went to the same places, we're exposed to the same things. We had a culture. That's what a culture is. It's a shared experience. There's a reason why music, which of course is an essential part of the culture I haven't mentioned yet and which doesn't really graft onto this timeline exactly the same. It peaked a little bit earlier than movies and television. The musical monoculture broke up almost a decade before that with the advent of Napster and file sharing. Napster arrived on the scene in 1999. This was also arguably our musical peak. And it's not that 1999 had all the best music. I mean, that's up to, you know, it's whatever your taste is. But every genre of music was thriving in 1999. Rock, pop, rap, country, R and B. We had big musical acts that were like actual bands that played instruments. And today rock music doesn't exist in the mainstream. All the other genres have melded together and become indistinguishable from each other. Before file sharing and eventually iPhones and streaming, if we wanted to hear new music, you turn on the radio and you listen to the stations or for my generation, mtv. When I was a teenager, almost everyone I knew went home after school. You put on MTV, you watch TRL, where we all see the same 10 music videos. Our opinion of the music may have varied, but we were all exposed to the same things. We had a shared experience, we had a culture. And this meant that even the generational divides were not nearly as stark as they are today. And there was a divide, but it wasn't a brick wall. You know, it was not this impenetrable fortress like it is now. In the 90s, my parents did not much care for the pop stars and rock bands that the kids were listening to, but they generally knew who those stars were. I mean, they weren't big fans of Eminem or Britney Spears, but they would have recognized those people if they walked into the room. Because we all had the same stars, we all had the same celebrities. Now Today, if your 14 year old son has a phone, which most of them do, unfortunately, he also has his own personal list of stars and celebrities that he looks up to and follows obsessively. And these are people that you've never heard of. You don't know their names, you don't know who they are, you don't even know what they do. It's not even as simple as, oh yeah, well that's a famous pop star. It's like they might not Even do anything. And there isn't one place for you to go and find out who these people are, because they're streamers and they're influencers and they're various other random people with huge followings who enjoy a very peculiar and very modern kind of fame, one that is vast but narrow. Millions of fans know them intimately, and the rest of us have never even heard their names. And I can't stress enough how new and weird Internet fame is. And I say this as someone who has some experience with it, as you know, at any other point in history, up until very recently, if you had 5 million fans, then you were famous. If you had 5 million fans, it meant that there were 50 million other people who at least vaguely knew who you were. Now you can have 5 million fans and be totally obscure to every other person on the planet. I mean, there are YouTubers with 100 million subscribers who I wouldn't recognize if they walked up to me and introduced themselves by name. And I am a YouTuber with millions of subscribers. Not 100 million, but millions. There's something poetic in the fact that Michael Jackson, the last celebrity of the monoculture, the last true global star, died in 2009, coincidentally when the monoculture was extinguished. So was its biggest star. The death of celebrity, true celebrity is a symptom of the death of the monoculture, the extinction of the shared cultural experience. Radio is long since dead. So is mtv. Blockbuster went the way of the woolly mammoth a long time ago. Movie theaters still exist, but they don't have anywhere near the kind of cultural importance that they used to have. And nobody watches TV channels anymore. All of that, all of it has been consumed by an infinite scroll of content created by an algorithm specifically for you. There is no local radio DJ telling you and all your friends about the coolest new band. I was a radio DJ right at the tail end of music radio's relevance in its twilight. I also worked at Blockbuster at the tail end of that. So I kind of checked in on these industries as they were all dying. And I remember I would hear stories from the veterans of the radio business about what it was like back in the good old days when your local DJ was a household name in the community. He was almost like the unofficial mayor of the town. And I felt like a guy who got to the party right when everybody was putting on their coats to leave. And now the party's over. Now there is a faceless, nameless, mindless, soulless, lifeless code, an algorithm, a formula feeding you content specifically designed to keep you staring at a screen. Now, the code doesn't care what you're staring at or why you're staring, only that you stare at. And for as long as possible. If a cute cat video will keep you staring, it'll show you that if a video of a guy getting shot in the head will do it, then it'll show you that it'll serve you anything and everything all the time, as Bo Burnham sang. Now, in this environment, it's extremely difficult for any piece of art, especially something longer than 75 seconds, to break through and grab the attention of the masses. And even if it does grab all of our attention for a brief moment in time, we're not going to experience the thing together or even in the same context. We'll experience it alone on our phones, on our feeds, sandwiched between other content, pulling our attention back away from this thing that we all briefly noticed at the same time and forgot about just as quickly. You know, today we still have hit songs that lots of people stream, and we have hit movies that lots of people watch. But very rarely does any show or film or song become a cultural touchstone, a true sensation, a thing that you cannot avoid, that you almost cannot help but experience. You know, in 1997, when I was in middle school, every person I knew, adult and child, had seen Titanic. And even if they hadn't seen it, they had a strong opinion about it. And the Celine Dion song from that movie was so pervasive, it was so totally ubiquitous that I