← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Charlie Kirk's Killer EXPOSES America's Real Collapse... | Tom Bilyeu Deepdive
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A single gunshot rang out on September 10, 2025, killing Charlie Kirk and proving the pollsters right. Because one in four Americans openly believe political violence may be justified to save the country, two thirds of Americans believe the other political party isn't just wrong and it's a threat to the country itself. And while Charlie Kirk lay bleeding to death as people were literally still ducking from the gunfire, someone stood up, threw their hands in the air and cheered. And online, the responses were even worse. Countless people celebrated the assassination of a husband and father of two young children simply because he was their political rival. But this wasn't the beginning of violence in the country, merely the continuation of it. Things have been going very wrong for a very long time. First it was the attempt on Donald Trump's life. Then the assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the attempted assassination of John Hoffman and his wife, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death on a public train. And now Charlie Kirk gunned down in front of his family, a massive crowd and on camera for the whole world to see. And those are just the highlights. There are far more politically motivated killings in just the last five years. But as Constantine Kissen said, Charlie's assassination really does feel different. It feels like the crossing of an invisible line that we didn't even know was there. Seeing stadiums fill up with mourners. It really does feel like the straw that broke the camel's back and has made this horrifying trend impossible to ignore. America is tearing itself apart now. I've spent the better part of two years warning that we were edging closer to civil war. People thought I was doing it for clicks. They couldn't understand why someone who won the game of capitalism and who built his YouTube channel off of empowering ideas was suddenly, quote, unquote, fear mongering. But in reality, it's the same impulse that led me to make mindset content that has led me to spend the last couple of years trying to get people to see that history is clear about what happens in the kind of economically challenging environment we're living through right now. The violence is not random. It's what happens when economic uncertainty collides with radical ideology. When people are told that words are violence and so real violence is a justifiable response to words. When algorithms send us down rabbit holes of team based anger and and feed us a steady diet of rage, radicalism and anti western sentiment, we are bound to end up right here. This moment is a rogue wave caused by a mountain of debt, wild wealth inequality, economic despair, conflicting ideology, messages of hate, and a belief that life is a shit sandwich and every day is just another bite. When that's your mantra, it's only a matter of time before things break bad. But this video isn't just about what's going wrong. It's what we can do about it to reverse the trend. But we're never going to find a way out if we can't be honest about what's wrong. So this isn't just about Charlie Kirk. This is about walking America back from a line that if it's crossed, it won't be able to come back from. How do I know? Because history rhymes. And right now, the next line is becoming very predictable. In four parts, I'm going to lay out where we are, how we got here, what happens if we don't change, and the playbook for creating a better path forward. Part four is the playbook. But do not skip part two. That's the key ingredient to this shift towards violence. If we don't address it, there's no pulling back. Welcome to part one. The Molotov cocktail of things that have led to this moment. The first ingredient is the erosion of free speech in the United States. Roughly 40% of young people now say free speech should be restricted if it offends Someone. In the 70s, the ACLU defended Neo Nazis right to march through a neighborhood full of Holocaust survivors. Now one in three college students say it's sometimes acceptable to to use violence to stop a speaker they disagree with. Violence to stop speakers. Sound familiar? We should not be surprised that a majority of Americans now say they're afraid to share their real opinions in public. Not because they might be wrong, but because they might be ruined by people who disagree. And in the UK, our cultural cousin. 30 people per day are arrested for things they post online. And it is the most Orwellian thing I have ever seen in my life. And once politics become about teams instead of ideas, people are pushed into us versus other out groups. And once that happens, the other side stops being perceived as merely wrong and they start being seen as evil. And we already know violence will be seen as acceptable, perhaps even morally necessary to, to stop someone who's evil from spreading their message. Because after all, words are violence. And just like that, free speech, the cornerstone of a thriving democracy, collapses. The very thing that once acted as a pressure release valve for our disagreements is now viewed as a threat. Politicians across the aisle, from Biden to Trump and back again, are calling for the censorship of speech they don't like. Biden had a pipeline directly to the social media platforms so his admin could remove posts they didn't like. And now Trump's Attorney General, Pam Bondi, is making unhinged remarks about targeting people for hate speech after Charlie Kirk's death. As Charlie Kirk himself said, however, there is no such thing as hate speech. There might be ugly speech, gross speech, or even evil speech, but it's all protected under the First Amendment. But we are losing the will to fight for people's right to offend. And we seem to be willfully blinding ourselves to the fact that when you're