A (12:21)
So caveats abound. Mark Halpern saying, look, we don't know this is unconfirmed, but we don't really know much of anything about this attack yet, do we? And so for a lot of people, they don't even know that it is a possibility that one of the few, this is Brown University. This is one of the most liberal colleges in the entire country. They don't even know that it's a possibility that this was a targeted ideological attack because they don't know that the girl was the vice president of the Republican Club. There are probably 10 Republicans on that entire campus. Now the second victim was identified. The victim is Muhammad Aziz Umur Zhokov. He graduated in May, so I guess he was a freshman. He Graduated in May from Midlothian High School. Kid wanted to become a neurosurgeon. Was a top performing kid by all accounts. Really, really nice kid. That complicates it because his name is not John Smith. You know his name. Mohammed Aziz U. Murzokov. It's unclear if Ella was targeted and then this young man was just collateral damage. It's unclear if he was targeted. It's unclear. Add on top of that, there is one media outlet called Center Square reporting that the shooter yelled Allahu Akbar before the shooting, which is a pattern that we've come to expect. But really complicates it. Then, was this a politically ideologically motivated attack? We've seen that on campuses, for goodness sakes. We're only three months out from the assassination of Charlie Kirk by radical leftist. We've seen plenty of Muslim attacks, though. One of the victims here is named Mohammed. Then we know that the Providence police arrested someone. It was then misreported who that person was. They then reported the right guy who was arrested, but then the guy who was arrested was released because they arrested the wrong guy. And now we don't know. Now the police come out, they say, yeah, we don't know. We're all really tired. We've been working on this for 49 hours straight. We're really tired. It's pathetic. They don't even know who did it. The one thing you're not allowed to do, though, is to speculate. The one thing you're not allowed to do is to say, well, you know, like, basically all of these attacks are carried out by two groups of people. Could have been a crazy kid. Could have been a kid who was a psycho. Like a psychotic. Not a psychopath, but a psychotic who just. There was no ideological motivation. Could have been a crime of passion. Could have. We don't know. However, the thing that we do know is you're not allowed to speculate as to whether or not that the shooting follows long standing trends. Mark Halperin's point, I think is totally apt. Here he goes. Look, I don't know if this was ideologically targeted. What I do know is that most people don't even realize that's a possibility. And just to raise the point, again, Providence police seem to have bungled this whole case. Brown seems to have bungled this whole case. But the odds that the vice president of the Republican Club at Brown. Brown, which makes Harvard and Yale look like Hillsdale, Brown, was the victim here and by all accounts, a targeted victim. The odds of that are so low. The odds of that being a mere coincidence. You have to wonder, gosh, was this part of this trend of violence against conservatives throughout the country? Even the Atlantic magazine admitting that terrorism is now a left wing problem, chiefly a left wing problem? Was this part of it? We don't know. Can we even talk about it? Are you even hearing about this in the establishment media? Okay, speaking of identity, an extremely, extremely important essay just came out in Compact Magazine. A report on the effects of DEI identity politics, specifically on white men and not all white men, specifically on millennial white men, and how that trend of white identity politics starting to creep up. Where that came from, that didn't come from nowhere. And it's totally understandable where it came from. We'll get to that in a moment. First, I wanna tell you about Done with debt go to donewithdebt.com this episode is sponsored by Done With Debt. What if you could give yourself one gift this holiday season that really matters? Like finally breaking free from the we Credit card debt Here is something most people don't realize. This time of year creates a unique opportunity. As the year winds down, credit card companies and lenders are rushing to close their books. They're settling past due accounts, writing off bad debt, and cleaning up their records before the new year hits. If you were carrying credit card debt or unpaid bills, creditors are often more willing to negotiate. You might actually have more leverage than you think. That's where Done With Debt comes in. They understand this timing inside and out. They know when lenders are under pressure. They use that knowledge to negotiate aggressively on your behalf. The goal is simple. Help you escape crushing debt and sky high interest payments without bankruptcy, without taking on new loans from month one. Done With Debt gets to work with one clear mission. Reduce what you owe. Put more money back in your pocket every single month. Do not let debt buy. I've known people who have had their minds racked because of debt. They get the phone calls. They get the messages. Don't do it. Don't let that anxiety enslave you. Get started right now. Your leverage may disappear at the end of the year. Chat for free with a Done with debt specialist@donewithdebt.com done donewithdebt.com that is donewithdebt.com really important essay. It's by Jacob Savage called the Lost Generation. Very, very lengthy. Obviously I'm not gonna read it all, but you should check it out in Compact Magazine. Compact Magazine, which is this interesting magazine. It's established by people who are kind of on the right but Also, there are some communists involved in it. And it's not 1980s Republican orthodoxy. Economics, it