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The Gist
Aaron Sibarium on Charlie Kirk, Retribution, and the Cycle of Violence
00:38:46
Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon reflects on his recent full-hour interview with Charlie Kirk, which aired just a week before Kirk’s assassination. He recalls Kirk’s reach across conservative factions and his surprising focus on...
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Excludes restaurants hey, great news. I've got an easy way for you to subscribe to the Gist list. What? You don't want to subscribe to a daily compet compendium of all the most important and fascinating news of the day with my commentary, puns, but also insights? Of course you do, but you haven't gotten around to it. Or what's a substack? Well, here's what you do. It's super easy. You text 33777 and just text the word Mike Mike and then I'll give you a link and you'll be able to subscribe. In fact, if you do, text Mike to 33777. We'll give you 25% off if you wish to become a subscriber to the Gist list, which is a good bargain and available for a limited time only. Plus the just list is going partly paid, partly sample it for now, get it for free. Most days get a discount on your subscription. Text Mike to 33777 It's Thursday, September 11th, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. The horrible assassination of Charlie Kirk with a killer still on the loose dominates the yesterday. I thought it was pretty crucial and still do that Donald Trump properly addressed the drones launched into Poland today, said nothing. God. But I also understand this is an attention getting matter and his politics align with focusing on Charlie Kirk. And Charlie Kirk could get attention, could let's say, earn attention. He had the number one or two conservative podcast and radio show out there, and he registered thousands of people, mostly young men, to vote. Democrats didn't admire Kirk's views, but they would have loved to have copied his methods. I'm not one who says we don't speak ill of the dead, but I don't want to rush to criticize all that Kirk ever said. I thought that was pretty distasteful as the blood was still stained on the Orem, Utah floor. Kirk was wrong about a lot of things. However, we could say it, and I have to say I thought for a time that he wasn't particularly bright. I came to revise that opinion, by the way. He was Gavin Newsom, Newsom's first guests on Newsom's podcast, and he gave better than he took, I thought. So I came to think of Charlie Kirk actually as bright in his own way, certainly a good communicator, certainly juvenile. So today, as he is being referred to as a leading light of conservatism, there is a cue of all his podcasts out there, all his last interviews, and some are bread and butter conservative stuff, but also Islam. Is that a real religion? Or did the guy who gave the baseball back to Philly's mom represent the decline of the American male? And here's an actual segment. Is Lord of the Rings gay? Yeah. Listen, if I shuffle off this podcast coil sometime soon, you will be able to say, hey, three days ago, wasn't he comparing Cameroonian separatists to Fonzie? And indeed I was. So what I'm saying is people contain multitudes and so does the body politic. A lot of us are angry, made angrier still by this act of violence. But more of us, I'd say many more of us are fearful and anxious about the consequences of what may come. We don't want the anger to overwhelm us. But what could be done about this? Well, take note of a couple things that I'm glad for. At least I'm glad. The governor of Utah where this happened is Spencer Cox. He's saying good things. He's been on the show. He is a reasonable Republican voice for calm. I'm glad that the Charlie Kirk brand was so tied up in debate. His tactics weren't always fair, but it was words. He was mocked on South Park a few weeks ago, and to his credit, he said he enjoyed the episode and took the mockery in good stride. So good on him, and I'm glad that I can criticize him even with some specifics and know that you will know that the most important thing is to allow such sentiments to circulate and not celebrate when not just a man is killed. That's a pretty low bar for humanity. But I would say we should not celebrate when ideas are put to an end by a bullet. On the show today, a spiel about what maybe could break the cycle. And that, by the way, is an idea that comes up with my conversation today. Aaron Saberium is a writer for the Washington examiner and and one week ago he was the guest for the full hour on the Charlie Kirk Show. He is a writer for mostly conservative publications. He's had scoops, he's gotten attention, lots of attention, big impact in the world his reporting has led to, but none of it was the kind of attention as bestowed by Charlie Kirk, who was a media giant and a political kingmaker. Aaron and I talk about that interview, the conservative movement and our thoughts on American political violence. Aaron Saberium up next.
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C
Aaron Sabarium is a reporter for the Washington Free Beacon. You know many of the stories he's reported on and broken Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, her ouster for plagiarism. That was Aaron. Aaron was also and I was scrolling through the guests of the Charlie Kirk show saying I wonder who Kirk has had on that I know that maybe we've had on. And one week ago Aaron was a guest and it was a full show interview and we're going to talk to Aaron about Charlie Kirk and maybe some other things like violence in American politics and conservatism. Aaron, welcome to the gist.
