Charlie Kirk and the Turning Point

Summary

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The Commentary Magazine Podcast

Episode: Charlie Kirk and the Turning Point
Date: September 11, 2025

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Episode Overview

This urgent and somber episode of The Commentary Magazine Podcast is dedicated to making sense of the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old conservative activist and founder of Turning Point USA. Recorded on September 11th, the conversation is colored by the resonance with the 9/11 attacks, as the hosts reflect on the implications for American society, political violence, social media, and the nation’s collective psyche. Panelists include John Podhoretz (host/editor), Abe Greenwald (executive editor), Seth Mandel (senior editor), Matthew Continetti (Washington columnist), Christine Rosen (social commentary columnist), and Noah Rothman (author and former Commentary staffer), who has written extensively on political violence.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Assassination of Charlie Kirk: Immediate Impact

• Signal Event: Kirk’s killing is described as a watershed moment for American civil society, representing not just the loss of a political activist but an attack on free society and open debate.
  • “It was an attack on the free society.” (Matthew Continetti, 06:02)
• Chilling Effect: Discussion about how the event is already forcing the curtailment of freedoms, like public speech events moving indoors for security.
  • “This is going to be yet another moment at which certain types of freedoms are going to end up having to be curtailed for safety reasons.” (John, 05:05)
• Connection to 9/11: The symbolic resonance of the date and what it means for a shaken America.

2. The Role of Social Media and the Spread of Violence

• Immediate Circulation: The murder video was instantly posted and shared on social media, with both a numbing and dehumanizing effect.
  • “Within five seconds of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, I saw footage of the murder... It's a snuff film.” (John, 08:21)
• Toxic Reactions and Disinformation: Alongside genuine horror, some on social media celebrated Kirk’s death, made jokes, or spread conspiracy theories.
  • “A lot of people on the left celebrated the fact that he was shot. And that is horrifying.” (Christine, 10:53)
• Broader Implications: Reflecting on what 9/11 would have looked like in the social media age.
  • “Had there been social media on 9/11... all of that stuff that was kind of in the noxious subculture would have been right out in front of us.” (John, 09:45)

3. The Political and Ideological Roots of Violence

• Academic Radicalization: The panel identifies rising violence as stemming from ideological radicalization, particularly on college campuses.
  • “College campuses have become petri dishes of nihilism and radicalism... real fascism in this country.” (Matthew Continetti, 06:38)
• Multiple Targets, Omni-Cause Violence: Recent acts against healthcare executives and others show the broadening of acceptable targets by leftist radicals.
  • “There’s a broadening of targets... a growing list of leftist, exotic, violent political ideologies.” (Seth, 31:53)
• Political Response: Politicians’ rhetorical justifications (“but” statements) cited as providing dangerous solace for radicals.
  • “Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, all of them deployed the very loaded butt...” (Noah, 15:51)

4. Personal Reflections on Charlie Kirk’s Legacy

• Influence on Youth: Kirk as a key figure for Gen Z conservatives, moving from meme politics to advocacy for open debate and against antisemitism.
• Growth and Change: His supporters note his maturation and willingness to stand up for Israel, even against surging anti-Israel sentiment in parts of the right.
  • “He decided to make his stand and pitch his tent... on the side of the righteousness and justice of Israel’s cause.” (John, 36:21)
• Personal Stories: Panelists reflect on their first impressions, regrets, and interactions with Kirk, drawing out his complexity and character.
  • “I want to mention another injustice that I did to Charlie Kirk that I deeply regret...” (John, 36:21)
  • “He had a specific way of talking about it from a non-Jewish perspective to other non Jews, that was extraordinarily valuable.” (Abe, 41:10)

5. Broader Context: Cycles of Political Violence in America

• Historical Echoes: Panelists draw parallels with past waves of political assassinations (JFK, RFK, MLK, 1960s-1980s), noting previous cycles of violence.
  • “We had this almost 20 year spasm of political violence aimed at people at the very top. And then ... it ended. Nobody knows why.” (John, 61:04)
• Societal Response: How past societies have responded—sometimes by rallying, other times by retreating or paving the way for authoritarian responses.
  • “The end result, as Matt said, is top down authoritarianism, not anarchy and chaos. Somebody will come in and clean things up in some fashion in a way that will be very un-American.” (John, 103:57)

6. The Role of Culture and the Glorification of Violence

• Hollywood and Pop Culture: Films and media increasingly normalize revolutionary violence against perceived oppressors.
  • “Culture is making the world safe for the idea that it is okay to parlay political violence as long as the violence is against people we don’t like.” (John, 46:38)
• Collapse of Civic Ideals: The dehumanization and nihilism fostered by both academic and pop cultural trends are seen as symptoms and drivers of violence.
  • “It’s dehumanizing. And it starts, I think, in the universities... then it’s present in the culture.” (Christine, 46:38)

7. Political and Social Fallout

• Security vs. Freedom: The panel debates the balance between increasing security and maintaining open civil society.
• Division and Lack of Consensus: The inability to come together, even for moments of silence in Congress, underscores deep national fractures.
  • “Big contrast to what happened on the floor of the House of Representatives...” (Christine, 89:38)
• Uncertain Future: Panelists express pessimism about the near future, with concerns that violence might breed further violence, and agree that even a small radical minority can upend society.
  • “You can't uncross a Rubicon... you get a dictator, not a right libertarian city-state.” (Abe, 103:57)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Spreading of Violence via Social Media
  “Within five seconds of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, I saw footage of the murder... It's a snuff film.”

  • John Podhoretz [08:21]

• On What the Assassination Means
  “It was an attack on the free society.”

  • Matthew Continetti [06:02]

• On the Change in Civic Culture
  “No one should get mugged. No one should, you know, be in a school shooting. But what are you gonna do? How can you stop it? You can't stop it. And we don't know how to stop it and we don't know how to stop these things.”

  • John Podhoretz [101:27]

• On the Political Division and Congress’s Response
  “If politics is downstream from culture... what would be important is if the politicians did a little more of what the Yankees did last night and a lot less of what they did in that eruption on the House floor.”

  • Christine Rosen [93:17]

• On the Broader Danger
  “It doesn't take a very large minority of people who believe that killing is good and cleansing and righteous to destroy life for the majority...if there are a few thousand Americans so inclined to ideological violence, that's more than enough to destroy everything.”

  • Seth Mandel [86:58]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Assassination, Immediate Response, and Social Media: [05:05] – [12:43]
• The Attack on Free Society and College Campuses: [06:02] – [07:46]
• Broader Context of Political Violence: [15:38] – [32:57]
• Charlie Kirk’s Legacy, Influence, and Stance on Antisemitism: [30:10] – [43:45]
• Culture, Media, and the Glorification of Violence: [46:38] – [58:12]
• Historical Waves of Violence: [60:48] – [64:49]
• Presidential Response, National Fracture, and Uncertainty: [64:49] – [71:04]
• Panel’s Outlook on the Future, Fear of Further Division: [95:58] – [104:11]

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Tone and Language

The discussion is urgent, reflective, and at times elegiac. There are moments of personal confession, sorrow, and regret, particularly regarding perceptions of Charlie Kirk and anxieties over America’s direction. There is also an undercurrent of fear—both for the future and the potential for a cycle of retaliatory violence. The participants speak as friends, colleagues, and as keepers of the public trust, mourning not just a man but a moment, and what it may foretell.

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Conclusion

This episode grapples intensely with what the assassination of Charlie Kirk means for America—with particular focus on the intersection of political radicalization, social media, and cultural change. The hosts agree that the threat is not just to individuals, but to the entire fabric of American civil society. While there are small glimmers of hope—a unifying moment at a Yankees game, perhaps—the panel is clear-eyed about the dangers ahead, calling for both vigilance and a reaffirmation of the values that once held the country together.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Expect a worse Some preacher pain Some die of thirst no way.

[A]

Of knowing this way it's going Hope.

[B]

For the best expect the worst.

[A]

Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Thursday, September 11, 2025. I'm John Pod Horowitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With us, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe. Hi John. Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.

[B]

Hi John.

[A]

Washington, Commentary columnist Matthew Con Netti. Hi Matt.

[C]

Hi John.

[A]

Social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi Christine.

[D]

Hi John.

[A]

And joining us today, our longtime former colleague and Commentary contributor, National Review's Noah Rossman. Hi Noah. Hi John Noah's joining us today because for the past 10 years, even after he departed Commentary's staff, he has been the person that we go to to try to make sense of the creeping and growing acts of overt political violence in the United States, beginning with articles he wrote in 2016 and then continuing to this the beginning of this year when his piece Clockwork Blue appeared on our cover. Noah is now fashioning that article or using it as the source material for a book that he is writing on this topic. That obviously exploded into our consciousnesses yesterday afternoon with the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I did not have time because I was having trouble logging in to pull up Noah's piece of Clockwork Blue. But maybe, Noah, you can dig up the tweet that you used that quoted the last paragraph of the piece you wrote, which you put up last night, because I think it is a very strong jumping off point. Again, written at the end of last year, published, you know, at the beginning of this year.

[E]

Sure, thank you. I'm pulling it up. I did not plan to make my niche political violence in America, specifically left wing political violence in America. I don't think I'm properly insured for this line of work that I'm putting myself together with.