tends a little bit more toward left wing economic is much more favorable toward right wing social policy. There's this joke in, I don't know if you remember this in I think it was Parks and Recreation, one of the punj. Or maybe it was 30 rock. One of the jokes though was it said, oh, Hi. It was 30 Rock said, I'm a fiscal liberal but a social conservative. And this was the kind of loser character, the character that everyone was supposed to hate. I'm a fiscal liberal but a social conservative. And that was a joke because at the time, 15 years ago now, the really fashionable political identity to hold was to be a fiscal conservative but a social liberal. I'm a fiscal conservative, but I'm a social liberal. And this actually represented a vanishingly small number of real voters. But people who were in elite positions, especially in the cities, they identified that way. So it was over pronounced in the popular culture. Very few people identify with that. Well, I guess Compact magazine's position is that view. It's the fiscal liberal social conservative. And they write really interesting stuff. So anyway, what's the takeaway? Takeaway is the DEI destroyed millennial men. DEI policies destroyed millennial men. It opens up with this talk about Hollywood and how if you were a white man in Hollywood, especially a young white man, millennial white man, trying to get a job in Hollywood 10, 15 years ago, it was basically impossible. And I can kind of attest to this because I was there at the time, I was doing other stuff too. And Daily Wire was just starting at the time, but. And I had a lot of friends who were trying to do it. Actors, writers, directors, people who were trying to break in specifically to that industry. If you were a white guy, it was told to you openly. Yeah, it's not gonna happen because they have to diversify. There are these DEI requirements. And isn't that wonderful? White guys still occupied a ton of major positions in Hollywood, but it was the older white guys, the guys who had already established their careers before. For the younger white guys, it wasn't happening. So that's how the article opens. But it doesn't just focus on Hollywood. Talks about journalism, academia, medicine, tech, all of these industries where starting about 15 years ago, if you were a white guy trying to break in, you were gonna have a lot of trouble. Just a few words from the article. As the Trump administration takes a chainsaw to diversity, equity and inclusion, there's a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well meaning but ineffectual HR modules. Undoubtedly there has been a ham fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating, explained Kianga Yamada Taylor in the New Yorker. But for the most part it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone. Jacob Savage in Compact goes on, this may be how boomer and Gen X white men experience dei, but for white male millennials, DEI wasn't a gentle rebalancing. It was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none of the thousands of articles and think pieces about diversity have considered the issue by cohort. They think about it by men, white men, brown men, yellow men, whatever. But they don't look at it by age cohort. And the boomers and the Gen X, they basically skated by with dei. It was the millennials and to some degree the older zoomers who got pounded. This is not a story about all white men. It's a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed and who mostly stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apartment entirely different professional fates. If you were 40 in 2014, born in 1974, beginning your career in the late 90s, you were already established. If you were 30 in 2014, you hit the wall. Because the mandates to diversify didn't fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power. They landed on us. So it opens up with this anecdote about Hollywood, which I saw. I saw it among my friends, I saw it among colleagues. So that was real. But it goes on. It says in journalism, eventually white men stopped even trying to enter into journalism because they were shut out of the jobs. And then journalism became even more effeminate. Journalism became even a lot more liberal. Journalism changed the not hiring these people, discriminating against this specific group, this sex group, racial group and age group, not only did it push them out of their careers, it changed the industry. It had this twofold effect. But then they go on. They say the shift in medicine's been even more dramatic. In 2014, white men were 31% of American medical students. By 2025, they were just 20.5%, a 10 percentage point drop in barely over a decade. That's a third of the people. So it's really a 33% drop, 10 percentage point drop in barely over a decade. And this is the clearest example we have of the celebration parallax. Mike Anton's point that you can observe the same phenomenon. But if you observe the phenomenon and say it's a good thing, then you're feted and you're applauded and you're patted on the back. If you observe that very same phenomenon and say it's a bad thing, you're called a dangerous conspiracy theorist spreading misinformation. This is the clearest example of it. Because we were told, my group, I know I'm a little dusky because I'm part Sicilian, but I think I, broadly speaking, I'm a white man. My group of people was told, hey, we're gonna diversify, and this is really, really good. And most of the white men, across party lines, across geographic lines, most of the white men said, oh, okay. They said, that's great. Wonderful. How great? Or if they said, well, we're being discriminated against, they mostly kept quiet, at least. And the consequence of that was you had at least a decade of active, explicit, overt, legally protected, culturally celebrated discrimination against a very particular group of people. Not even