- [09:31]
D
Thank you for having me.
- [09:33]
C
So just first of all, if you want to get into when you heard the news or how you're feeling about the news in general, before we get to the specifics of your interview with.
- [09:41]
D
Kirk, I mean I saw something about it on Twitter and then texted a friend who I knew knew him who told me, oh yeah, it's real. This is actually happening. And I mean how I feel. It's, I mean it's, it's, it's obviously horrible. It's very surreal when someone you've just met dies a couple weeks later. And it's, it's always a weird, I think that's a weird feeling. But it's especially just weird and creepy when they are, they don't just die, but they are murdered in this highly public Way.
- [10:22]
C
Right. Because I suppose for, I don't know, maybe the majority of Americans, they hadn't heard of Charlie Kirk beforehand. He was very famous. But, you know, in our fractured society, it's hard to say without there being a monoculture who is known by most. So that's one level. And for most other people who knew him, it's a level of abstraction. And then for someone like me, when I say new, I met him very briefly at the rnc, but when you have an actual interpersonal relationship with someone, it becomes more real. But for someone like you, not his best friend or not, someone who was always in his orbit but was with him for an extended period of time, this is not a story, this is an experience. If no one had heard of Charlie Kirk, but that person who was very interested in you a couple of weeks ago and was very gracious to you, was suddenly shot and killed, it would be, of course, shocking.
- [11:12]
D
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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C
So tell me about the interview and how his team reached out to you and what they were interested in.
- [11:20]
D
Yeah, they were, they were interested in my reporting primarily on universities, although also on the medical system and in particular the rationing of COVID drugs based on race. We spent some time talking about that. That's something that happened in 2021, 2022. I went on his show, Charlie's show. I met him, very nice guy. Struck by how sort of normal and personable he was, you know, asked good questions. I think he obviously has a reputation for being a bomb thrower, but in our interview, you know, he said a few things that were a bit pushing the envelope, but I thought he generally, you know, didn't. Didn't seem like he threw too many unnecessary bombs and really kept it pretty focused on my reporting, asked good questions. And I will tell you that before the interview started rolling, I said, I just want to thank you because you've really, I think, very admirably pushed back on some of the most noxious currents, not just on the left but on the right, including the real nasty anti Semitism that's been percolating up on the Internet. And so we ended up talking a bit about that at the end.
- [12:42]
C
How did it compare to other interviews, other hour long interviews which are always good for a reporter? Like you could get all your information out, how would you compare it in terms of quality and also in terms of what you think it brought to the audience?
- [12:56]
D
So he has such a massive audience that I suspect a lot of people in it, maybe they'd seen one or two of my stories at Most, but probably a lot hadn't and didn't know who I was. So I was honestly just grateful to have a platform. And I. And I think because he read live on air from a lot of my stories and read pretty extensively from them, you know, I think people basically just got exposed to some of the craziest stuff from the past two or three years that they may not have heard about at the time.
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C
Right. And I'll interrupt and say they probably have heard something like, oh, someone in the government is rationing Covid vaccines based on race. But you know, maybe they put that. Maybe that was just a sentence. Maybe they put that along with the mental categories of a lot of crazy stuff about COVID vaccines that weren't said. And so to hear you lay it out, what you factually did uncover with states like Utah, New York, actually doing this was probably different for many more people than you had ever reached before.
- [13:59]
D
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's probably the biggest platform I've ever had. I mean, I guess. I guess before he was, before he was kicked off of Fox, I went on Tucker Carlson's show once or twice, which was also pretty big. But I think at this point, Charlie Kirk maybe even bigger, certainly among young people, I think he's maybe more influential, I'm not sure. But also, it's not just raw audience. Right. Charlie was going to the White House and shaping policy and I think seems to have had pretty good relationships with a lot of different factions within the MAGA coalition, which I don't think can be said of Tucker at this point. Right. Tucker really has burned a lot of bridges and I mean, has gone in a particular direction that I think probably has alienated him from even plenty of people in the White House.
- [14:56]
C
Right.
