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Unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy gold to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad free top podcasts included with prime because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today. Welcome everybody. It is definitely the only time I can remember where doing this sort of work has felt like this. And I have had a lot of conversations with creators over the weekend, having more of those conversations today. And there are a lot of really important things I think to talk about in the wake of this Charlie Kirk murder. And one of the things I want to start with is this concept of condemnation. Anyone who knows me, you all know I've already condemned Charlie Kirk's murder. There's no except for but or anything. We can talk about his political views, we can talk about whether we feel empathy for him. But I have condemned the murder and everyone I know on the left has done the same. Every serious person on the left has done the same. MAGA insists that the left is cheering this on, and that's just not true. You know, except in the most like random anecdotal corners of the Internet, the left has denounced this. Elon Musk, for example, retweeted some account with close to zero followers saying something horrible. But the reality is that every notable left wing voice, every major Democratic figure, elected officials at the state, local, federal level, and every mainstream commentator, everyone has condemned what took place. Now, there are some people who have clarified I don't feel empathy for Charlie Kirk personally because I found his political views vile because of the damage that he caused. The disinformation, the bigotry, fine. But even those people have condemned the violence. And that is a really important distinction. You don't have to suddenly feel empathy for Charlie Kirk as a person to say unequivocally, with no mitigation, ifs, ands or buts whatsoever. This kind of violence is wrong Period. And that is where there is now a really important contrast that becomes very stark when the target is on the left. The right doesn't just fail to show empathy, which now they're angry about, even though Charlie Kirk himself said, oh, you know, empathy, empathy is not a thing. The right not only lacks empathy when the targets are on the left, they mock, they laugh, and sometimes they even cheer. You know, think back to when Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi, was brutally attacked with a hammer in their home. And remember, of course, that they were looking for Nancy pelosi. Donald Trump Jr. Made fun of it. It was widely ridiculed. It was dismissed as not something serious and important to condemn. Uh, more recently, when the Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman was murdered, a sitting Republican senator, and a lot of MAGA commentators joked about it, when Joe Biden announced he had cancer, there were a lot of influencers who mocked him for it or who didn't even believe it or thought it was part of some conspiracy theory. And that's not even the whole list. Like, I could just do an hour with examples. But the point here is they've laughed about all of it. They laughed. I mean, this is thinking back a ways now, but they laughed about Gabby Giffords when the Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot. They turned Hillary Clinton, Clinton collapsing from pneumonia into a campaign meme. And they mocked John Fetterman stroke. And they laughed at his debate performance when he was still recovering from it. And they jeered and cheered when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. And so over and over again, there's been this reflex of cruelty, cruelty as entertainment. A people who have suffered as the kind of punchline to jokes. And this is not new. This is a long standing pattern. And yet it's been the right that has claimed that the left celebrates when bad things happen to right wingers. Whether it was Rush Limbaugh's illness, Trump testing positive for Covid, any number of right wing figures facing health issues. Except it's not true. The reality is that mainstream Democrats and progressive commentators and all of us, we condemn those celebrations. We saw those and said, I hope they recover quickly. I mean, go fact check me on it. Go back to my coverage when Donald Trump had Covid and was brought by helicopter to Walter Reed. You'll find that there was nothing gleeful or joyful about it whatsoever. Even when these are our political opponents. And I know it's such a low bar, but this is sort of where we are. And it is the right that has consistently failed this empathy test, not the left. And now they have the audacity to say, where's the empathy? Where's the empathy for Charlie Kirk here? And so that's the real culture that we have to talk about on the right. The cruelty is a feature. It's not a bug. And when they see violence, suffering, illness, even death, it's all fair game as long as the victim isn't one of their own. This is not the fringe that is doing it. When Elon Musk retweets someone with zero followers saying something about how they're glad Charlie Kirk was killed or whatever, that is the fringe. When it's Republican senators and governors and presidential candidates and Trump himself over and over and over, you realize that much like all of the other ideas and policies and principles that they abandon when they're inconvenient, the cruelty is the entire point. And so now, when someone like Charlie Kirk is murdered, we have roundly condemned it. I have made clear, if you want to end gun violence, there can't be any instances of gun violence that you say you are even tacitly okay with. Just not. Not a single one. We've all been extraordinarily clear. They want to act like they've rediscovered morality and like we are cheering something that we are not cheering about. Suddenly