A (4:45)

Well, harkening back to 1968, which was the year of political violence, right.

B (4:51)

I mean, but even before that, right, you can read Lincoln's Lyceum speech, where he's decrying mob violence against people who disagree with prevailing views. Right. Elijah Lovejoy slaughtered for publishing abolitionist tracts. It's tarring and feathering during the revolution. I mean, it's sort of a recurring part of our experience.

A (5:13)

Okay, David, what about you? I mean, you've written just this week, turned around a magnificent kind of look at Kirk and what he meant to the conservative youth movement. What have you made of all of this early kind of remembrance?

C (5:29)

Yeah, there's a few things. One, going back to Jamel's point, when I wrote. I have a piece that was published this morning, the Thursday morning, about Kirk and about the assassination, and Charlie and I had a lot of disagreements. You know, we represent very different parts of the broader American right, and there were a lot of disagreements there, and I chose not to highlight those in that discussion. I mentioned that we had disagreements, but I chose not to highlight them for a pretty specific reason, which is that when you're looking at the shock and horror and trauma of what just unfolded on that college campus, that the. The gravity of that is so much greater than the disagreements that I had politically, that I didn't want to foreground those this moment because I wanted to rest on the most important thing and the most important things plural, which is the gravity of the loss of a husband and a father and also how and where it happened. And so the thing that really is sticking with me when I got up this morning is this happened on a college campus. It happened during a debate or a debate type event on a college campus. And it was people, rather than hashing these things out, one person chose to end the conversation with a bullet. And the fact that this occurred on campus, the fact that it incurred in front of thousands of students and the fact that it occurred to a person who, as I wrote in my piece, has an all. He's almost omnipresent in politically interested Gen Z or social media feeds. It's very difficult to find a Gen Zer who pays any attention to politics at all, who doesn't know who. Charlie Kirk is just virtually impossible. All of those things together, I think mean that this is a more seminal cultural event than we might otherwise think. What are students going to be thinking about debate on campus now? What is, you know, people who speak on college campuses, and I know all of us here do, how do we feel approaching an event on a college campus? Now these college debates, these college discussions, these are some of the, this is some of the lifeblood of our democracy. And when you had a murder in the middle, in the middle of a college event, in addition to the tragedy, horrific tragedy impacting Charlie and his family and his friends, we have this radiating impact into the culture as well, specifically into the culture of the college campus. And this is something that I've been thinking about is that it's the horror of the moment and then the radiating impact that we're going to have on American discourse.

B (8:21)

I take that observation, I take that point about the consequence and the weightiness of this particular incident. My response here is less about those making that point and more about what I sense is a kind of sanctification of Kirk as this exemplar of dialogue and discourse in the country. And I just, I don't think that's an accurate picture of the man who lived. And I mean, you know, he was prolific. So it's not particularly difficult to get a good sense of what Kirk believed about things and whose stated beliefs were in essence that people of his ideological persuasion ought to be able to suppress the views of the people they don't like. That's what the professor watch list was, something his organization continues to maintain, a watch list of professors and instructors and adjuncts and whomever's on the college campus of their speech for saying things he doesn't like and saying things the organization doesn't like. And it's been strange to me to see Governor Gavin Newsom praise Kirk as having been committed to good faith discourse, and then read an entry on this watch list of a professor not speaking in the classroom, speaking as a private citizen in his own life. And then at the bottom of this entry, it says, contact this guy's employer to harass and maybe try to get him fired. I want people to basically be able to do two things at once, to sort of say, in line with David, that this was a tragedy for Kirk and his family and his friends, that this should not have happened, that this is very consequential, and at the same time say, we're not gonna airbrush this guy's life and this guy's legacy. Right. As a political communicator.

A (10:28)

Well, that is one of the things you see with violence and these sorts of tragedies. It kind of flattens the victim, and you create martyrs. I mean, already we're seeing Trump referred to him as a martyr. There's a pastor in Oklahoma who founded the Pastors for Trump Network who said that Charlie died for what he believed in. He died for something greater than just himself. We hope and we pray that Charlie's death is not one in vain. Which is this at all worrying, David?