- [14:56]
D
Charlie Kirk really the sort of pro Israel, you know, more hawkish, philo, Semitic. Right. He gets along great with them. I think he also gets along pretty well with the kind of more isolationist, even to some extent Israel, skeptic wing of the party. I think he really was trying to kind of build bridges between these different factions and keep the coalition together. And you know, I think until he died tragically, he was doing a pretty good job of threading that needle.
- [15:27]
C
What I liked about that interview was I've heard you interviewed many times before and I'll say to my audience, I've never come across anything that you've ever reported that was inaccurate. And of course, a lot of it has had real world consequence. Hey, if you want to say, I don't think Claudine Gay should have been fired, that's up to the Harvard Board of Trustees. But if you want to say, I don't think we should know the information about her plagiarism, we don't even have to say plagiarism. I disagree with that. And the reason we know it is because of Aaron. So what I would say is that your version of your actual, factual, in depth coverage of these controversies, which, sure, conservatives will latch onto, is, I think, in many ways the best version of that. And I would say if Charlie is interviewing you, Charlie Kirk was interviewing you for an hour. That's kind of the best version we could hope for, for conservatives to imbibe what you've been reporting. Do you often come across prominent conservatives who are either using your exact stories or the idea of the stories, but getting key things wrong that make you uncomfortable?
- [16:38]
D
Yeah, it's happened before. I'm not sure I would say it's any. It's not necessarily anyone prominent, but there have been times where other outlets will kind of rewrite my story. Right. Or do a. Do something about my story and say, Washington, Free Beacon first reported, blah, blah, blah. But in the process, they will actually mischaracterize what I said. And I mean, that's frustrating because I do try to be very precise. And, you know, I don't like it when people say, you know, you know, Washington Free Beacon report, you know, X, Y, Z. And then like, Z is wrong in that sentence. And I'm like, guys, like I. I wrote it a specific way. You know, I realize subtleties like commas and conjunctions, maybe some people gloss over those, but the commas and conjunctions can actually change the meaning of the sentence. So, you know, please actually read it carefully and don't misdescribe what I wrote because I don't want you putting words in my mouth. But yeah, so I, you know, look, I think.
- [17:43]
C
And those mistakes will usually, you tell me, run in one direction, the more sensationalist direction.
- [17:50]
D
Yeah, I would say generally they do. And I appreciated that. I think Charlie just like, read the stuff out loud, so there was really no room for. Room for error. I mean, he was just regurgitating what I. What I had said. So I appreciated that.
- [18:08]
C
How important do you think he is to the conservative movement or was.
- [18:12]
D
I think he was very important and is in some ways going to become even more so now as kind of a martyr figure. I would say that in addition to his.
- [18:23]
C
Sorry to interrupt, but is that good or bad? The martyr figure portion.
- [18:28]
D
Remains to be seen. I mean, I Think of all the people who could become martyrs. He's one of the better ones because he actually was not some. His politics were not actually all that crazy or out there. He would say some incendiary things, but when you actually looked at the substance of his views, they really were pretty mainstream. Right. I think relative to the Republican coalition, you know, so in that sense, he's not the worst person to make a martyr out of. But what worries me is that. Yeah, I mean, what I'm seeing just on the Internet, it does look like this is radicalizing a lot of people, and that's not good. You know, you see people saying things like, well, you know, we tried to give you the nice guy who just debated, and now you killed him, so no more debate. Like, I mean, I don't. I don't like where that's going. Obviously. Obviously, to be clear, you know, there are also left. This is responding to leftists who are, in some cases, cheering on his murderer, which is outrageous. And, I mean, those people have a lot to answer for. But, yeah, it's not good. Both sides, I think, are going in a bad direction.
- [19:47]
C
Yeah. And I've also seen. I don't know if you saw Jesse Waters. He was. I understand that he's angry or anguished, but I think he was also being incendiary with his comments by saying that, you know, it all changes now and essentially we're seeking revenge.
- [20:03]
D
Yeah, that is. That is language that I think should be avoided.
- [20:09]
C
It is hard to be. I guess it's hard to be calm, especially when your job is to get attention and your income relies on your ability to gin up strong emotions. This is sort of the opposite of your job where you take weeks and weeks to report on a story where all the commas are in place. So I don't know how well you relate to it, or do you?