they go, see, look, this is what the left is like. But the truth is actually the opposite. We have consistently condemned it. They have turned violence into a punchline. Now, I know that when you look around online, it's actually difficult to keep up with every single element of this. And, oh, who was this person? And what did they say? Did they actually say it or did they not? So I think in a situation like this, first of, I hate to say this, getting offline is probably a good idea. I mean, I have stopped even looking at Twitter. No matter what I say on Twitter, I glance at the comments, it's a complete disgusting cesspool. It becomes, you know, me being Jewish becomes a focus, as if that has anything to do with any of this. I mean, it's a mess. So I do encourage people to get offline, but focus on what you can control, which is that I know you aren't cheering this. I know you are condemning this. And all we can do is repeat time and time again, they have cheered many times for this sort of stuff. We aren't cheering. We are disgusted and sickened by this. All right, let's talk about the motive. What was the motive of Charlie Kirk's shooter? There are widespread speculations now, endless speculations, in fact. But the most important thing about the motive is that whatever the motive was being raised in this wildly pro gun, totally MAGA family didn't prevent the shooter from ending up a shooter. And that is so critical to understand. You know, there is rampant speculation the shooter is trans. That was the motivation. The shooter is not trans. The shooter has a trans partner, and that was the motivation. We're going to follow up on that in a moment. But the point here is clearly the shooter hated Charlie Kirk. That we know that we can say for sure. But in terms of the theories that are being spouted here, they are wild and completely, completely without evidence. One, of course, is based on the idea that the shooter is a groiper. Now, if a groiper isn't a term you've heard before, groipers are like, more aligned with somebody like Nick Fuente. They're, they're clearly on the right, but they're sort of of the belief that Trump and Kirk are in some sense traitors to the right wing. You could say they are even to the right of Trump and Kirk. We don't know that that is the case at all. And so I think we should be careful about saying that that's what's going on. Another hypothesis has been, well, it's mental illness. You know, we always hear that. And to some degree, I would argue anybody who's willing to carry out such an attack on some level is mentally ill. But that can often be a distraction. The battle that is happening in the propaganda space and on social media is that those on the left want to argue that this was a right wing shooting. Those on the right want to argue that this was a left wing shooting. They want to categorize it. They want to be able to check the box under the category that is most convenient to them. But every single one of these analyses that I've heard, and actually even calling it an analysis is a little bit generous. Something that's been missing from this is that Trump and MAGA and Republicans in their various forms have been telling us for years that certain traits are good and godly and they are the best environment for a kid to be brought up in. They tell us if you grow up in a Christian household, that's the best thing for kids. It's the best. But in this case, growing up in this Christian household, religious family, did not inoculate Tyler Robinson from becoming a shooter and going out and murdering someone. They tell us that growing up around guns protects people. It's. It's better for the people that have the guns. It's better for other people in society. Growing up around guns is a good thing. And in this case, growing up in a gun nut family led to Robinson knowing how to use a rifle to kill someone from 200ft away. And so certainly in terms of the specifics and even just in terms of the environment, the gun culture didn't keep society safer. And in fact, had he not grown up in such a family, he probably wouldn't have had the skill to hit Charlie Kirk from 200ft Away or whatever distance it was. And you can keep going with this. They tell us that growing up in a two parent household prevents radicalization and it keeps kids out of trouble. And the problem is single parents. Yet Tyler Robinson grew up in the much lauded two parent household. It wasn't two dads or two moms, which they tell us is worse. It was a mom and a dad. And just like that, we saw that that didn't prevent him from becoming a shooter either. And so oftentimes, the right loves to pigeonhole the problem of gun violence as an issue of urban young men. That's code for black. Usually when they say urban men, they're talking about black men. But Tyler Robinson is just a rural white guy, or maybe, maybe it's suburban, suburban white guy. His father was in law enforcement. We're told there is no better environment for a kid to grow up in than with a family in law enforcement. It keeps you on the straight and narrow and prevents you from becoming a criminal. Well, it didn't work. Despite growing up the son of a cop, he ended up an alleged killer. And so that's the real hypocrisy here. Every so called safeguard that the right insists is going to keep kids on the right path. Christian upbringing, two parents, law enforcement in the family, respect for guns, all of that stuff was present in Tyler Robinson's life and none of it mattered. For maga, Tyler Robinson's upbringing was really like their Camelot red estate in the country. Grandma says everyone was maga. And so if these are the values that Republicans claim are the antidote to violence, to a life of crime, how do they explain that their model household produced the shooter? Trump even acknowledged this. How could this have happened given the right wing upbringing? Check this out.