just white men, millennial white men and older zoomer white men. And now all the Think pieces decry the rise of identity politics on the right and among white people. What did you think was going to happen? What did you think was going to happen? There's a Pew report that came out some years ago that showed that white people are the only group that doesn't have a racial identity. Showed greater than 50% racial identity. People who said that race was important or very important to their sense of identity, greater than 50% among Asians, Hispanics, and black people. Among black people, it's over 70%. Do you know what it was for white people? Fifteen white people have no sense of racial identity. And generally white people say, isn't that a good thing? We shouldn't have too much of a sense of racial identity. We should all, however, when your country experiences the largest demographic change ever of any place in the history of the world over the course of 60 years since the Hart Celler act, and when that change is intentional, when that change is being targeted at you, explicitly saying, we want fewer white people and we don't want you to have jobs and we don't want you to have a career and you're going to be ostracized from society, don't be surprised when you get a little alienation. Don't be surprised when people feel a little isolated from their culture, deracinated, feel as if they don't really have a stake in the society. It comes from somewhere. And there's this Response from the left, which says, yeah, take that, white man. You're the devil. We hate you. You're terrible. You should feel terrible about yourself on the basis of your sex and your race and your age, I guess. But then the response on the right is, oh, quit your belly aching. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. We're all individuals, aren't we? And this group of people is saying, well, hold on. We're not being treated as individuals. We're not. So that just isn't true. And we can't exactly pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We can learn how to suffer in a way that is sanctifying, that is good. We can learn how to make the best of a bad situation. We can learn how to play the hand we're dealt. We absolutely have to do that. But this requires a political solution. You gotta stop actively discriminating against this one particular group of people. Young white guys, on every level, in your immigration policies, in your hiring policies, in your university admission policies. And we're beginning to see that this is one of the achievements of the Trump administration that has gone largely under the radar is the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in college admissions. Now the schools are gonna try to get around that anyway. But that was a big shift. The Trump administration has deported a ton of people, over 2 million people. They're not getting any credit for that. And they're being lied about, actually, by some of their critics on the left and the right. So there are. But this requires political solutions. Okay? I think the age of squishy individualist liberal slogans is over because it has failed, and it's led to deeply unjust discrimination. And when people recognize that we shouldn't, tell them they're not seeing what their eyes are seeing and not to believe they're lying eyes. The same thing goes for Zoomers, by the way. We'll get to Zoomers in a second. We'll get to Zoomer aggrievement just momentarily. First, I want to tell you about Good Ranchers. Go to goodranchers.com, use code KNOWLES. This episode is sponsored by Good Ranchers. You know what I am most looking forward to this Christmas season? The commemoration of the Incarnation and looking ahead to the second coming of Christ. But after that, and after spending time with my family, you know what it is? It's delicious, tasty meat from Good Ranchers. I love it so freaking much. It's outrageous. Good Ranchers, it's all American. It's not injected with a bunch of weird stuff. It's great. You know, local farms and ranches. I love all that. The price cannot be beat. 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GoodRanchers.com, code KNOWLES 40 bucks off plus free meat for life. GoodRanchers dot com, get back to the table. Wall Street Journal has a really important report out. This holiday season. People are buying their gifts. I haven't bought any gifts for Christmas. This is so bad. If you have ideas on what I should get sweet little Elisa, please tweet them at me. Please send them into the mailbag. I don't know what to get. What do you get the woman who has everything? You know, what do you get the woman who doesn't need anything in this world? But anyway, sorry, that's a sidebar. Most people have bought their Christmas gifts already. With one exception. Two exceptions, I guess. Me, I haven't bought my Christmas gifts. And zoomers, Zoomers are not spending money on Christmas gifts because of economic pressures. According to the Wall Street Journal. Unusual Wales posts a chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics says Gen Z is spending more on essentials than previous generations. Their wages are not keeping up and that is one reason why they're not spending as much this advent. So you look at this chart, really interesting chart. Inflation adjusted spending for 16 to 24 year olds and you see real wages from it's 1985 to 2020. Real wages have ticked up a little bit. You notice though they really only tick up during the Trump era. So they tick up a little bit at the end of the 90s.com boom. I mean now Everyone is getting rich at the end of the 90s. They flatline until the election of Obama. They decline. And this was also the global financial crisis. They decline, started to tick up a little bit again, but not that much. Election of Trump, real wages grow, Biden gets elected, Real wages flatline, actually decline a little bit. Trump