- [20:34]
D
I mean, I can understand the emotional impulse, and obviously, you know, I've seen some stuff on Twitter or from Blue sky that's ghastly and awful and makes my blood boil. But look, ultimately, you know, I think this event is sort of a reminder that you just need to draw certain lines in the sand, such as no political violence ever. You just don't do it. You just don't assassinate people you don't like for any reason. And, yeah, it would be a shame if the lesson people took from this event was not, you must draw lines in the sand, but rather, well, the lines are fake and oppressive. So we should just do whatever we want. Right. That, I think, is not and that's not really the code that he lived by. I mean, his whole thing was about debating people rationally on college campuses. And I would also note you were asking about his influence. The other thing he did was he organized this whole get out the vote campaign for the Republicans. People have been saying, oh, Republicans don't like democracy. They want to do voter suppression. Well, you know, he actually did what Democrats have been telling them to do, which is just try to go out and get people to the polls and vote. I mean, he believed in the democratic process and strengthened it. So, yeah, I would hope that people would take the message that we should have, you know, we should solve our disagreements through speech and debate and at the ballot box and not through political violence. Because I think that's.
- [22:13]
C
This is why Ezra Klein said. And he's getting a lot of guff for it. But Charlie Kirk did politics correctly. He concentrated on the outcome, which were votes, not just attention for himself and not just nihilism. He wanted an outcome and it was an electoral outcome. I have had a couple times on the show Z. Cohen Sanchez, who she ran a. An organization called Unfuck America. And what they did was they went around to Charlie Kirk talks and they sort of debated him. And she put up a post yesterday saying, I always admired what he did and the way he mobilized people was something that we should emulate. So that's a good point that there are a lot of nihilistic say anything in it for all the wrong reason people. And no matter what you think of Charlie Kirk's preferred political outcomes, the fact that he was concentrating on politics and not just injecting more anger into the world is, from where I sit, laudable.
- [23:16]
D
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
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C
Is your read of the moment that we're in a cycle of escalating political violence?
- [23:22]
D
That wasn't really my read a year or two ago. It seemed like things had. Not that things were good, but that there had been some stabilization. And I didn't quite see the rails coming off to quite the same degree as it felt like they were in 2020 now. I mean, yeah, I mean, I'm not sure. And we should also, I think, remember that we're recording this on September 11th at about 1:30 in the afternoon. As of now, we. We've heard that there are. There were bullet casings that had transgender and antifa slogans on them of some sort. We really don't know much more than that. And generally, I think in these cases you want to avoid imputing motives too quickly because Sometimes as in the, you know, as in the case with that, that awful shooting at the Minnesota Catholic School, you read what some, the person's manifesto and it becomes very clear that they are just crazy. And, and to ideologize it is to kind of miss the real driving force behind the violence, which is just a sort of nihilism and derangement that kind of resists political categorization. So, you know, I don't want to, you know, you be careful about over interpreting it, but yeah, I, it does seem like the pace of these kinds of things has picked up more in the past few years. I don't think it's quite, it's not like the 70s yet, but were not heading in a great direction. And you know, the other thing I guess I would say is that even if the shooter turns out to just be a random crazy person and this is all a diversion and they don't actually have a clear radiology. Okay, but because he was a public figure and because people were celebrating his death in certain corners of the Internet. Right. It has in effect being turned into political violence regardless of what the shooter's motives were. And that's a problem.
- [25:35]
C
Right. And let's also say that when you mentioned Minnesota, I thought you were going to say, and let's remember that in the early hours of the shooting of the state legislator there, that there was a lot of misreporting about the political leanings of that shooter. And I have to say I saw that detail about what was inscribed on the bullets, but I saw it in the context of several, I don't remember if they were tweets or which social media platform I was on immediately saying, well, this is clearly what you do if you wanted to have a false flag operation. So such is the case of our, of our information ecosystem that we don't know what's factual. And then once something is factual, we have no way of knowing what it means, which are two different things sometimes.
- [26:19]
D
Yeah, yeah. I really don't like to jump to conclusions about this stuff and I, and I wish people would be a little more, would, would temper not just the, the, the tone of the rhetoric, but also, but also be more restrained about attributing responsibility. Right. We really don't know exactly what caused this clearly.
- [26:43]
C
So I guess, I guess my last question is I understand how to gin people up and I understand we have all the tools and mechanisms to get people very upset. What tools do we really have to calm people down and who are the people who control those tools? Do you have any ideas?
- [27:04]
D
You're basically asking me how do we fix polarization in the United States? And I don't really think there's a great answer.