heard it five times a day whether I wanted to or not, and I didn't want to. I have a distinct memory of going on a hike with my dad at the height of the Titanic craze and hearing My Heart Will Go on wafting through the trees from somebody's campsite somewhere. I assume you couldn't even escape it in the woods. It was everywhere. There are movies today that make more money at the box office than Titanic did. And there are songs that probably get more streams than My Heart Will Go On Got radio plays. But none of them, no matter how widely consumed, are the same kind of cultural sensation. Not even close. Not close. There hasn't been one that even comes close to it in 15 years. At least. A movie these days can make a billion dollars and have virtually no cultural impact at all. A movie can be seen by millions and barely noticed at the same time. Consider this. When is the last time a movie produced an iconic moment or line, you know, one that one that's, like, repeated and parodied and known by Everyone, something like, to stay with Titanic, Kate Winslet, you know, with her arms outstretched at the front of the ship. Everybody knows that image. My kids were born 16 years after the movie came out. They'd never even seen the movie, and they know that image. When's the last time that any film produced an image that widely recognized? I mean, think about it. I was racking my brain. I can't. It's been like 20 years longer. It's been a very long time. Why? Well, for a simple reason. An iconic image is like an impact crater on the surface of the culture. A thing that imprints itself indelibly onto it. But it's impossible to make a cultural impact when there is no culture to begin with. It's like an asteroid hitting a gas giant like Jupiter. There's no crater, there's no impact. The thing just gets sucked into a giant ball of gas and incinerated. Speaking of asteroids, by the way, just in parentheses, the movie Armageddon came out a year after Titanic. It also had a song on its soundtrack that was instantly iconic and inescapable. I mean, this was common back when we had a culture. It's popular these days to rail against gatekeepers. Everyone does. Ah, the gatekeepers, the people. Gatekeeping. You know, it turns out that gatekeepers aren't always a bad thing. In fact, they are necessary. Radio DJs used to be gatekeepers. So were movie theaters. So were video rental places, concert venues, TV channels. They maintained the boundaries of the culture by deciding what we were all exposed to. If a movie was not in theaters and Blockbuster didn't have it and it wasn't playing on TNT or amc, that meant you just couldn't watch that movie. In fact, most movies that you would want to see, you just could not watch them. You just couldn't. You couldn't do it. You couldn't listen to most music if there was a song. This will really blow the minds of kids these days. If there was a song you wanted to hear and you didn't have it on CD or cassette, your only other choice was to physically pick up your phone and call your local radio station and ask them to play it. Now, this was gatekeeping. Yeah, but within the gate was our shared cultural experience. Within the gate was culture. Now those gatekeepers are all gone. Doesn't mean there's no gatekeeper now. Now there's one. And it's not flesh and blood. It's the algorithm. And this one is far more tyrannical and sinister than any of the other ones ever were. And worse, it's invisible. We don't even know that it's there. But it is. And it has, again, one mission. And one mission to keep us staring at the screen and to keep us staring at it. Alone, isolated. Fragmented. Now, if this all sounds kind of bleak, well, I'm afraid that it gets worse. AI is about to take the fragmented culture and explode it into an infinite number of microscopic pieces, like dust floating in space. Now, up till now, the algorithm has been showing you, for the most part, content created by other people. Well, soon it will show you content that it creates. This is already happening. And soon it will be the only thing you see, or that it has given you the illusion of creating yourself. Which means that in the not too distant future, if the AI industry has its way, your favorite film will be one that nobody else on Earth has seen, and your favorite song will be one that nobody else has heard, because you will generate your own pop culture by feeding prompts into a machine. And by the way, the machine will prompt you about what sort of prompts it wants you to type in so that it's telling you what to want and then create and then giving you the thing that it's letting you pretend you created. You know, I've talked a lot about how AI art is soulless and dead, and that's true. But perhaps the bigger problem is that it's lonely. It exists for you and you alone. It kills for good, whatever is left of the shared cultural experience. That's our future. It's already here. I wish I had better news to share, but, like, that's the news, like it or not. Now, if I'm very optimistic, which I'm not, I would hope that people will rebel against this fragmented, algorithmic, digital pseudo culture by building strong communities where there can be a shared culture, at least on a local level. Building actual communities physically, in physical space, with people that you're actually around in person. You know, over the summer, we visited a place that had a small theater where the local troupe would put on plays for the community once or twice a week, and people came out. It's a community event. People would come out and watch the plays. Maybe that sort of thing will become more popular. Maybe. You know, if I can't have a shared culture with the entire country, I'll at least have one with my neighbors. That's the optimistic view. Of course, the other possibility is that we'll all stay plugged into the Matrix in a world that the machine designs for each of us individually to live in, alone, distracted, and amused, but never happy. A post culture, a non culture, A culture that isn't real because it isn't shared. That could also happen. I know which possibility I would put my money on. But in the end, it's up to us. Because the last decision that we will make as a culture is whether we want to have one or not. That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. Godspeed. Hey there. I'm Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley.