C (11:02)

Well, yes, it's all very worrying. I mean, anytime you have an event like this, you do have this kind of fork in the road moment that the shock, the horror settles in, and then you sort of have this choice. Am I going to use that to stoke rage and hatred and fury against my political opponents? Or I'm going to realize we are walking down the road to oblivion, and I'm going to become a part of a political culture that is going to condemn this unequivocally, commit itself to treating people with decency, even across big differences. Because, you know, one of the things is a political culture can tolerate very large differences against a background of decency. It cannot tolerate and survive small differences if the background environment is one that is soaked in violence and hatred. And so one thing that does absolutely concern me is that you are seeing in response the political leaders, the writers, the pundits, all of those people. Every living president has put out a statement about this. You know, you're seeing a lot of very responsible, sober behavior in sort of the political elite, and a lot of.

A (12:18)

These from characters that you would not necessarily expect, like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

C (12:23)

Totally. I mean, you're seeing a lot of calls for calm, a lot of calls for peace, a lot of calls for reconciliation. And that's one path to walk down. That's the path we should go down. I'm also seeing calls for civil war. I am seeing calls for unrelenting vengeance, mass raids, mass police raids against political opponents. That's your fork in the road. Every time you have political violence, which path are you going to walk? And I'm seeing a lot of people online, thankfully, not most of your political elites or whatever, but it's still a lot of people online taking that path towards more vengeance, viewing politics not as an arena of disagreement on important matters, but as a blood feud. And that is what is alarming me, one of the principal things that's alarming me right now.

A (13:13)

So, Jamal, you mentioned President Trump.

C (13:15)

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals.

B (13:26)

This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in.

C (13:33)

Our country today, and it must stop right now.

A (13:37)

And he went further than that, saying that he was going to root all this out. What we have that's new in these situations today that we didn't have, say, you know, in the 60s or before, we have the immediate outlet of social media where we were watching people grieve in real time last night and rage in real time. And a lot of the responses were appalling, whether it was people gloating over the violence or people calling for the left to be tracked down and destroyed. I'm hoping that, you know, 24 hours in, 36 hours in, everyone will have had a moment to catch their breath. I mean, where do we think this is going?

B (14:22)

You know, I don't know. It is, I think, simply true that the president and his allies do want the state suppression of their political opponents. I think they're very open about that. I think they're probably looking for some excuse. I doubt this will be the excuse. One thing about these sorts of events, the perpetrators of these events, is that contra, I think the desires of some people, they don't have particularly coherent political beliefs or ideologies. They are acting in ways that are often inscrutable. And so my suspicion is that if and when authorities find the shooter in this case, they're gonna find someone whose beliefs are a grab bag of nonsense, in the same way that the shooter in Pennsylvania targeting Trump, his views were a grab bag of nonsense, the same way that so many would be. And successful assassins have belief structures that just don't make any sense. And that will make it more difficult to use the event as some kind of rallying cry for a crackdown. One thing I want to say, though, kind of just reflecting on what David just said, is that if this had happened to someone else, what do we think Charlie Kirk's reaction would have been? It would have been the thing that we're decrying.

A (15:45)

Yeah.

B (15:46)

And I feel maybe it's too soon for this kind of conversation. But in keeping with trying to be honest about Kirk's life as it was lived, I think we should acknowledge that his work contributed to the kind of political atmosphere where people rage about civil war and crackdowns against their political enemies.

A (16:11)

I do think that I saw a quote from him about decrying political violence.

C (16:17)

One of the things that's made the rounds is he is saying when we stop talking to each other, that is when violence occurs, or something along those lines. I think there was one.

B (16:27)

I mean, after the attack on Paul Pelosi, the attacker, he made light of it.

C (16:31)

I remember there was.

A (16:32)

That was disgusting.

C (16:33)

And why is he still in jail? Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some. If some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail is like 30 or 40,000 bucks. Bail him out and then go ask him some questions.

A (16:53)

Well, this is interesting. It's interesting that you point to Paul Pelosi, because one of the things that's different about the Charlie Kirk situation is this. This is not a politician. Right. So it is not Donald Trump. It is not Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman, just like Paul Pelosi was not himself in the political arena now, Pelosi was, you know, he was kind of collateral damage from somebody who was seeking out his wife, whereas Charlie Kirk was himself the target here. But it does speak to kind of the widening circle of political violence. Right?