- [27:09]
C
I mean, I mean, temporarily, like even have. How about this? How about this? Let's settle for the polarization that Charlie Kirk embodied, which is. I'm going to debate you and I'm going to vehemently disagree with you, but polarization to that extent, yeah, that's fine. I would accept. Right. It's the polarization to violence.
- [27:28]
D
Well, look, hopefully they find this guy and get him in custody. I would say, you know, we're talking just a few days also after there was this horrible stabbing where some woman got. This Ukrainian woman was stabbed on a train. And that touched off a whole other discourse cycle about how violent the left is or how the left is responsible for violence. And so we need to. There's some people implying we need to take things into our own hands or whatever. Look, like I will say one thing is it's just frankly, violence breeds more violence. And so it really is important that violent people who we can confidently identify as violent just aren't out there. Right. This is a little orthogonal to the Charlie Kirk thing where we know less information. But in the case of the. Her name is Irina Zarutska.
- [28:22]
C
Irina Zarutska, Yeah.
- [28:23]
D
Right.
- [28:24]
C
Yeah.
- [28:24]
D
You know that guy, if he had 14 prior arrests. Right. Like, there's no reason for someone like that to be out on the street. And the problem is that I think especially in an age of ubiquitous surveillance cameras and cell phone videos, unfortunately when stuff like this happens, it really fuels people's worst instincts, including frankly, some real racist instincts. And I just don't really think you can stop that cycle without stopping the actual crime and the violence. I just, you know, there was a time where there was kind of a monopoly. The legacy press had a monopoly over these images and could decide what the public knew. We're well past that. If something like this happens, people will see it. People will also see, unfortunately, the races of, you know, the people who did it and fit that into a kind of pre existing narrative they have. It's just really ugly. And the only way short of censorship, which I don't agree with, the only way to really stop that radicalization cycle from happening is you just gotta stop the violence. And that unfortunately means, I mean, that means using law enforcement and yes, also mental health. That's, that's part of it too. But like, you gotta identify the people who are threats and you just, you can't have them walking around on public transit. I mean, again, it's a little different from the Charlie Kirk thing. But like, I really do, looking at the way people responded to that video of the subway stabbing, I mean, my initial thought was just that, you know, an aggressive crackdown on crime would probably be one of the best things for race relations we could possibly do in this country.
- [30:16]
C
Aaron Sabarium is a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon. Thank you so much, Aaron.
- [30:21]
D
Thank you for having me.
- [30:28]
C
I've been using AI tools a lot. They are excellent as thought starters. They are excellent for organization, which I don't have. I will tell you a specific way that I use it. As, you know, I talk on this show and then I also have the written word on the Pesca Profundities newsletter on Substack. But, you know, talking out a subject is a lot different from writing it out. So what I will do is I will take my spoken essays, I will put it into, say, Claude from Anthropic, and I will tell Claude to rewrite it with specific guidelines. I could emphasize the factual. I could say strip away the. I could just give it the prompt to strip away the colloquial. You know what you could even do? You could tell Claude to write it in the style of. And then you could name an author or two different authors and buy gum. If it doesn't do that, Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop with good enough. It is really a collaborator. I will go through the essay. I will say. I wouldn't say that. I would say that. I mean, it's all what I said, but it takes spoken word, turns it into proper grammar, sometimes can turn it into the proper grammar in the style of Marcus Aurelius. If I want to appeal to a stoic audience, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. I've also loaded in spreadsheets and code and asked it to give me an analysis that I was suspicious of. And it can confirm, it can talk you through. And it has talked me through. Essentially it's quote unquote thought process. And Claude code is a game changer for developers. It works directly in your terminal and it understands the entire code base. It works with people like me who only understand what code is trying to do. And it works really well with people who are experts on coding. And Claude meets them at least halfway. I'm thinking of tasking it with something that it can do, which is to take control of the calendar, emails, all of my go to tools, and just integrate all the incoming communication and outgoing communication in a way that really makes me look much more on top of things than I really am. Ready to tackle bigger problems. Sign up for Claude today and get 50% off Claude Pro. When you use my link. That's Claude AI slash the gist have to say. Before I even knew they were a sponsor, I started paying full freight. I think I might have to go back and use myself as my own promo code. That's Claude AI slash the gist. Right now for 50% off your first three months of Claude Pro. That includes access to all the features that I mentioned in today's episode. Claude AI the gist. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
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Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer.