[A]

You know, you say that and, you know, you say that, it's not a bad line. But this is no joke, by which I mean obviously nothing that we're saying today is a joke, particularly on this 24th anniversary of 9 11. But speaking to people who do what Charlie Kirk does for a living and a lot of other people have done, the chilling effect of the event yesterday is real. People are canceling speaking events, speaking events are being redesigned to make sure that they are indoors, that, you know, this is going to be yet another moment at which certain types of freedoms are going to end up having to be curtailed for safety reasons. Because how can anybody be sure that if they are out and about somewhere or doing something on a college campus or something, there won't be somebody with a rifle on a roof ready to shoot?

[C]

That was one of the objectives of the attack. We should just point out it's not just an assassination of a 31 year old man married with two small children. It was an attack on the free society.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

I think that's one reason why America is shaken in a way that we, we haven't been for some time. And it's grimly symbolic that it happened on the eve of the 24th anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

[A]

Right.

[E]

So just to summarize.

[A]

Sorry, sure.

[E]

Not at all.

[C]

It happened on a college campus.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And I think that is a particular interest in this. College campuses are supposed to be places of free and open debate. There's supposed to be places where someone like Charlie Kirk can come and attempt to persuade young people about the validity of his ideas. And what we've seen over the past generation is that instead of being places of free inquiry and free discourse, college campuses have become petri dishes of nihilism and radicalism. I'm not talking about this particular campus. I don't know it. I never heard of it until the news broke yesterday afternoon. But what we do know, especially in the years since October 7, is that these universities have become the source of real fascism in this country. And the sort of violence and evil ideologies that not only kill Charlie Kirk, but also killed the United Healthcare executive, that also lead to the attacks on Christian schools and churches, and that also contribute to the firebombing of the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania's home and the two assassination attempts on President Trump.

[A]

So, Noah, can you.

[E]

Sure.

[A]

Read your concluding paragraph?

[E]

Yes. It ends thusly. We've been lucky that no single act has set off a truly cataclysmic chain reaction. But the potential for a spiraling cascade of violence and reprisals is ever present. And one day soon, unless we grow sick of the sight of blood or become revolted by the thought of an America descending into actual political carnage, and unless the left is willing to take a look, a long, hard look in the mirror, our luck will run out.

[A]

So our luck ran out yesterday. I mean, it may not be that, you know, our luck, we're drained of luck. This is a signal event in a thousand different ways. But here's what I was thinking about, and Christine, as our. As if Noah is our political violence expert, you're our social media is an evil expert. Within five seconds of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, I saw footage of the murder of Charlie Kirk right in front of me on this little screen on Twitter, on X. This is an image that I did not need to see, that did me know was of no value. It's a snuff film. I watched this guy being killed practically in real time, and we. And then within minutes, of course, all over the place. While the vast majority of the commentary that I saw, reared in horror, politicians on all sides of the political talking about the horror of what's happened here and all of that, nonetheless, there was still this bubbling up of what you might call kind of like this poisoned public opinion that welcomed this killing that celebrated this, that made jokes about this killing and depersonalized, dehumanized Kirk as he was dying in the emergency room. And, you know, I was thinking about 911 and what would have happened had there been social media on 911 and how it would have been three minutes before the fire can't melt steel. The Jews did it. That person that we see jumping off the building actually isn't really jumping off the building. It's a fake, the photo's a fake. The event is a false flag. George W. Bush did it. All of that stuff that was kind of in the, you know, sort of the noxious subculture would have been right out in front of us. Right, right, right in our faces. And, you know, that's part and parcel of why our luck ran out here in Noah's formulation.

[D]

Well, I regret to say, I say this with no happiness at all, but we're not going back to a time where those things aren't going to be shown immediately and spread immediately. But I will say this, it also exposes the reality of some, quite frankly, evil minds in society. It does also spread that evil, as you say, we don't know if the person who shot him was left leaning in their ideology. We don't know that. But we do know that a lot of people on the left celebrated the fact that he was shot. And that is horrifying. That's just absolutely unacceptable. I will say that one of the audiences that Charlie Kirk really connected to, and starting, at least for my kids age range, they're 19. When they were in middle school, they all got to know Charlie often initially online through social media. And a lot of them who then went on to college campuses where they did feel like they had to hide their conservative beliefs, were really, really heartened by his message of no, get out there, say what you believe, argue with people who disagree with you. That's how you persuade others. And you do it in a way that is the opposite of violence. And so I think in a weird way, a lot of people who came to understand and respect Charlie's work as young people were horrified the minute they saw that video. My, my son texted me and said, did you see what happened? I knew immediately they were talking about Charlie Kirk. And they weren't big Charlie Kirk fans. They came across him when they were younger and listened to, you know, would watch some of his videos and stuff. But he is, he is very important to this young generation of voters who got to know him in very formative years and now see what happened to his message. Of arguing that persuasion and democratic deliberation and all of the things. Look, he was a total meme lord when he first started out. I was not a huge fan of some of the things he used to say, but he really connected to young people. And the reason that this is another signal moment is that an entire generation that grew up on social media watched him die on social media.

[C]

Well, and it's not that you watched him die, I think, and I don't watch that type of thing. And I'm not so sure actually that it's inevitable that we'll see it in the future. It's the way that we're headed as a country doesn't necessarily end in anarchy. It ends in top down authority. All right? And so that's just left to be seen what type of measures will be imposed eventually if this goes on. But I was struck by the video of him prior to the assassination. He had such joy. It was so visible. He was smiling, he was tossing hats out to the crowd. He was clearly happy to be there at the start of this tour that was going to take him to college campuses all over the country. This is what he was meant to do to appeal to young people. And the young people themselves were joyful. They were happy to be there. Even the ones, I'm sure who were liberals or progressives who were looking forward to the chance to sit in front of him and argue with him, which he welcomed. Right. That was kind of the shtick of these tours. And so there's no clear contrast between the two futures that America must choose between than what preceded the event and the aftermath of the event. And the fact that this assassin was on a roof 200 meters or yards away in a very disturbingly similar technique than to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania last year. That suggests that this was not a lunatic, you know, who was taking a moment of opportunity to kill someone famous, but a premeditated cold blood killing. And just like Manjoni gunning down that United Healthcare executive, also the father of two young children in the back. That's the danger that awaits America.

[A]

Noah, we commissioned, or we talked about your writing, A Clockwork Blue, the piece that we published because of the murder of Luigi Mangione and the response of.

[E]

Brian Thompson, Health care.

[A]

Excuse me, Brian, L.A. murder of Brian Thompson. Yeah, because not only did it happen, happen in broad daylight, 6:45 in the morning in midtown Manhattan, but it was almost instantaneous that the murder started to be either excused away, explained away, or celebrated by and not by A world of psychopathy. We're talking about Bernie Sanders who said there should never be, as you say in a passage in the piece, there should never be political violence like this. But.

[E]

There were a lot of Americans.

[A]

Are very angry about health care. So therefore, implicitly, Brian Thompson and everybody like him had it coming. Yeah, right.

[E]

Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, all of them deployed the very loaded butt in order to find some justification for their own political program that they could scrape off a crime scene floor. Matt's point is very important. I've been staring into the abyss now for a couple of months and the extent to which individuals who are radicalized, usually self radicalization. We talk a lot about self radicalization because we don't necessarily have small cell violence in this country, but we do. It does still exist. The attacks on the ICE centers over the course of the summer, some of which were very sophisticated operations, tactically adroit, in which individuals would hide in tree lines and create distractions and lure ICE agents out and then sabotage them. It's militarily smart, but we mostly have radicalized individuals like this and they take their cues from former. For people who execute violent attacks, like what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, like what happened at the President's property in Florida. But they also take solace from the notion that the people they respect and like may want to see stuff like this. So when the vast majority of the progressive, far left, progressive intellectual infrastructure in this country rallies around the notion that, yeah, I mean, it's sort of not great that we're killing fathers who committed no crime other than to work in a sector that we don't necessarily like. But it does demonstrate the degree to which everybody's angry. And I can channel that anger. I can harness that anger towards my own political ends. That is the delusion that has afflicted the Democratic political class for the better part of this century. It didn't begin with the killing of Brian Thompson, as I demonstrate in that article and will subsequently demonstrate in the book. You can see it throughout the 2010s and a little bit earlier in the aughts. There was, for example, just jumps out of my head. In 2016, a number of Dallas police officers were targeted in a military style campaign of assassinations from a rooftop shooter who was dispatched with a robot. And the President didn't exactly eulogize him, but found in this killer a measure of determination and gumption and righteous grievance that needed an airing that we could not ignore, needed to be heard. That is the Sort of thing that people take inspiration from, especially those who are not especially don't have a lot of cultural moorings, don't have a lot of relationships in their life, are atomized and adrift. And those people can cause real havoc. You know, we talk about the riots. That's a problem. That's. You know, that's something that is a sort of a different category of violence because you, as a properly adjusted individual can succumb to the lizard brain that just attracts you to mob violence and compels you to participate in mob violence in ways you otherwise wouldn't in any other sane situation. But the radical individual who shatters the social contract with one insane act of violence like this can foment those mobs. And those mobs can attract sane people to them to do insane things. And that's how the begins. And it doesn't just end easy.