gets elected again, real wages are going up. Okay, but cost of food is growing. Cost of housing explodes, cost of vehicle insurance explodes. So basic stuff. What do you need to exist in the modern American economy? What are the real basics that people. Well, you need food, first of all, but you need a car and you need a place to live. And all of that has exploded. And one of the big drivers of the cost of housing has been the migrants, because migrants are occupying huge amounts of rent. Especially the rises in rent are something like 40% attributable to mass migration. So the zoomers are getting hammered on this. And this is another place. Where is this my criticize the right day? This is my criticize my friends on the right day. This is a real place where people on the right are just completely dropping the ball. Some people get it. The younger politicians on the right get it. Vice president would be a good example. He's been speaking about this for a long time. But Trump has spoken about this for a long time. But a lot of people on the establishment rights just still don't get it. They say, oh, these kids need to quit their bellyache and they need to pull theirselves up with their bootstraps. They have it way better than their grandparents did. Yes and no. Yeah, it's true. Houses are nicer today. The food is in some ways more luxurious today. People live more opulent lives today. That's true. But we live in society and you do kind of have to keep up with the Joneses. And real wages have not risen and you can't support family on one income in a lot of places. It can be done. I want to give people encouragement. It can be done, but you have to be very, very intentional about it. And the whole culture tells you not to do that. This on top of white male millennials and older zoomers being actively discriminated against in the college admissions process and in the job market. The zoomers do have it tough, okay? And this is not a cause for the zoomers to say, you know, oh, I'm going to go sit down and feel so sorry for myself. It's like Johnny Fontaine and the Godfather. I don't know what to do. And the Godfather lets just smack him. Says, you're going to act like a man. What's the matter with you? You got to look, you got to act like a man. You got to learn how to suffer. You got to learn how to adapt and play the hands you're dealt, as I just said. But we need a political solution to this, folks. This is where the establishment, the squishy Republicans just don't get it. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of people just don't get it. Politics is done politically. Politics is an effort of the community. Politics involves setting norms and standards and incentives and disincentives for everybody. It's not an individualist endeavor. We don't just say, oh, just sort out the culture and forget about the politics. No, no, no. First of all, you can't really separate the two because politics is downstream of culture. But also the law is a tutor. And so you need a political answer to this. And furthermore, even if you are the most laissez faire, don't want the government to do anything, kind of right winger that there is, let us remember that the palace is never safe when the cottage is unhappy. And you have a generation of people who are having economic difficulty keeping up because of economic challenges that their parents and grandparents didn't face. You know, you have that same generation of people, especially the white guys in that generation who are being actively discriminated against on top of the economic pressures. You have that generation being raised with the insane cultural confusion of the sexual revolution, being encouraged to chop their genitals off. You know, when your parents went through a weird rebellious phase when they were kids, they got a tattoo. When the zoomers and the young millennials go through a weird rebellious phase as a kid, everyone around them gets them to chop their genitals off. When your grandparents went through a weird rebellious phase, they probably drank a little too much or maybe took up smoking. You castrated yourself. These are major, major. All of your parents were divorced. Your society was fraying in social solidarity, driven in no small part by the mass migration that was foisted upon you that led to the compounding of all of these problems. You need a political solution to these things. And there are plenty of political solutions. I mean, again, I keep focusing on the migration because if you just took care of the mass migration alone, that would fix the housing problem. That would fix a lot of the problems with the cost of food. It would fix a lot of the problems with the stresses on the welfare system. It would fix a lot of the problems of lack of assimilation and diversity. Just that alone but that's a political solution. That's not. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It's never good to whine. It's never good to complain. It's never good to feel sorry for yourself. Okay? I agree with the establishment, right? When it comes to that, don't be a little whiny wimp, ever. Don't do that. That's very off putting. However, these are real problems, folks. These are real problems that were caused by politics and get fixed by politics, okay? Speaking of changing perceptions of the country, did you know that the pine tree flag, the flag that says an appeal to heaven, did you know that that is a dangerous symbol of white, not even white, sorry, Christian nationalism. It's a white flag, but it's a Christian nationalist flag. That's according to a USA Today journalist. We'll get to that momentarily. First though, wanna tell you about a legacy box. Go to legacybox.com knowles are you still searching for the perfect gift? Legacy Box. That's the simplest, safest way to convert your old family videotapes to digital. For just nine bucks each, it's the most meaningful gift you can give. 