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This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. When you visit the doctor, you probably hand over your insurance, your ID and contact details. It's just one of the many places that has your personal info and if any of them accidentally expose it, you could be at risk for identity theft. Lifelock monitors millions of data points a second. If you become a victim, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year@lifelock.com podcast terms apply. Yesterday, just hours before the District Attorney of Utah county formally announced the charges against Charlie Kirk's assassin, and before he ran through some new evidence that authorities had collected, a left wing journalist named Ken Klippenstein published an exclusive article on his substack, which happens to be one of the most popular political substacks in the country. Too much fanfare, Klippenstein reported that he had obtained private messages from from people who knew the shooter, which were were sent on the day that Charlie Kirk was killed. These messages were uploaded to a private server on Discord, which is a communication service that's popular among young people, particularly young people who play video games. Here's one of the screenshots that Klippenstein provided in his article. As you can see, at 3:17pm on September 10, somebody wrote, Charlie Kirk got shot. And then around 30 minutes later, somebody writes dead. Roughly an hour after that, somebody else writes, I just saw that video rip I guess bro didn't deserve to go out like that. Sad. And then according to this screenshot, the messages stop there. No one says anything at all again until late the next day on September 11th at 8:57pm and that message comes directly from the shooter. He says he's sorry and tells his friends that he's going to turn himself in. And then on September 12th, this message was posted in the Discord server. It reads, hey everyone, if you have not seen the news yet, Tyler's post is true. He was taken into custody earlier today for the shooting of Charlie Kirk. While Charlie Kirk's politics were not acceptable to some, I ask that we all say a prayer for him and his family during these confusing times. Close quote. Now the rest of the article contains quotes from one of the shooter's friends claiming he was generally apolitical. And then Klippenstein offers this conclusion. Quote, trump and company portray the alleged Utah shooter as left wing and liberals portray him as right wing. But the federal conclusion will inevitably be that he was a so called nihilist violent extremist. Nve. Now to recap, some members of the shooter's Discord group shared a small number of screenshots with a popular left wing substack author. The screenshot showed that the community was mostly focused on video games and wasn't celebrating Kirk's death in the slightest. Allegedly, the author publishes those screenshots and presents them as proof that the shooter was not actually left wing. Supposedly he was just nihilistic and, you know, angry at the world. Very transparently. The intent of this article was to deflect any suspicion from Discord and the people the shooter was interacting with on the platform. And presumably that's why the shooter's friends gave those screenshots to Ken Klippenstein to begin with. But in truth, in reality here the screenshots raise far more questions than they answer. So let's pull that first screenshot up again. Let's look at this again after Charlie is shot. According to the screenshot, there's a grand total of five messages on this Discord server written by two people about the assassination. And none of them are incriminating or even controversial. And these Messages stop by 5pm the entire evening of September 10, after all this had happened, and most of September 11. The next day until 9pm no one says anything at all. And then out of nowhere, the shooter confesses. He basically tells an empty room that appears to be uninterested in the Kirk assassination that he did it. Now, this is not evidence, as Ken claimed, that the shooter had no political motivations and wasn't operating as part of a coordinated terror plot. It does not exonerate the shooter's acquaintances in any way. It's actually very odd as far as evidence goes. I mean, it suggests that some messages from this Discord server may have been deleted or redacted before the screenshots were sent to Ken Klippenstein, which would not be shocking, by the way. I mean, these people obviously have every incentive to make it appear as though they didn't know about this and were not celebrating it and did have had no hand in coordinating it. Of course, they have every incentive to do that. Or it suggests that they were communicating through a different channel in the interim between the last message from the group and the out of nowhere confession from the killer. And it supports the conclusion that for one reason or another, some of the influential left wing voices in the country, as well as close associates of the Sassen, are desperate to hide the shooter's political motivation. And in the process, they're getting very sloppy. Now, I say that because Ken Klippenstein wasn't The only prominent leftist on Substack to clumsily push a narrative like this. Heather Cox Richardson, who I'm told is the single most popular political commentator on Substack, wrote that Kirk's assassin had embraced the far right. She said that conservative commentators had created a fictional world to argue otherwise. Now, to restate what's happening here of the most influential voices on the left. Not Reddit trolls, not bots on Twitter. Actual people with large audiences are going out of their way to lie about the murder of Charlie Kirk. And it's not just on Substack either. Here's a Jimmy Kimmel show from the other day. Watch this.