[B]

I just want to add, there's two things about this that make this a bit more. That make it a bit scarier, I think, for people. The first is that they don't have a shooter in custody. This is the. The morning after. So the first is that what we usually see with these acts of violence, even in Minnesota, where that lunatic shot members of the Democratic. Members of the. Of the State House, he. Before he was found, his car was found. Right? With materials and stuff like that, we're used to seeing evidence and a manifesto and this and that. We're used to seeing names and people combing their social media. And obviously at first, people can get it wrong. Got it wrong yesterday, some. Two people were arrested who are not involved, you know, in the crime. And that happened in New York also at the NFL shooting. But we're used to right away getting some feedback into the political world, into the political mind of the person at the heart of this. And this feels more like when there was a D.C. sniper, you know, all those years ago, on the loose. And without knowing who it was or why exactly. There is a sort of randomized, you know, feel to it. And the randomized feel to it is the other thing that makes this a harder week, which is. Was the stabbing on the train just a couple days earlier, a couple weeks earlier.

[A]

It only became a news story that last week. Seth, I gotta stop you because I'm. I got to repeat what. I think you're going in the wrong direction here. I think Matt made the point. This was not a randomized moment. No one's. No one's. We're not at risk. Ordinary people are not at risk from somebody Getting on a rooftop at a college gathering and then using essentially sniper skills that were likely learned in the, In a, you know, in a military setting. To assassinate somebody, that is not the train is a random threat. Psychotics and schizophrenics who push people off platforms are random threat. This is directed political violence. It is a, it is an entirely different matter. What's striking about it just quickly is 25 years ago, nobody in the world would have known who Charlie Kirk was. He's a political operative who rose through the ranks of sort of, sort of being a young Republican, was a prodigy, figured out how to be a successful get out the vote guy, and then also became a kind of celebrity using social media. But the Charlie Kirk of 25 Years Ago, Nobody would have known, nobody would ever have taken, you know, there were like three or four political consultants that people whose existence people knew of, right? There was. There was Carville, there was Madeleine, there was Karl Rove, there was Lee Atwater. Nobody knew who these people were. And now everybody who has any kind of high scale public profile involvement in political life in the United States has a target on his head or in his back or on his neck. We all what this message.

[C]

That's what makes it disturbing to people. It's because it's, it's different from the random shootings which of course do occur and which do make everybody scared. But in this particular case, it wasn't random. It was directed at a political figure. But this was not an elected official. This wasn't even a political consultant. He was not a member of the cabinet. He is a political activist. He is a social media personality. And what that means is it widens the aperture for potential targets so that, as John says, anyone involved in public life now is thinking, what, what am I? And under threat? Should I watch what I say? But that is exactly what this assassin meant to achieve and why it's so important to resist that temptation to remain silent.

[A]

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[E]

You know, so I said something really important there actually that I think is going to be something I'm going to be focusing on a lot, which is the mechanisms that the left uses to avoid confronting the degree to which a lot of this violence, most of the violence now in this particular period of American violence is coming from the left. Ezra Klein did this yesterday, New York Time magazine. You know, we're in a crisis of political violence. All of a sudden, everybody's tuning in to something we've been focused on for a long time, right? But they see violence, political violence from the right where it doesn't necessarily exist. They're buttressed by all these statistics, a lot of which are category errors, but statistics that demonstrate to them that the right is the font from which all political violence springs. And they attribute events that are not political terrorism to the left. As Recline attributed the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer to one of these events, which was an event in which all the conspirators were FBI informants and everybody else was acquitted. He talked about how the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband was right wing violence. The guy was a schizophrenic. He wasn't acting on any orders. In fact, the degree to which there was any support for him from the far right fringes was really muted. And yet they see this as just right wing terrorism. The assassination of the Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hartman and her husband. This is, again, this is evidence of a political act of political terrorism to the left. And when the trial happens and when we review the degree to which this individual was unhinged, was acting out politically against people he knew personally, but nevertheless not in support of some sort of a political agenda, not revolutionary violence designed to foment a broader outrage and a broader direct action campaign. They have a variety of category errors into which they retreat. That allows them to say now that they recognize political violence is everywhere, oh, it's everybody. It's everything. It's everybody. It's nebulous, it's society. No one's to blame. And only a couple of months ago they were saying, this is a right wing thing, so they will not recognize it.

[B]

And also, just to finish, the point that I was trying to make before is that if you were sitting next to Charlie Kirk yesterday, as people were, you were sitting next to a guy who was shot, right? If you were sitting on the train, there were people sitting nearby when an open attack was shot going on. And both of the things that we said afterwards were that this could change the way that people relate to these environments in which the violence is happening right on the train. Anybody who's seen that video will have a hard time sitting there staring at their phone and not, you know, I don't know, blinking at shadows or whatever.

[F]

But.

[B]

But these are the types of events that change the way we interact with our environment. And people are already talking about open air events. And we had those discussions of open air events after Trump was shot. And so, you know, this week, I know that the train thing, as you said, was not this week, but it became a story this week in the last few days, was that people are starting to wonder, you know, a shot rings out on a college campus where normally it's safe. Somebody gets stabbed on a train where normally it's safe. People are looking around. Regular, normal people are looking around and are going to be seeing and feeling danger in multiple areas where maybe even two weeks ago they didn't feel the same way, in part because, as you said, Charlie Kirk is not the president giving a speech who was shot at, but because he was essentially, you know, a kind of influencer, you know, more than anything. And the way that people fall into those categories today.

[C]

I want to add another reason why I think people are so disturbed by this, and that is Charlie Crook's age. He was 31 years old. He. He had achieved so much in such a short span of time. He came onto the scene when he was 18 years old. He began impressing kind of wealthy older Republicans by his polemical skills and by his energy. He turned Turning Point from an idea into an incredibly influential organization, the equivalent of the Young Americans for Freedom, which powered the conservative movement after it was founded in 1960. And he did it with just a tremendous energy and verve, but always a positive mental attitude. There was a. A New York Times profile of him some time ago. And of course, the Times journalists went in probably extremely skeptical and, you know, antagonistic towards Kirk's political views. But what they came away from their time with him was that he was a good person. At 31 years old, he was a good person. No drinking, no drugs, a devout Christian, someone who was married. He had two small children, he cared about deeply. A friend to Israel.

[A]

A friend to Israel. I want to talk about that importantly.

[C]

And the fact that that is cut off, it's cut off in an afternoon, suddenly. That is, I think, is what spooked this country.

[F]

I just want to amplify this point about the broadening of targets on the left that's been happening steadily. I mean, when, when was, when before was a health care CEO considered a political target? There's a broadening of targets in part because there's a growing list of leftist, exotic, violent political ideologies. You know, there are these manifestos that come trans manifestos anti tech, anti healthcare. There's sort of course Throw in the anti Semitism. Now there are. So when any, when there's some shooting at this point, you know, it's political, you know, it's ideological. You don't know what from under which one of these radical rocks the shooter crawled out.

[E]

But it's all inflected with revolution.

[F]

Yes.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

It's all part of the Omni Cause.

[E]

Left wing revolution.

[F]

That's right.

[A]

Exactly.

[F]

The violence sort of mimics the Omni cause. Yeah.

[E]

Right.

[A]

Now I want to dial back to 2018. Adam Rubenstein, who works at the Free Press and was a staffer at the Weekly Standard just before for it shuttered, has a piece in the Free Press alongside a wonderful piece by Matt that everybody should read this morning called the Charlie Kirk I Knew and the Story he Tells. So going back to 2018, I was very suspicious of Charlie Kirk. He just seemed to me to be like one of these Trump kids, maga kids around. But I found them all. I thought maybe they were all sort of hustlers or they were just like attaching to whatever was the latest fad. And, you know, there was all that incredibly sort of ugliness of the sort of the Trump supporter in 2016. And I wasn't paying that much attention to him, but I just assumed he was like one of these people. So Adam went and spent a week and did a profile of Charlie Kirk that appeared on the COVID of the Weekly Standard a couple of months before the Weekly Standard went out of business. And the morning that it came out, he got some he email or tech from somebody in the White. In the Trump White House calling him a cockroach and a shill and a monster for how he had portrayed Charlie Kirk. And then he was kind of sitting there shaken in his account. And then he gets a text from Charlie Kirk who says, hey, great job. And then a couple of months later, they're on a plane together and Charlie Kirk asks. They happen to be on the same plane. Charlie Kirk asks whoever is sitting next to Adam if he would mind trading seats or trading places. And then they sat there and sort of like caught up. So this is seven years before. This is before this massive degree of success that he had had. He was not 31, he was 24 or 23. And clearly I, you know, my snap judgment of who he must have been then was extraordinarily unjust.

