Ep. 2013 - The Industrial Revolution Has Been a Disaster For The Human Race

**Michael Knowles** (0:00)
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Hey Meta, what's the capital of Peru?

**Michael Knowles** (0:08)
Lima. How do you say, where's the restroom in Spanish? Dónde está el baño?
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**Andy Ngo** (0:20)
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**Michael Knowles** (0:23)
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While the mainstream left is embracing political violence to a greater degree than they have in at least a century, maybe ever, in America, the Trump administration is doing more to suppress violent leftists than the government has in at least 60 years, declaring Antifa a terrorist organization and sending a bunch of its members to prison for a combined 450 years. That is all a great start, but the violence is almost certainly going to get worse. And while lots of attention has been paid to causes like immigration, polarization, decaying institutions, not enough people seem to remember that the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. I'm Michael Knowles, this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show. We have the greatest journalist of Antifa in the world coming on the show. That would be Andy Ngo, to discuss the recent incarceration of Antifa operatives, and to give us a little tease into his next book, which is phenomenal, I can hardly tell you. But it occurs to me that while we're all pointing the blame game on the political violence that's increasing, a lot of people have been neglecting what might be the most obvious cause of it. And so, look, the bad news is political violence is increasing. And the political violence is coming from the left, and even leftists are beginning to admit that the political violence is coming from the left. And even when the leftists admit the political violence comes from the left, they're still hiding most of the left-wing violence. We've talked about that a lot over the last eight, nine months, but it's clear, they're still not counting the BLM riots that murdered dozens of people, destroyed over a billion dollars in property. They're still not counting most of that as political violence. They're still not counting attacks on right-wing people and right-wing institutions and churches and all that. They're still not counting a lot of that as left-wing violence. And even still, just based on their very, very narrow definitions of left-wing violence, you're seeing that it's overtaken right-wing violence. So this is very dangerous for everybody. It's dangerous for the left. You can't have a country like that. It's great news that the Trump administration comes out and says, Antifa is a terrorist organization, in the same way that we think of the Ku Klux Klan as a terrorist organization. We have Antifa. Antifa, despite the protestations of the left, have uniforms, they have flags, they have meeting spots, they train together, they coordinate, they're attacks. They're a terrorist organization. And so the way to break them, the way that we broke the Ku Klux Klan, the way that Giuliani broke the mafia, is by treating them as an organization and holding their members accountable. So we're starting to do that. That's all great. But what is driving it?
A lot of the attacks from Antifa, including the one that just sent a bunch of them to prison, they're centered around immigration. So we say, okay, maybe it's immigration that's driving this. Some of the Antifa members are immigrants or children of immigrants. A lot of them are kind of pasty white leftists. But you say, well, the issue of immigration is clearly driving a lot of that. And immigration is driving myriad social problems that we've talked about ad nauseam, especially in the wake of the Mamdani elections last week. However, I don't think it's chiefly immigration. Then people say, well, it's polarization. The left and the right used to be more similar. There's more of a uniparty. Then the right wing broke into the Tea Party in populist era and the left wing got woke. And so the polarization is what's creating a lot of that political tension. Yeah, maybe to some degree, maybe.
Decaying institutions, we no longer have faith in our institutions. And so because of that, you know, we take matters into our own hands. We don't believe that the cops are there to protect us. The left thinks that the cops are evil and they need to be abolished. And the right thinks that the cops are being hamstrung by the political order. So they're not going to protect us either. We got to take matters into our own hands. Yeah, sure. There's a little bit of that, too. The one cause, though, that people haven't really made the connection to, and it just occurred to me the other day while I was reading the Unabomber Manifesto. No joke. Telling on myself a little bit. But while I was reading Ted Kaczynski's The Industrial Society and Its Future, it occurred to me the chief driver of political violence in American history was the Industrial Revolution, the Second Industrial Revolution. If you just, there have been plenty of periods of political violence in American history. Probably, probably we think of the Civil War, that would be an example of it, which was right at the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution and did involve economic changes that pertain to slavery. But even, let's just take that one out for a second. You know, you think of political violence in the 1960s and 70s with regard to civil rights and some of the social movements that were being funded by the communists. You think of little rebellions that popped up in the 18th century. But the most sustained period of political unrest and violence in American history occurs from roughly the 1880s through the 1910s, basically right up to and right into World War I. That's when you had the Haymarket Affair, 1886