C (17:33)

Yeah. This is something. I'm glad you're bringing that up, Michelle, because I think that this is a horrific evolution that was inevitable. And one of the reasons why it was inevitable is because the prominence and power position between politicians versus sort of your world of influencers and pundits, et cetera. I think, especially on the right, has shifted to the point where a person like Charlie Kirk. I said, I think he might be the single most successful conservative not named Donald Trump since the Trump era. Which Republican elected official had more hold on the Republican public, other than Donald Trump, than Charlie Kirk? Honestly, I Think Charlie Kirk had more of a hold on particularly Republican young people than any other Republican politician. And so as sort of the influencer and pundit class and whatever has grown in its power and influence, then you're beginning to look at, okay, in a world of escalating political violence, this was never going to be contained to the politicians. And so I've long felt it's just a matter of time before this happens. And so, yeah, that is. It's crossing a line that was absolutely going to be crossed because of the metastasizing political violence and the changing way in which power works in our culture right now.

A (19:04)

Jamel, did you have anything you want to throw in on that?

B (19:07)

I'm always wary of saying that things are novel.

A (19:14)

This is the problem with your studying history. You know, too much.

B (19:19)

I guess what I'm struggling with is trying to understand why we've had this nationwide outpouring in the way that we didn't for, you know, the assassination of Hortman in June. Right. In the way that, you know, the intimidation and threats of violence against judges and election workers is basically invisible to most people. Right. That we're talking as if there isn't. There hasn't been just beneath the surface for the last five years. You know, maybe political violence, not as dramatic as this, but certainly very real and certainly with very real victims.

A (19:57)

Well, isn't part of that because there is a video of the actual shooting.

B (20:02)

That might just be it. Right? It might just be video. Yeah.

A (20:05)

It happened. So it's not just that he was shot and it is caught in gruesome video images. It's that it was on also a college campus where you, like, that triggers something with a lot of the public. You had all these terrified kids running and recording this and texting people, are you safe? And it was just a very dramatic example of what is usually something that people hear very antiseptically after the fact. And for obvious reasons, you don't want to put these images out there unnecessarily. But in this case, you couldn't repress it. It was out there.

B (20:43)

Yeah.

C (20:43)

I mean, images matter so much. I mean, the. There would not have been the reaction to the George Floyd murder that existed had all the information that we had been a press release about it or eyewitness testimony about it. The circumstances combined with sort of the omnipresence of Kirk and sort of Gen Z America. The place, the images, the video, the audience. I mean, this was a. This was shocking and jolting for a lot of understandable reasons. And one other thing, though, to point out that's making all of this worse. I'm seeing people continually repeating something online that is the political violence is all coming from the left. And I'm pretty convinced I've spent so much of my life living in very, very red areas, that a lot of these people who say that you could put them under a lie detector and they pass the lie detector test, that this is all coming from the left or that only the left celebrates political violence. And this is coming from a movement that had the January 6th prison choir opening, a recorded track of the. A version of the national anthem from the January 6th choir opening, some of Trump's rallies. And then people are saying with a straight face, only the left celebrates political violence. And. And this is a giant problem. There is a long list of right wing political violence, deadly right wing political violence, including mass shootings. And so when you look at it like this, it is so incumbent upon those of us who have a memory longer than a goldfish, speaking of memory, to be able to place this in a context that says America has a political violence problem. And one of the things that makes America's political violence problem is when our partisan blinders convince us that my community is the one completely under siege and your community are the ones who are besieging us, and that that mindset is only causing us to double down on this apocalyptic vision. And that stokes all of that Civil War conversation that you're seeing pop up in dark corners of the Internet.

A (22:55)

I mean, that's one of the reasons, or the main reason why it was so disappointing to see Trump go there in his video yesterday about Kirk. I mean, he focused solely on the left, and he drilled down on the idea that his team is under assault. And I do think it probably is something of not a revelation, but I do think most of the folks on the left would flip that script and say, well, it is absolutely the right that is the problem. It is two different realities that people.