[D]

We did talk about, I mean, I was at the Weekly Standard that I remember the sort of editorial discussions of this piece. And Adam was also quite a young reporter. Like, this was a big story. He was also 24 and he's amazing. But there was. The thing is, Kirk was very much a performance artist at that stage of his career and it's why he was so compelling, particularly to the young people who came of age online in the meme wars and the crying liberal tears age. But what I think is important to look at is how rapidly and in a sophisticated way he grew. He actually, his rhetoric in the last few years is quite different from what he sounds like in 2016. He started writing books and the happy warrior stuff, which I think, Matt, you use that phrase in your, in your wonderful piece. That was real. It was at the core of his character and his temperament. And that I think is why, if we have a chance to talk about why, he was also vehemently opposed to the anti Semitism that was developing on the right. Those people listened to him and it was very important that he spoke to that. And I think it spoke to his core character and temperament and judgment in a way for someone who is so young could actually develop and learn over time.

[A]

I want to pick up on that because I want to mention another injustice that I did to Charlie Kirk that I deeply regret and have deeply regretted over time, but very, very minor. So he basically is on a knife's edge is the wrong term, but because of where he was situated in the political discussion. So he is somebody who is friends with the Nat cons and friends with Ben Shapiro. I don't know if you can sort of like, you know, I don't want to get into like this kind of, you know, parochial right wing divisions and stuff like that. But you know, he, he was somebody who supported Israel. But a lot of the people who were in his camp and who would come to his conferences, excuse me, were following the direction of some of these people in an anti Israel direction. Right. The sort of. The people in his ambit were themselves starting to say that, you know, this war was, we should, why were we involved and what is Israel to have in us and why do people care and all this and, and kind of participating in mild anti Semitic rhetoric of their own. And he had a kind of choice to make. And when he was in the middle of this last year or something like that, I tweeted something out, he had said something and I tweeted something out dismissive of him. And a couple of very pro Israel people of my acquaintance, known to people who are listening, but it's a private thing, like got in touch with me and said, what are you doing? He's a friend of Our, like, we don't want to give, you know, he's a friend of ours and we're trying to, to, you know, strength, you know, stiffen his spine and make sure that he doesn't go down this bad path that so many in the JD Vance world are going down. Don't do this. You know, stop. And, and you're not, you're not helping. And I'm like, well, I'm not here to help. He said something, I criticize it. I don't even remember what he said. But whatever the story here is, he decided to line him, he decided to make his stand and pitch his tent in the conversation on the right, on the side of the righteousness and justice of Israel's cause in Gaza and Israel's existence as our foremost ally and, you know, sharer of the same civilizational aspects that are, you know, the fundaments of both Israel and the United States. And he needn't have gone there. You know, if you're a vanguarder, you probably were kind of more tempted to go the other way. So that needs to be mentioned as well, which is one of the reasons why we don't know who killed him. And it's incredibly unnerving to me that there is some possibility that we'll never find who killed him. And, you know, the world in which we don't understand the motivations of the people who do these things, like the kid in Butler, like the guy who shot, you know, at the concert at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. It is very societally disturbing that we can't pinpoint a cause. But for all we know, this was a, you know, this was, it was because of his support for Israel that he was shot down.

[B]

Can I connect something? Can I connect what you and Christine were both saying about? Because Christine's point about him growing up is important because we, we have come through an era in which lots of, especially on the, it seems more so on the right wing influencers start young and they become famous and they become famous at, you know, 16, 17, right. They give a speech at CPAC and, you know, and they sort of grow up before our eyes, which is, which is one thing. And. But to connect it to what you were saying, I don't know. A month or so ago, I wrote about something that happened on Charlie Crook show. And this, I think was. This I think really was a perfect example of what he was trying to do. Now a mother called into his show and said, you know, my son, he's been thinking for himself a lot recently and doing his own research and all that other stuff. And I've been very proud of him because he's, you know, he didn't. He was suspicious of some of the stuff coming from Fauci during COVID and he was suspicious of some of the restrictions, and he looked it up for himself and he sort of made up his own mind and he wasn't a sheep and all this stuff.

[D]

However.

[B]

And then Charlie Kirk said, you're going to say he has fallen down a rabbit hole of online anti Semitism, are you? And she said. She said, yes. She said, I'm very worried because the path to questioning, the path of questioning authority for yourself and questioning, you know, what everybody is telling you to do, has led him so far down that rabbit hole that he is now questioning basically everything. And it ends up where conspiracy theories end up, which is anti Semitism. And so Charlie Kirk, she said, you know, listen, I want him to be a free thinking young conservative. I want him to challenge the status quo, and I want him to. And I want him to question things. But how do we do that in a way that he doesn't fall all the way through the black hole of the Internet into this dark, you know, underbelly? And Charlie Kirk said, I knew what you were gonna say because I have gone through that period fairly recently in my life. Not that Charlie Kirk felt fell into a black level antisemitism, but because he's young, because he was 31, and because he knows what young conservative men encounter on the Internet. And then he said, you need to talk about antisemitism in the context of these other conspiracies as a way of what your son is doing is he's falling into a trap when he's questioning things. He's taking personal responsibility. That's a good conservative thing. When he falls into blaming one group of people for all the troubles in the world and think bad things that happen to him, he is shirking personal responsibility. It is laziness, and it is a cat. You know, it will become a character flaw if these people grow up to be the sort of people who will blame one group for everything bad that happened to them. It is scapegoating. And it's not just anti Semitism and bad because it's bigotry, but because it is scrambling young people, especially young men's brains into thinking into a completely different way than they were. And that, I think, really connects why, as Christine said, we saw him grow up and we saw his rhetoric change as he lived through These, you know, different periods. And also on the anti Semitism thing, that he had a specific way of talking. Talking about it from a non Jewish perspective to other non Jews, that was extraordinarily valuable.

[C]

That's what we've been robbed of.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

It's so awful.

[A]

I want to ask you this. You've got to. You gotta. You gotta jump. But Luigi Mangioni emerges and shoots Brian Thompson in December in New York or November, whenever it was six months earlier, maybe a year earlier, a movie comes out called the Menu with Ralph Fiennes about a bunch of rich leading industrialists who go to an island where there is a famous chef. It's a restaurant on this island. And the chef decides he's going to. They're going to play a game in which he can. He basically is going to kill them all because they're so evil. This is a satire. Okay, so that's exhibit number one. Exhibit number two, a movie about to come out in about a month called Begonia, made by the director Yorgis Lanthimos, starring Emma Stone, both, by the way, signatories to this evil letter saying that Jewish money should be boycotted by Hollywood. This is a movie about a guy who decides that a health care executive, I believe, or a senior CEO played by Emma Stone is an alien. And he kidnaps her and he chains her in the basement and he shaves her head because according to him, she's getting alien signals through her hair. And the movie apparently is a cat and mouse game in which she tries to kill, keep herself alive by negotiating with this guy or playing games with him, like in the King of Comedy or something like that. But this is a movie that basically lionizes the kidnapping and torture of a CEO because of, you know, political reasons. And I assume that the twist is that she is an alien, or if she's not an alien, she's a demon or something like that. Another movie with Anya Taylor Joy, coming out later this year that has some form of a similar plot. And in two weeks, Leonardo DiCaprio's $150 million movie, One Battle After Another, which is about A weatherman, the 1970s, you know, radical, and the reemergence of the need to do domestic bombings in the United states in the 2000s in some fashion or other. So what's happening here is the culture is making the world safe for the idea that it is okay to parlay political violence as long as the violence is against people we don't like, who are reps of lay capitalism or politics or Law enforcement or whatever.

[C]

It's dehumanizing. And it starts, I think, in the universities. I think it starts with postmodernism. It starts with gender ideology. It starts with 1619 project a concerted attack on all of the pillars of American society and the beliefs that uphold Western civilization. And it's been growing for some time. It's now. Now, as you say, it's present in the culture. We had that recent poll just, just in the past few days talking about how among progressive women, life priorities have collapsed.

[A]

Right.

[C]

The belief in marriage and children has just plummeted. We see that the Democrats have turned against capitalism. This is what they've been taught. And we've spoken about it on this program before. This idea that we have now every year, new graduates who have meaningless degrees, few prospects, a load of debt and mounds of entitlement and resentment.

[A]

They are the shock troops.

[C]

They're the shock troops. We have a little fascism that's coming.

[A]

We have a literal number. From the foundation for Individual Rights of Expression poll released on Tuesday. 34% of college students recently said they supported using violence in some circumstances to stop a campus speech.

[C]

I just want to say one thing before I go. I just want to say one thing about the hunt for the killer. We should remember it did take a business with week, five days to find Manjoni. And now he. He committed his heinous act in New York City, where there's many surveillance cameras. This campus is different. But I do think that we still have the possibility of finding the killer. And I think it's very important, whoever the assassin is, that we do not give them any public. I think one thing we have to do in order to stop this period of violence from getting out of control is to deny the actors not just freedom by going after them and punishing them, but also the oxygen of celebrity, which only will inspire copycats.

[A]

Well, Matt, as you go, maybe. Christine, you just said we're not putting that genie back in the bottle. I mean, it's going to be very, very hard. Already yesterday, two possible suspects were taken into custody, and we knew who they were five minutes after they were taken, I assume because people in the FBI were, you know, were leaking their identity. So we've seen pic. We saw pictures of two of them.

[D]

Yeah, I do. I actually, I want to hear from Noah about these arrests because I am not a fan of Keshe Patel and really love to see anybody else heading the FBI for an investigation like this. But I'm curious, Noah, if you. If that kind of attempt Is that common in these things to like, to identify, to arrest two people and then release them?