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You go to dailywire.com subscribe and join now. My favorite comment yesterday is from purdog9859 who says that was a solid Michael Caine accent. Thank you. I can't do Australian. As a kid, I think I was able to, but I can't do it. So now whenever I have to do an Australian accent, I think I'm just gonna do Michael Caine. Crikey. That's not a knife. This is a knife. My name's Crocodile Dundee. Okay. A USA Today journalist by the name of Zach Schremelli has this breaking news story of this pine tree flag being flown. The pine tree flag, which is the appeal to heaven flag, it's a white standard with a pine tree on it says appeal to heaven. It says new. A controversial Christian nationalist flag is hanging outside the D.C. office of a top education apartment official. The agency's union and an employee who's observed at firsthand told me the flag, which was raised by rioters during the January 6th insurrection, is adorning the office of Murray Bessett, principal deputy assistant Secretary. Whoa. The principal deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Planning Evaluation and Policy Development. The appeal to heaven flag tells the journalist is the same that was flown outside the vacation home of conservative Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in 2023, according to the New York Times. Breaking. Stop the presses. Very controversial Christian nationalist flag. Okay, what's the. Do we have a copy of the flag? You've all seen them. It's a white flag, pine tree, appeal to heaven. Not only. Not only is the flag not a Christian nationalist symbol, this was a flag that was flown in the Revolutionary War. It's one of the oldest flags in our country, and it was commissioned by George Washington himself. But it gets better. Some people know that. The liberals don't know that. The people who work for USA Today, they don't know that. The journalists, they don't know anything about that, anything about our history. Most people on the right who care about these things know that the pine tree flag was commissioned by George Washington. So that's the funny rejoinder. It gets even funnier, though, because Christian nationalism is posed by these sorts of people as the antithesis of liberalism. Good old classical liberalism in the American tradition, the tradition of natural rights and the Declaration of Independence. And John Locke, who tells us that we have these rights to life, liberty and property. Okay, the phrase an appeal to heaven comes not from the Bible, not from St. Thomas Aquinas, not from some preacher. The phrase appeal to heaven comes from John Locke, specifically John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, which is the foundational text of political liberalism. John Locke, father of liberalism, Second Treatise, the foundational text of political liberalism. That's where the phrase comes from. I'm not the biggest John Locke fan in the world. I think John Locke's influence on the American Revolution and the founding of our country is a little bit overstated, actually. I think other thinkers are more important. I think the classical political tradition plays a big role too. However, the irony is, if you wanna point to the pine tree flag as being the symbol of radical, revanchist, retrograde Christian nationalism, you are pointing to a phrase written by John Locke, the father of liberalism, in the book that establishes political liberalism. So what conclusion do we draw from this? This is my favorite part of the whole story. Let's just take the USA Today guy at his word, and let's take the New York Times. And it's not just the USA Today guy, it's all the libs. When. When Sam Alito's wife was flying this flag over their home, they all freaked out. They said, this is Christian nationalism. If the pine tree flag is a symbol of Christian nationalism, as the liberals uniformly contend, and if the pine tree flag was commissioned by George Washington himself, flown during the American Revolution, and comes from John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, what does that tell us about America? What does that tell us about the founding of America? What does that tell us even about the Founding Father's view of Lockean liberalism? It tells us that it's Christian nationalist. It tells us that ours is a Christian nation. It tells us that inasmuch as the Founding Fathers embraced Lockean liberalism, it was through the lens of a Christian nation. It tells us that Christian nationalism is the oldest tradition in our country, which obviously it is. Because even before the Revolution, a century and a half before the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, and even farther before the Constitution, all before that, the country was settled by people who called themselves Pilgrims, zealous Christians establishing a new country in a new world. I love that. Three cheers for Zach Shremelli and the New York Times, for that matter. Love this. Yeah. Okay. Okay, guys, you're right. The pine tree flag is Christian nationalist and I guess so is George Washington and John Locke. Fine by me. I mean, look, read a little John Locke. If the libs read John Locke today, they would call him a Christian nationalist. He said that atheists shouldn't be able to speak in public. Okay, that's pretty good. Speaking of journalistic malpractice, before we go, Jake Tapper, he was just interviewed. He was doing like a cool live stream interview, okay? He's got this book, Rage Against Terror, and so he was doing his cool livestream interview. He's not wearing a coat and tie, he's wearing a hoodie and headphones. He's not like a regular journalist. He's a cool journalist. So Jake Taffer goes on and he's asked why he's so tough on Trump, why he keeps hammering Trump, raising all these insinuations about Trump's fitness for office. And his answer is, perfect.