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That's not the itinerary we're following.
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Bon voyage.
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- [34:23]
C
And now the spiel. I hope the murder of Charlie Kirk will become a watershed moment. And by that I mean the moment we shed the preachings of Fox News, Jesse Waters.
- [34:34]
B
It's happening. We've got trans shooters, you got riots in la. They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. What are we going to do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? And that's the question we're just going to have to ask ourselves. Now, Charlie would want us to put as much pressure on these people as possible. Dana nailed it. This is unacceptable and has to stop and it has to stop now. And everybody's accountable. And we're watching what they're saying on television. And who's saying what? The politicians, the media and all these rats out there.
- [35:17]
C
No, no, no, no, no. I know you are upset. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is hugely upsetting. It's a shocking escalation in an already overly violent political atmosphere. But what I heard there sounds too much like a threat and an escalation of its own. This should not become our marching orders. This should not be the primary way we express grief. I understand in times of stress people revert to their most basic, even base instincts. And the only reason we know Jesse Waters name is because he's somewhat of a master of the rhetoric of outrage. But calmer voices must prevail. And yet the same goes for the left. While some on the left, I would say many of the most mainstream voices are responding with appropriate mourning and rejecting violence. There was one guest on msnbc, my apologies if there were two, who said something out of line and then the president of the network quickly apologized and chastised him. But there are others, not so much in the mainstream, not so much invited on well watched TV networks who go way too far. Do not go to Blue sky if you're looking for proper mourning. You will find a retrenchment instead. People spurring on inaccurate narratives maybe without even realizing it. I also was reading the formerly conservative substacker Jennifer Rubin. She wrote sadly he, Donald Trump and the MAGA troops reserve outrage only when Republicans are targeted. Compare their near silence when Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was targeted. Their mockery when Paul Pelosi was killed. Snide remarks when two Minnesota Democrats were assassinated, as we saw yesterday. Democrats condemn political violence whoever is targeted. Her examples, however, do not hold up. Yes, some MAGA types mocked the Paul Pelosi incident, but most elected Republicans did not. We do not remember those who did, but many, many pro forma statements went out expressing sympathy with Nancy Pelosi, wishing him a speedy recovery. Better examples are Governor Shapiro. The record is clear there wasn't near silence when he was targeted. J.D. vance posted thanks be to God that Governor Shapiro and his family were unharmed in this attack. Really disgusting violence and I hope whoever did this is brought swiftly to justice. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise There is no place in our society for political violence and praying for Governor Shapiro and his family. Elise Stefanik Pretty much same thing. AG Pam Bondi Deeply relieved that Governor Shapiro and his family are safe. Even President Trump, muted as he was and less than adequately did say this is certainly a thing that cannot be allowed to happen. On Instagram today I posted a reel about political what about ism and one commenter said that conservatives didn't denounce the killings of the the Minnesota legislators. That was also mentioned in the Jennifer Rubin post Not true. Many, many conservatives did. House Speaker Mike Johnson released a statement saying, today House Republican and Democrats stood united in condemning the horrific, politically motivated shootings in Minnesota. We pray for the Hortman family as well as the Hoffman family. These were politicians who were. Or a politician, his wife, who was shot before Hortman and her husband were killed. Scalise chimed in again. Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Mark Johnson chimed in again. Trump himself said, I have been briefed on the terrible shooting. Such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America. Pam Bondi pledged the FBI would be investigating and said, this horrific violence will not be tolerated and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But what captured our attention, and maybe what Jennifer Rubin was thinking of, was Senator Mike Lee's horrifically stupid tweets about, this is what happens when Marxists take control. That distortion convinced many that no Republicans condemned the attacks and that GOP leaders danced on graves or the charred ruins of mansions. And then months later, when we forgot those press releases that I read or those statements that were actually said, it becomes solidified in the public's mind that only Democrats condemn violence, that no Republicans would say anything close to decent about this. And what happens is an escalation in animosity between the sides. In some ways, this is part and parcel with a trend that's been going on for a while, a perception gap. Many studies have showed that one party has consistently wild impressions of the other. For instance, 80% of Republicans say there should be some way for immigrants who follow the rules to