[E]

Well, I don't know. I'm not abreast of what law enforcement's processes are like this. What I, what I would say is probably it's not common for the FBI to announce that it has a suspect in its custody and then release them on social media.

[A]

To be fair, I don't think the FBI formally announced that they had suspects in custody. We knew that one of them had been arrested.

[D]

He was tweeting it.

[E]

He has suspect in custody.

[A]

Oh, I'm sorry.

[E]

The suspect's identity was released to the public illicitly. Right.

[A]

That's what I'm saying. Right.

[E]

And then I subsequently said, no, that is a breach of protocol.

[A]

Okay, fair enough. I'm sorry, I was mistaken.

[E]

Nevertheless, a couple of points you had mentioned this growing comfort with political violence, or at least telling pollsters that you're comfortable with it, that's been on the rise. When I wrote my first book this in 2017, it was about 20% of college students who were polled by UCLA's John Villa Senior that said they were comfortable with using political violence to silence speech with which they disappointed. Agreed. But a brief point on your cultural products that are sort of acclimating Americans to violence, that is a response to demand. There is a supply because there is a demand for this sort of content and it bubbles up from beneath. The killing of Wesley La partner lapatner.

[A]

Wesley Pat was shot in midtown Manhattan in the lobby of Blackstone.

[B]

By a.

[E]

Crazy person, by a person who thought he was meting out vengeance against the NFL for imagined slights.

[A]

Right.

[E]

That was an act of random, senseless violence. But from beneath, there was a sensibility, irrationality to it that was invented and attached to the killer's motives. An anti capitalist motive, a revolutionary motive, a socialist motive. And if you dig into a lot of these acts of violence, whether they're Luddism, whether it's anti technology, whether it's environmental, whether it's anti health care, it's all revolutionary violence of the sort that is very familiar to students of the 1960s, 70s and early 80s, to students of the 1910s and 1920s.

[A]

It's very familiar to Russian intellectuals of the 1860s.

[E]

It preceded the Soviet revolution.

[A]

No, I mean it was, it was, it's the subject of the great work of Dostoevsky and it's the. Was the cause of the assassination of the reformist czar Alexander II in 1881 that led to the installation. This is Matt's point. Even though Matt has left the installation of a very authoritarian as Russia was liberalizing, the killing of Alexander II led his son Alexander III to crack down on liberty and freedom.

[E]

Yeah, this can all sound really arcane and academic.

[A]

Not arcane at all.

[E]

Not at all. It has absolutely. It is absolutely relevant to our current condition up to and including the anti Semitic violence with which we've been living for the last two years. Now. The Soviets created the notion that, you know, otherwise you would be like, what is the connection between anti Israel violence and leftist revolutionary, anti capitalist politics? And the answer is the Soviet Union, it created that connection, made an academic theory out of it, anti Zionism and exported it liberally in order to convey the notion that, you know, this individual nation is antithetical to the proletarian consciousness, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the bottom line is it's all one facet of the same revolutionary ethos. A violent revolutionary ethos. It's not hard to draw the strings that connect one to the other. Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a 4 liter jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

[A]

Oh, come.

[E]

They called a truce for their holiday.

[A]

And used Expedia trip planner to collaborate.

[E]

On all the details of their trip.

[A]

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool. Whatever. You were made to outdo your holidays.

[E]

We were made to help organize the competition.

[A]

Expedia made to travel.

[B]

I'm Oliver Darcy. And I'm John Passantino. We have spent years covering the inner workings of the news media, tech, politics, Hollywood and power. Now through our nightly newsletter, Status.

[A]

And we're bringing that same reporting and sharp analysis to a new podcast, Power Lines.

[B]

Every Friday, we're breaking down the biggest stories, shaping the industry, explaining why they matter, and saying the things most people are thinking but too timid to say out loud.

[A]

No spin, no fluff, just sharp analysis that isn't afraid to call it like it is. We also pull back the curtain via our exclusive reporting to take you behind the scenes.

[B]

My understanding, having reported this, is that the Pentagon protested to CNN and tried to effectively exile the CNN producer. And when the moment calls for it, we've got some hot takes. I just think Brad Pitt, honestly, he kind of seems a little washed up.

[A]

Oh my God. That's Power Lines, presented by Status. Follow Powerlines and listen on Apple, Spotify.

[B]

Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app.

[D]

And there's also, culturally, I'm intrigued by, John, what you were laying out with these Movies. But I remember discussions we had on this podcast about the rise of the anti hero and sort of, you know, superhero movies and the sort of glamorization of the dark superhero. But healthy cultures use antiheroes as a lesson, right? It's sort of, this is where we don't want to go. And what I see culturally, both in the movies you mentioned, John, but just generally bubbling up from beneath on social media, as you say, Noah is a glorification of the anti hero. That's a sign of a nihilistic culture where the anti hero is the only person who can act on, on cultural and political questions. And that's a very dangerous cultural position.

[E]

Perspective is really important. I mean, you can always go to social media and find a bunch of idiots and insane nihilists who are saying the worst possible thing and make an example out of them. But the people who respond to those things are the people in political positions of political authority who talk, you know, who condemn Luigi Mangioni. But it's the President of the United States who says that the massacre of police officers in Dallas is a horrible thing. But those are the. That is the incentive structure that's being created from the bottom and it's being responded to by people at the top. So you cannot say it does not matter. You can't say it's irrelevant. It's extremely relevant.

[A]

I just want to read another little, just cultural detail. Like, is a ridiculous little cultural detail. But yeah, so we are, we are now creating, There are. People are creating cultural heroes out of these sort of late capitalist critics that are taking their late capitalist criticism and turning it into action and violence. Right. So there is again, a movie review. I'm sorry to go this way, but it just, it's an interesting way of showing how things seep or how ideas seep into the larger culture. Movie coming out with Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller called Eternity, which is basically a ripoff of defending your life. People die and they go to heaven and they get to choose at this train depot limbo what kind of forever they'd like. Where, where could they live? So here, here are the choices, according to Richard Lawson in Hollywood Reporter that the movie posits. Will it be an unending day at the beach? A million lifetimes spent as a libertine in Queer World. Maybe a trip to the political Eden of Marxist world, though we're told, ha, that that one's all booked up. The political Eden of Marxist world. Now even 30 years never read a history book.

[D]

Let's just state that.

[A]

No, I mean, 30 years ago. Even then you wouldn't. I mean, you know, Marxist world is a. Is a dystopian nightmare of gulags and mass mur. Mass murders in which Soviet Union and China together in their Marxist totalitarianism, murdered close to 150 million people. So this is now 2025. You're making a movie about how everybody wants to live in Marxist world. Like when you say there's a demand. I don't know if there's a demand. What there is is a cultural set of attitudes that is taken up by the people at the high summits of our culture. Movie producers, financiers, writers, directors, actors, performers that think is kind of jazzed by this idea, let's make a movie about kidnapping an executive as. And talk about lay capitalism and how evil lay capitalism is as we sit in our homes in Malibu and make as Emma stone probably does, $40 million a year. But we hate capitalism, don't we? And when we project the idea that we hate capitalism and we don't like democracy and we like violence against people that you don't like and it all comes together. You got a guy on a roof with a, With a rifle. Now, I don't know that that's what's motivating him because again, for all I know, you know, he's. This is some kind of an Islamist attack or it's, you know, something like that where we have the, the, the, the total, you know, you know, sort of the circular effect of the Marxist anti. Zionism, you know, which Marxism being of course, anti religious, anti, you know, opposed to religion and doctrine, now supplying radical theocrats and, you know, believers in the Ummah and all of that with their arguments that they then use to convince people to go and break through the fence at, you know, at the Gaza envelope and murder and injure 5,000 Jews just for being Jews. So the world is a very complicated place, but what we have here is some weird. We have lost our antibodies against this and society had them and it's losing them and it's losing them rapidly.

[E]

But really, I mean, you could say if you survey American history, that those antibodies were the exception, not the rule.

[A]

Well, this has not been a country awash in political violence.

[E]

Not in the last 20.

[D]

No, but we've had major cycles of political violence. Noah's right. I mean.