B (23:32)

Are functioning in from an empirical standpoint. So they said you can categorize stuff. It is the case that more political violence comes from what you would describe as the right than it does from the left. And I'd say that if you're looking for some kind of, you know, what forces in the culture have unleashed this, I think you could make a very strong and empirically grounded case that Donald Trump's presence in American politics has had an instigating effect on comfort with the use of violence and violent rhetoric against political opponents. I don't think that is a stretch. I thought that I have, though it's just this term political violence and how it's a more amorphous term than I think it appears to be because it tends to designate certain kinds of violence as being political violence, mainly violence against recognizable political figures and other types of violence or threats of violence as sort of the background noise of American politics, not necessarily worthy of the designation of political violence. And it excludes violence from the state against individuals. Like, I think that's a complicated term. And, you know, the extent to which, like who is the target of violence shapes notions of what constitutes political violence beyond them being a political figure. But just, I think it's important to say so.

A (25:02)

The violence speaks to the fact that, you know, politics is seen as existential. I mean, the House couldn't even have a moment of silence for Kirk without it degenerating into squabbling. I mean, is there a way that this could help turn down the temperature on that, or are we still just too much in the thick of the fever at this point?

B (25:18)

I don't think so. And that's because it is my view, right, that the fever, as it were, is not simply that spontaneous result of, you know, all Americans engaging in getting angry at each other, that there are, like, specific people that we can readily identify who have like, made it their. Their work to heighten tensions. At the National Conservative Conference last week, the far right influencer activist believe Jack Posobiek spoke on the theme of his book, which is called Unhumans. And the argument of the book is that people on the left are not actually human beings deserving of respect and dignity. And he spoke and received applause. And this is a gathering of influential people in the world of modern day conservatism. The President of the United States last year during his campaign referred to immigrants and people on the left and any of his political opponents as poisoning the blood of the nation, right, referring to people he opposes as little more than vermin. Why would this event lead these people to moderate their rhetoric? Moderate the rhetoric, like, not speak about people as subhuman, when what we're seeing right now is that they're using it, they're making suppositions about the causes, right? They're assuming that this was some left wing assassin and using it as an opportunity to push forward with this. And I'll say, to be honest is that like a lot of these figures on the right, who their response to Kirk's killing was this. We have to have a civil war. We have to round them up. You know, Chris Rufo was doing this. Like, a bunch of these guys were doing this. These were supposed to be Kirk's friends, and his body's not even cold, and they're already weaponizing it. I obviously had no sympathy for Kirk's politics, but I would think that if I were one of his friends who shared his politics, that I would not be using his untimely demise for my narrow, partisan political purposes. And the fact that that is what happened, I think is a testament to the fact that there's no path from this for these particular people to turning down the temperature.

C (28:03)

David, one thing that we've not talked about that I think is worth mentioning is that I also see this. There's a danger point here with the shooting, and that it's also an ideal opportunity for social media. The malign and when I say malign actors on social media to do what they do, one of the things that has become abundantly clear is that a lot of American political conflict isn't just driven by terrible people who are engaging in wildly apocalyptic and hateful rhetoric, who are real, live human beings, but we also have influence operations using social media to take existing cracks and fissures in American life and just blow them up and expand them. And things like this are ideal opportunities. And so you're starting to see stuff like, well, look at this horrible person celebrated Charlie Kirk's death, and they got 44,000 likes, as if that's a genuine measure sort of of what the left is. And we have to realize that some of this isn't real. Some of what's stoking us isn't actually real. And so not only does social media draw a kind of participant that's not typically representative of your media and American voter, that reality isn't compounded by the fact that some of the people in the social media, Deb date aren't genuine participants even to begin with. And so I. That's why I think this is in some ways even more perilous, because it presents that opportunity for people to utilize our own technology against us once again.

A (29:39)

All right, so I have to admit that anytime something horrible is exploding on social media, my mind automatically goes, because this has happened to me with stories and before. I'm like, how much of this is a Russian bot or a foreign influencer or just kind of some sinister, not real, American response to this? So I know that makes me sound really strange and paranoid, but I'm just gonna admit that up front. And with that nod to social media and the shadowy forces I just wanna say I'm glad we're all real participants here and talking through some of our disagreements this week. I really appreciate your thoughts on this as always, guys. Thanks so much.

C (30:21)

Thank you so much, Michelle.

B (30:23)

Thank you very much. And I promise I'm not an AI bot or anything.

A (30:26)

I have my suspicions.

D (30:53)

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