come into this country. But only half of Democrats believe Republicans think that. Republicans wildly overestimate how many Democrats are gay. Democrats wildly overestimate how many Republicans are millionaires. We don't know each other, we don't trust each other, we don't like each other. We've been conditioned to fear each other. And more to the point of what we're talking about today, research shows that Republicans and Democrats greatly overestimate how much their rival partizans support violence. For instance, they do polls, and only four and a half percent of Democrats and 9.8% of Republicans score somewhere above the midpoint of a violence support scale. So we could say 5% of Dems, 10% of the Republicans have an overly accepting attitude towards political violence. And that's bad that it's that high. But what do Democrats think? Democrats think not 10% of Republicans, but 35% of Republicans hold those views. And Republicans think 37% of Democrats hold those views. Now, if you said oh, the Democrats are less violent, but the Republicans think the Democrats are more violent. I don't know, maybe you're thinking like a partisan also. My main point is it's a wild misestimation, not the fact that. Slightly more wild on the Republican side. So what breaks this cycle? It is not media. It is not. I was gonna say partisan media, but what media isn't these days? MSNBC can't help themselves or people like Jen Rubin. I know that she truly believes that she is adding facts and analysis to a discourse that needs it. The fact that she gets lots of money from all her substack followers telling her, yeah, this is what we want to hear. I don't know, that plays into it a little bit. But I also think she's thinking that she is an honest broker. I can't tell you the same for Jesse Waters. I do know he's quite upset. But plenty of conservatives are honestly saying it's almost all the fault of the Democrats. And they're doing it not for clout. They're saying it because they believe it. They're responding to the same kind of social drive for likes, all the kinds of likes, the social media scorecard likes, and just the fact that we're social and tribal creatures who want to be liked by our own tribe. For a long time, when I still had more hope for reform, that was the message I would always share on this show. So there would be a classic MSNBC segment, there'd be a real news item, there'd be extremists. Some were absolutely in the news. Remember Caesar Siak, the van decorator guy who was put in jail for threatening opponents of Donald Trump? Yeah. That was an indication that violence is out there. But then there was a guy who attacked an FBI office in Cincinnati with a stapler gun. And there were many, many segments on MSNBC and other places that held that out as an example of increased political violence, as opposed to an example of an idiotic or possibly mentally unwell individual who was, by the way, eventually gunned down by the FBI. These outlets thought it was their duty, it was certainly in their business interests to document a world where right wing extremists were a constant danger, were a major part of the conservative ecosystem, and where a left wing viewer would rationally say, oh, my God, they want to kill us, and left wing extremists, they were either ignored or filed away as an exaggeration. Well, the potency of each side are both exaggerations, though we have to say, as the facts change, we need to update our opinions. There are less exaggerations than they were a few years ago. I saw then what would come to be that the left, feeling besieged, would believe they were under assault and they'd come out fighting and it would radicalize their most unbalanced members. And that has happened. As a reminder, right now there is a trial about the guy who tried to assassinate Donald Trump. I should say the second guy who tried to assassinate Donald Trump, the only one who lived. I guess if I wanted to make bank, I wouldn't say, guys, let's all calm down. I would have. I wouldn't have said violence is and definitely needs to remain an aberration. I guess if I wanted to make bank, I would say something like, there is violence in America. There's lots of violence and it's almost all coming from the other side. So what Mike Lee did in his comment about Marxists, that's what Elon Musk did when he tweeted, the left is the party of murder that sells what doesn't. And what needs to be heard, what needs to be properly reflected, is that the vast, vast, vast majority of all parties, in every sense political and just people, they don't want in on this. They need to be reminded, they need to remember that political violence, while not unknown in American history, is rare and needs to stay that way. The only thing is, it is certainly less rare than it was even a decade ago, and it's a lot less rare than it was from the 80s to the early aughts. And I don't know how it gets rarer again. Certainly not when megaphones and platforms amplify those who insist that violence is rampant always on the other side, and when those who have the biggest audiences are most incentivized to boil their own supporters blood rather than to lower the temperature. The Gist was produced by Cory Wara, the very nimble and able Cory Wara. Ashley Kahn is our production coordinator. Kathleen Sykes and I collaborate on the Gist List substack every Wednesday. It's a straight up Pesca profundities newsletter. So a lot of labels here but I will just tell you go to Mike pesca.substack.com to see what I'm writing about. And Michelle Pesca is CEO of Peach Fish Productions. Improvement and thanks for listening.