[A]

No, we've had cycles and then. Yeah, look, we were talking about this last night or I was talking about this last night or on texts that, you know, we had this period that began, obviously there are hints of it before with assassination efforts by Puerto Rican nationalist son Harry Truman. But the, you know, assassination era begins with JFK in 1963, right? Political VI. He was shot by a communist by somebody who had recently returned from the Soviet Union and was head of the Fair Play for Cuba committee. Shot by a communist. Then his brother is killed by a Palestinian terrorist. Martin Luther King is killed in the same year, earlier than RFK 68 and 72. George Wallace is paralyzed by Arthur Bremer's bullet. In 1975, Gerald Ford. Two assassination attempts in 18 days by police, female members of the Manson family. 1978, George Moscone, the mayor of San Francisco, is killed by Dan White. 1979, Aldo Moro, the prime minister of Italy, is kidnapped and then murdered by a radical terrorist group. And then in 1981, of course, within the span of three weeks, Ronald Reagan is nearly killed by an assassin's bullet. And then the Pope, John Paul II is nearly killed by an assassin's bullet. And then the assassination era stopped. Nobody knows why, nobody knows the reasons. It was as though we had this almost 20 year spasm of political violence aimed at people at the very top. Now, maybe security got better. I mean, there's all kinds of things you can say that would explain this, but we had this spasm and then it ended. We had this spasm in the 70s leading up, I think, to Jim Jones and the, and the People's Temple. And there was a radical leftist group from San Francisco. They go to Guyana, they set up Jonestown. Someone goes to figure out what's going on. Congressman Leah Ryan, he's shot and then they all commit suicide. And, and somehow that period of nihilistic left wing psychosis that had gripped so much of the country. Patty Hearst, there's all this stuff ended. It kind of just. It stopped. Like it was too much and maybe hopeful in hope. I just don't feel this way. This will be too much. Charlie Kirk is too much. Of course, the possibility is it's the opposite, that Charlie Kirk is the beginning and not the end. Charlie Kirk. There's going to be a. The, the nightmare scenario is there's a response, right? Somebody from the right goes out and shoots somebody. Some version of Charlie, you know, goes and shoots a version of Charlie Cook Kirk from, from the left. A. You know, that's the other thing. The campus riots by, by evil, you know, by these evil actors for two years are met with counter riots if they start again. And then there's actual physical confrontations on college campuses between posses you know, if they start encampments again and then someone goes in and decides that they're gonna go set those encampments on fire or like go through and shoot people in the tents or something like that. We don't know.

[D]

Well, I'm curious what everyone else thinks about the President's response. And actually, Noah, I would be, I know you have to go, but what did you think of Trump's response? I never get Noah on here. So that's, I'm like, so I watched.

[E]

It and I thought it was appropriate for the time that we're in. A lot of the words that came out of his mouth could have come out of my mouth and they were, they're really verbatim what I'm writing and what I have written for commentary. And it's important to acknowledge our shared reality and the President should do that. There is a school of thought that would say it's more the President's place to restore calm, to appeal to our better angels, to not acknowledge what the potential motives that are informed by are. All our experience about who this shooter likely is, but nevertheless, the President, having no suspect in custody, perhaps should have been a little less sure of that. I'm sensitive to those criticisms of him. However, he did acknowledge what we're all talking about and which Americans need to be confronted with, which is the degree to which we have a spasm of left oriented violence more prominent than right wing violence. But it is also true, John, as you say, that those who execute political violence do so usually fully convinced of their own righteousness because it is a response to the last act of violence, and so on and so on and so on. And political violence begets more political violence because it is retaliatory. And that's how you get these never ending cycles that cascade and end up in something really, really bad.

[A]

Well, no, you gotta go. So thank you for, for, for joining us and I wish you hadn't had to. Me too.

[E]

Thank you, John.

[A]

Okay. To continue our, our conversation here because, you know, we're only scratching the surface and we've gone an hour, but I think we can go a little longer here in this, in this conversation. So I started with social media, which may seem like a weird place to start, and maybe I'm too online like everybody else, including the shooter, you know, and Charlie Kirk and everybody else is all too online. But that's, this is, this is the, this, you know, it's like this is the water in which we swim. This is the atmosphere. This is the world in which we, we now live.

[F]

It's also, it's also the medium in which the horror spreads. And, you know.

[A]

That's right.

[F]

Yeah.

[A]

And of course, because all these things are introduced before there is any ability to throw up a gate. Right? That's the nature of social media. That's what it is, is unmediated. And, you know, when they try to mediate it, it's worse. Right. Then, then you get the, then you get the deplatforming and people silenced and, and the, and the sort of, the decision that, you know, saying things like, I don't think boys should be in girls sports gets you censored and thrown off social media.

[D]

Worse. Under the Biden administration, it got collusion between large tech companies and the government, which is in total violation of our First Amendment right.

[A]

I want to talk about the Trump statement, though, because what's, what's interesting is, Noah, I didn't watch it, and what little I saw about it, which was oddly little, was very negative. I mean, my social media feeds are sort of split in half between people I follow on the right and people I follow in media to get news and see what the common conversation is like. And it was very negative. It was like he didn't bring us together. And he's kind of calling for more violence, and he's saying government is going to investigate and see if there are networks that are involved here. And what, what was this a lone thing or was somehow this was part of a network? So on the one hand, I don't see what's wrong with the President saying we're going to look down every avenue and try to figure out what happened here. And on the other hand, like, if he is implicitly saying that there is a, you know, an active conspiracy, you know, like to murder people like Charlie Kirk on the part of the left. There are two ways of looking at this, one of which is if that's even remotely true, then it's fine he said it. If it's not remotely true, then it's not fine that he said it. And since he can't know whether it's true or not true, I guess he shouldn't have said it.

[D]

But this wasn't it. I really, I watched it and talked about it with, with one of my sons. And it was interesting that my son's not super online. But his reaction was, isn't the President supposed to kind of try to calm things down and bring us together and all that? And it struck me that actually we're not in that moment anymore. We've moved past that. Anything Trump would have said would have been criticized because of how polarized, polarizing a figure he is. I do wish that he, that we had someone in the, that office right now who could bring us together. But the question I have is I'm not sure that's even possible. You could have the Pope sitting there talking about baseball for five minutes and then discussing how we should all come together, and it still would be polarizing. So, and that is in part, John, as you say, because of how most people get their news and information now is also filtered through social media, which shapes how they understand and react to events. So it's a, it might be another sign of just how far we've come from the old 20th century way of people in power dealing with crises, because I just, I, it didn't make a huge impact. I actually thought that JD Vance's Twitter post about Charlie Kirk was, was lovely and heartfelt and actually much more effective at conveying both what we've lost and what he thought of him as a person than anything Trump said said.

[A]

Well, okay. So, Abe, help me out here with your so, you know, we, the crushing morosity is the jokey theme of this, this podcast. But it's very hard. I've spent my life as a, as a, as a neoconservative, being a defender of, a supporter of America and the west and the idea that the people who criticize America are doing so either disingenuously, ignorantly, without any sense of gratitude for the gift that it is to be an American and all of that. And on the other hand, I look around over the last couple of months and I see a country I'm not sure I want to be living in. I've never, I don't think I've ever said that before. I'm 64 years old and obviously I lived through worse. Like I lived through the 70s. I was a kid, kid in the 70s and all that. But, you know, a world in which you get to see this woman stabbed to death on the, on the Charlotte light rail world, which you get to see Charlie Kirk shot to death, the Josh Shapiro's house being set on fire, Jews being murdered in the streets of Washington and Denver and, you know, this kind of acceptance, this bizarre acceptance that the behavior of people on college campuses is a free speech issue and not a civil order issue, and the people who are being attacked on campuses simply have to suck it up, even if, you know, because, because of speech and all that. I don't, I don't like What I'm feeling about the country right now. And I, I, that I've never been conditional about this. I loved America when presidents that I disliked were president.

[F]

You know, I, I feel similarly. I, I still love what is great about the country, the ideals that it was founded on, and the enduring upkeep of the institutions that keep those ideals in place. We are still a unique nation with a unique purpose. One of the things that really got me about the fact that this is September 11th and yesterday was September 10th. Looking back, if you look back on 9, 11, so that attack from outside, you know, that was like, you know, this was the ugly world bringing America into it. Now we have to go, here we are in 2025, September 11th, and all, we, we're just attacking ourselves from the inside constantly. It's, you know, and it's terrorism. I mean, it went from international terrorism to domestic terrorism and there is something of a through line.

[A]

And the terrorism you're talking about 10 years ago, it was still external terrorism. In other words, like the Pulse shooting in Orlando was an act of international terrorism in a weird way. So was the shooting in San Bernardino. Yeah, that was when Trump said we need to seal the country off until we can figure out what the hell is going on.

[F]

They've sort of met in the middle, you know, the, the, the, the international terrorism and the domestic terrorism, the jihadism and the, and the radical Marxism, you know, there they are. It's this horrific fusion.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But I don't like, you know, the other thing though is when I say I don't like the feeling I'm having about America. I can't do this on the one hand, on the other hand, thing that I would like to be able to do in a weird way, if you're making a deep social critique talking. Look, we've spent the last 10 years examining the failures and problems on the right and trying to call out the bad behavior of people on the right Horrified by January 6th. I'm horrified by the fact that people are still apologizing, making apologia for January 6, than are trying to rewrite what we all saw with our own eyes on January 6th and all of that. So that is a sort of on the one hand, on the other hand, and at the same time, I really do feel like this contagion is coming from the other side. That's why Noah's writing about left wing violence. I mean, can we dig up examples of right wing violence? If you want to call it right wing terrorism, you can. I don't really know that anti Semitic violence like the Tree of life shooting or the shooting in Poway or the, or the attempt to shoot up, you know, the synagogue in Texas, if those actually constitute right or left wing, that's a different anti Semitism is deeper and does not follow proper lines of on this regard since of course the shooters, the shooter in, in Washington was a, you know, Hamas sympathizer. So. But it feels to me like the assault that has led to the opening of the Overton window to domestic terrorism is 90% the result of the people that I disapprove of and don't agree with.

[D]

Well, there was you know, remember in the, in the 70s, 80s and into the 90s when you would see extremist violence, you would see it on the left with the, remember the animal rights activists and the more extreme environmental rights activists. On the right, you would see it with anti abortion activists who would bomb clinics and threaten doctors and kill the doctor. So but again, to the point that we were all discussing earlier in the podcast, those were very specifically motivated radicals. And I think what, what Noah's piece in Commentary a few months ago and what his book will likely show us is there. And to Abe's earlier point, there's a kind of meshing and we say Omni cause as if it's sort of captures this. But it's very disturbing how quickly the radicalization can happen and how unimportant the actual revolutionary goal needs to be. It's violence for its own sake, its disruption for its own own sake. And when people point to the more extreme edges of right wing MAGA world or any of this and say rhetoric matters, I agree with them on that point, just as I agree when they point to people on the left, including plenty of sitting senators in the Democratic Party who say we are at war, any means necessary we have to stop this fascist Trump administration. That's bad on both sides. So that's where you can both sides it But I think this, this the danger of the current, current moment is that the violence becomes its own motivational tool. And you see and Greta Thunberg being the perfect international example of the Omni cause type, it doesn't she's on a boat because she just wants to be a perpetual revolutionary and there are no consequences to her yet for that. We need to start talking about what kind of consequences we're going to mete out to this sort of violence because the justice system does it. But culturally we have to have that of kind conversation too.

[A]

I just don't think that there's enough of a consensus that the violence is unmerited or unjustified. Too much of the vanguards, and in this case I do think both on the right and on the left, I mean I was seeing some very disturbing things from some very MAGA figures yesterday, talking about taking it back to them and vengeance and stuff like that, which is not what you want to hear at a, at a, at a moment like this and at the same time. So that's a, that's a very big deal. I just don't know how we impose social consequences without social consensus.

[D]

Right.

[A]

That violent that, that, that, that violent expression is a. Is the ultimate contradiction of the American experiment in self governance which is we channel our disagreements and our differences into political contest taking place among our representatives who fight it out in how they make laws and how they do things. And then, you know, that how they determine what they support and what they oppose and whether they can get enough people to follow them in that regard is how we run our society.

[D]

But the impatience in this point is, that's important point because the impatience with the system exists in a very extreme form on the left. They want to pack the court, they want to get rid of the electoral college. The idea that if the system doesn't give you the result you expected, like say in the last election, that the system itself needs to be burned down. There's obviously a strain of this among, you know, some nat con types on the right, but I think it culturally there hasn't been an acknowledgment among mainstream liberal people, you know, slightly left of center, that, that is a huge structural issue for, for the left in general. It's not just the extreme progressives, that idea that the system itself doesn't work anymore, so let's tear it all down. That has deep roots on the left now.

[A]

And you know, I mean, one of.

[B]

My concerns is that people don't want, is that not enough people, people want to live in a country where people can resolve things through debate. In other words, not just that they misinterpret and think we have to take matters into our own hands, but there's a kind of like gleeful cosplay among people who like want to act out life in a different society in you know, one of the things that I always think of his Antonio Garcia Martinez, who is, you know, a tech personality, Silicon Valley personality and an author. He wrote the book Chaos Monkeys and he wrote a, he did a thread on, on X a couple years ago when a movie, an HBO movie about the January 6th, insurrection came out. And I always thought this was really one of the smartest things I'd read in a long time. Antonio wrote. Wrote essentially that he, as a person who has traveled the world right, in elite circles and, you know, and all sorts of different societies, recognized this sort of, like, acting cosplay for what it was, which is that in America, you don't actually have this sort of thing, like the storming of the Capitol to stop a transfer of power. And it's so unusual that when people try to act out what they think it means to have to storm the Capitol, you get guys in Viking helmets, right? Like, there was a. There was a, like, noticeably immature and confused element to January 6th because it was people playing a role that they'd seen on tv, and it was very clearly people playing. Playing a role that they'd seen on tv. This is not what happens in America. And therefore, in America, people don't really know how to do it. Right? People don't really know how to storm.

[A]

And by the way, this is an important point because that's part of the. Of the conservative response to the law enforcement measures taken after January 6th, which is. What do you mean, we have to go to jail for three years? We were really only kind of kidding. Like, you're punishing us too harshly. We didn't really mean. I didn't really think that we could stop it or something like that. This is what. When people at their sentencing, when they were asking for leniency would say. I mean, I was a little crazy. Like, I thought maybe I could stop. How do I know that there was no way to stop it or that the vice president didn't have the power to not accept these documents or whatever? Like, it's like that guy who went to the Comet Pizza. You know, the.

[D]

Yeah, but ignorance of the law is not.

[A]

No, no, no, I'm not.

[B]

No, no. It's not that. It's an excuse. It's that people don't really understand people even when they're trying to do something that's wrong. They. In this country, there's no experience of storming the Capitol. And so when they do, they don't really understand what they're doing while they're doing it in terms of how to do it. And the danger is that you, you know, you. Your mask becomes your face, Right? If we become a society where people act out these weird, cosplay, violent fantasies enough. You can become a society where people do know how to effectively storm a Capitol to stop a piece.

[A]

Well, you have A bad one, and then maybe you get better at it later. That's, that's, that's part of the fear. But I'm not defending, I'm saying that the weirdness of the right wing response is, hey, give us a break. Like, you know what, you're lenient to liberal criminals, so you should be, you know, lenient to us. And in fact, that's also part of the opening of the Overton window. Like you have campuses getting set on fire, not technically, but, you know, like by these professors, people talking about how it's okay to kill Jews, I want Jews dead, or, you know, Zionists shouldn't be allowed to speak, or whatever. And if you don't nip it in the bud and you say, I have no authority, I have no power to do anything about this, I'm the president of Columbia, I have no power to move on graduate students or whatever who are fomenting violent, who are supporting violence and fomenting it on our campus rhetorically. I'm sorry, free speech trumps all, which is not actually true. Free speech does not trump all. We have two and a half centuries of non libertarian rulings that say there is all kinds of speech that you can't engage in necessarily at certain moments, you subsidize it, you get more of it, you get more of the badness. And if we're, this is where Christine's point about how we need to stop doing X, Y or Z. Well, unless there are real consequences to doing X, Y or Z, you're not going to get it. You're not going to stop it. Like.

[D]

No, I will. One, one, one glimmer of hope.

[A]

I don't know if I'm being clear. I'm sorry.

[D]

One glimmer of hope. Of hope I saw yesterday evening and throughout the morning today was how appalled, how widespread the feeling of horror. Appalled horror that anyone would celebrate this killing was. There are a lot more people who were horrified by what they saw in Blue sky among the fringe lefties than were supportive of it. And I think that is another shift because for all the reasons we've discussed about Charlie Kirk and his legacy, particularly among young people, that is horrifying because he is a father and a husband and was only 31 years old.

[F]

You know, but one problem here is that it doesn't take a very large minority of people who believe that killing is good and cleansing and righteous to destroy life for the majority. You know, if, if, I mean, I don't even want to put a percentage on it, but if there are a few thousand Americans who are so radical and so inclined to ideological violence. That's more than enough to destroy everything.

[B]

Yeah, well, I hope, I hope that the, you know, it sounds weird to say this, but, you know, we've seen the rise on social media over the last decade, decade plus of the brands. Right. Companies who like, partake in the, you know, in the meme world. But I do think actually that cultural institutions that are not political have a really important role to play here as well. And I actually am. Was very moved by the fact that the New York Yankees opened their game last night with a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk with his picture and an American flag on the big screen in a ballpark. That sort of reminded me a bit of, you know, again, I'm not comparing, but after 9 11, when everybody went to a ball game and we all sang the anthem together, right. For the first couple times, it was like weirdly emotional to sing the Star spangled banner with 50,000 other people. To have, you know, 50 or 60,000 people taking a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk signaled to me that immediately there were parts of America, parts of the culture, the non political parts of the culture. There were parts that understood right away that a line had been crossed. And if that line is allowed to be crossed without serious, you know, and immediate and definitive pushback, the line will be moved. That was an example of something that I would like to see and it was very happy to see because normally people would say, why? The Yankees would say, I don't want anything to do with, you know, Charlie Kirk's controversial. This guy will be mad. And this guy, we're just here to play baseball. I thought what happened yesterday was a, was a good sign and I hope a direction, you know, that can help move things in the right way.

[D]

Big contrast to what happened on the floor of the House of Representatives too, where there was profanity hurled and the chaos and no ability to simply just have a unifying moment of silence without dissension.

[A]

And okay, so that's an interesting story because if you go through that story about what happened, it was.

[D]

He was. Speaker was in the wrong. By the way, you don't get to call for prayer unless you're the chat. There are rules about prayer on the floor of the House and who does it.

[A]

Okay, right. Mike Johnson said we're going to have a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk. No, he called and there was.

[D]

He called prayer.

[A]

No, no, no, no, no, no. There was a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk that was observed after that Lauren Boebert asked for a prayer to be said for Charlie Kirk openly. And it was at that point that voices started to scream, and we don't know who they were because the camera is stationary. And there were people in the gallery who were watching but couldn't see who it was. And there were voices saying, no. And then the voices said, well, we didn't say prayer. Somebody said, we didn't say a prayer for Evergreen High School, which was also, you know, there was a school shooting yesterday that has now been completely ignored because of what happened to Charlie Kirk. And then there was chaos on the floor. And so it was like there was a moment of comedy. And then. I'm not saying Lauren Boebert was wrong to say we should also say a prayer, but they did say a moment of silence. It was observed. And then the culture war began out of the mouth of one of the most irresponsible members of Congress that we have. It wasn't sufficient for her that they did a moment of silence. Then she wanted an act of prayer because she said something like, silence is nothing. Prayer is active, or something like that. I want to start screaming at her.

[D]

Tells here are important. I'm sorry to interrupt, but the detail here is important because he called for the moment of silence, and then he said, we ask everyone to pray for him and his family. And I think that's what probably triggered some people on the other side of the aisle.

[A]

But they work, but they observe the moment of truth.

[D]

You're right about that. Yeah.

[A]

So, I mean, I think this is, you know, I don't want to, like, be, you know, talmudic and hairsplitting here, but they observed the moment of silence. And then Lauren Boebert said, you know, now let's pray openly, because that moment of silence was bullshit, is basically what she said. And then people started yelling.

[F]

Silent prayers get silent results is what she said.

[A]

Right. Silent prayers get silent results, which is, by the way, unbelievably offensive. And, you know, Jews pray silently. One of the major prayers in the Jewish liturgy is the amida, which is said silently. And so I believe I was unaware that there is any tradition either in any homiletic that says that a silent prayer is meaningless. Most prayer is silent. So that was gross of her, as most of the things she does are gross. And then there was yellow like anything else.

[B]

John, everybody knows that the louder you are, the more effective you are.

[A]

Right. And then. Right. And then there was yelling and screaming. And then Anna Paulina Luna, fresh from saying that interdimensional beings, you know, had been at her Arby's started yelled at the Democrats. You effing did this. So, yeah, it was really bad.

[D]

If politics is downstream from culture.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

What, what would be important is if the politicians did a little more of what the Yankees did last night and a lot less of what they did in that eruption on the House floor.

[A]

Now, to be fair, it could have been five people. If you, you can't really hear what's going on. We only have one tape. It could have been five people out of 435. You don't want to like over analyze or overestimate the. How many people were ugly in this way. And we can all have our guesses as to what disgusting and despicable members of Congress might have been who decided to have a tantrum even about doing it. In other words, like somebody, you know, she said, let's have a prayer. And then somebody could have said, Mr. You know, you know, Mr. Speaker, the chaplain has to call for the prayer or something like that. Whatever. It was an effort to just push, push this political advantage in an. Also in an unseemly way, having succeeded at bringing unity. What Lauren Boebert wanted to do was cause disunity. And then the Democrats responded in Pavlovian fashion or the radicals, whoever it was, you know, in Pavlovian fan, then created this moment of deep embarrassment for the United States.

[D]

Yeah, just a reminder that we have a lot of people who don't behave like adults in, in our Congress.

[A]

That's not a good thing. Yeah, right. So we've been going for like almost for an hour and a half and obviously there's going to be much more to be said about this. But if I pull it, pull a McLaughlin group game and give you all a surprise exit question. The exit question is this on a scale of 1 to 10? I can't do a scale of 1 to 10. It is September 11th. We are reminded of this unprecedented assault on us that has really defined, still continues to define our century, this 21st century, and America's role and reaction to it in relation to it. Are things in the wake of this commemoration and Charlie Kirk, is the temperature going to cool? Are things going to get better in response or are they going, let's say in the next eight weeks or are they going to get worse?

[F]

What do you think my answer is?

[D]

Well, I know what Abe's answer is.

[A]

Go ahead, Abe.

[F]

I think things are going to get fine.

[B]

Abe, then on a scale of 1 to 10, how much worse how much worse?

[F]

I don't know. I don't even know how. I don't want to think of how, but.

[A]

Well, thinking about how almost, Almost creates a kind of pathway to have like enumerating the ways in which.

[F]

Certainly giving voice to it.

[A]

Yeah, you don't want to get. Giving voice to it. Giving somebody an ide. Whatever. You don't want to do that.

[F]

Yeah.

[A]

So you're going with worse.

[F]

I'm going with with with worse.

[A]

Yeah.

[F]

Sorry. Truly sorry.

[B]

I think it's going to be basically the same, which is a form of worse. I mean what I would like to say, in other words, is that we all, you know, we all feel the same way, which is just shock and fear and like something has just taken the wind out of us. But I think that we just, you know, the short memory and the way that social media is kind of real life these days, more, much more so than we. It used to be or which I think that, you know, we'll kind of roll on unfortunately, in whatever direction we were heading.

[D]

Christine, I refuse to make a prediction about whether it's going to get better or worse. But I, but I will say that I've been thinking a lot about 911 this morning and what it was like that day and all the people we lost and it, and then obviously about Charlie and what it struck me as being a very stark warning about is that republics and free societies tend not to fall when they're attacked from the outside, but they collapse from within. And that is the point that we're at. I was contrasting the unity after 911 with the fracturing that we saw yesterday and today. And I. That I think should be a constant concern for every American and how they can as individuals repair that fracture in their own lives, in their own communities.

[A]

I'm going to go with worse also. Unfortunately, I think that there are too many positive evil incentives for people to make it worse than self restraint on the part of people collectively wanting to make it better. And I just think there's no balance between the two of them. And as Abe says, it only takes, you know, it's this problem of a society of 330 million people. If 2000 of them decide that they're gonna go out and, and, and, and do evil, they can do a lot of evil and they represent a part per million, you know, in our practically or part per 100,000 or whatever it is ordinarily would have no effect on the body politic. And now, you know, they can have an outsides effect and the temptation will be very large. Now, maybe Seth is right and that because of the combination of Irina's murder and Charlie's murder and all of that, there's going to be a heightened sense of place among people who just look at their phones. Maybe people will be more vigilant or feel less safe and therefore have more eyes on the American street. And as we know from Jane Jacobs, eyes on the street is the way that you help prevent bad things from happening, because people need to do these things mostly in the shadows. That's why the guy has to crawl on a roof where no one is looking to take the shot. So that's the one possible hope, in some weird way, is that we. A sense of collective responsibility and security will actually help us, because we will all understand in that sense that we're all in it together and that nobody knows where the next gunshot or stabbing is coming. But history doesn't really reflect that. That's how people respond. People go into their. People go into hiding. You know, they stay inside. It's not like they go out in en masse to show that, you know, we're not going to take this. They get guarded and protect themselves. Right.

[B]

And now. And that was something that, you know, we've brought up, you know, Israel in this context. You know, when this stuff comes up, that. That was a. The. That. That sense of we have to go back out to the shook, you know, because the people who are shopping, planning, putting a suicide bomb, a suicide bomber in a shook, wants you to avoid the public square, whatever. That. That sort. That sort of gets built up right now. It's not necessarily like day one, everybody's like, oh, got ahead right back out there. There's a sort of, you know.

[A]

You know, I was.

[B]

It happens because you've been pulled into a kind of civilizational struggle in a way, and you just. And you have to. And that's not learned behavior yet. And you almost don't want us to have to learn that behavior, I guess.

[A]

I mean, I was in Israel during the second intifada on, you know, on three different occasions. And I would not say that the Israeli attitude was, we have to go back out to the shook. People went out, they went shopping, and they went right back home as fast as they could because they didn't know where the next suicide bomb was coming from, and particularly if they were with their children and all of that. So that. That's, you know, of course these things have a. Can have a gigantic societal effect, but there need to be more of them. And as I Say it is kind of weird that Charlie Kirk is shot at the same time that someone is shooting up this high school in this very affluent suburb of Denver. And we barely even have registered that it happened. Not that there's, you know, we've achieved this kind of sense of learned helplessness about, about school shootings. You know, that reminds me of the crime wave of the 70s and 80s where it's like, well, what do you expect? I mean, if you're gonna go out in the street, you're gonna get mugged. Well, you know, you may go to a school, it's terrible. No one should get mugged. No one should. No one should, you know, get, be in a school shooting. But what are you gonna do? How can you stop it? You can't stop, stop it. And we don't know how to stop it and we don't know how to stop these things. And therefore a very small number of people can do an immense amount of damage to the public. Wheel and Trump coming out, not really proffering a message of unity. Maybe that's a reflection of a current reality. He doesn't do it because it would ring false from him, number one, maybe he doesn't believe it, number two. And third, it would fall on deaf ears anyway because all that depersonalization has happened and we don't feel like we're all in it together. We don't feel like people that we disagree with are fully the same as us or a lot of people don't. And you know, that's the, this goes on for a generation or two. And that is where democracies collapse. I mean, if we have no trust in institutions and then we have no trust in each other and we have no trust in the viability of anything that we do or the safety of anything that we do, yeah, we collapse and then the end result, as Matt said, is top down authoritarianism, not anarchy and chaos. Somebody will come in and, and clean things up in some fashion in a way that will be very un American. Right?

[B]

You can't uncross a Rubicon. And what happens after the Rubicon is crossed? You get a dictator, not a right. You know, libertarian, you know, city, state.

[A]

See, history teaches us many things. Okay, we'll be back tomorrow for thanks to Noah Rothman for joining us for for the absent Matt, Seth and Christine and Abe. I'm John Pablo. Keep the candle burning.

[D]

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