not prepared to fight for people's right to say offensive things, by default, you're fighting for the right to jail them for wrongthink. Hence the daily arrests in the uk. Making matters worse, as free speech is being systematically dismantled, people are beginning to believe that the American system itself is. Is irreparably broken. Democracy, corrupted capitalism, an exploitative farce. People are being taught in public schools that America, and the west more broadly, is nothing more than a colonial theft project founded on slavery. Education has ceased being a place where you learn how to think, and instead it's become a place where you learn what to think. People have become so convinced of their own righteousness that they no longer want to be challenged. The whole point of the structure of the American government itself was to build a system with checks and balances, because humans are deeply flawed and systems populated by humans tend towards tyranny. Remember the Statue of Liberty? It was a gift from foreigners to the US because we had become not just a symbol of hope and prosperity, but we had actually managed to succeed in becoming a place where, where unparalleled innovation was born out, actually leading people to breathe free. America was the place that put its money where its mouth is in terms of understanding. People cannot be trusted blindly to think you've got things so right that your job as an educator is to indoctrinate children rather than teach them to question everything is madness. And to make matters worse, the thing we're indoctrinating people with is, is that we're a very bad, horrible place. That's the plan. Perversely, I think this self loathing is only possible because of our prolonged success. We've had it good for so long that we've lost the stomach for the realities of competing on a dangerous world stage. But this is turning into a global fafo. We are going against cultures that still believe in themselves, that are internally united, and they will run a divide and conquer strategy on us. And it will be easy because we no longer have a shared national narrative. We live inside of fragmented echo chambers where the loudest, angriest voices rise to the top. And everyone is scrambling to get on a team and spout the party line. As they say, the moderates die first in a revolution. No one wants to be isolated. Not when the issues are so complicated and hard to think through. And when the mob could come after you at any moment. Being on a team feels better than being isolated. Being angry feels better than being afraid. In a study where people had electrodes in their brain and could stimulate any emotion they wanted to, did they choose to stimulate love or even laughter? No, they chose to stimulate anger. Let that one sink in. You really think people are going to avoid content that further divides us when they will stimulate the regions of their brain that control anger over happiness when given a choice? Anger is what we want. Because when you're mad, all of that uncertainty goes away. You know what to think and how to act. And speaking of brain stimulation, while the jury's still out on how much impact it will have, we'd be fools. Not to mention what is possibly the world's dumbest mass medicating our children. One in five kids in America are now on psychiatric medication. By the time they're 18, we are rolling the dice on their brain development. Maybe it's neutral, maybe it's catastrophic, but we won't know until we have the guts to stare down big pharma and actually study the impact it's having. But by then, how many generations will we have already put at risk? And let's not forget the final ingredient in this Molotov cocktail. The economy. Beneath all of these cultural fault lines sits the most important factor of all. It has become Impossible for young people to buy a house. Housing affordability is at its worst. In over 30 years, the median home price is now more than seven times the median household income, compared to just 2.5 times in 1970. Since 2000, inflation adjusted house prices have risen 65% while median household income has barely moved. Why does this matter? There are three very specific reasons. One, because housing is the only asset that people intuitively understand. Two, assets are the only way to avoid the crushing effects of inflation. And three, when inflation is high, anyone who owns assets gets richer and everyone else gets poorer. That's what's happening right now. The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. Not because capitalism is broken. It's happening because over the last five years alone, inflation has been 25% and wage growth has been stagnant, locking young people out of the only asset they understand. They could invest in the stock market for sure, but they won't because it's risky and confusing. And that's why 10% of Americans own 93% of all the assets. This creates economic uncertainty, massive inequality, which together makes people fearful, which makes them vulnerable to anger based populist leaders who promise they have all the answers. And the most important answer of all is that the other team is evil and must be stopped. And so the flywheel spins and you end up here, 37 trillion in debt and growing. And an entrepreneur and YouTuber known for empowering content is fear mongering because he studied the historical loop we're in. This much income inequality will lead to violence over and over and over again. Scratch that, it has already led to violence and it will keep escalating until we address the root cause and snap out of this self destructive trance. That brings us to maybe the most surprising part of our story. The part no one understands. We'll be back in a moment.
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And we're back. Welcome to part two. Revolutionary empathy. It's deadly. In 1789, France's top 1% controlled nearly half the wealth while bread prices consumed roughly 80% of the average worker's wage. I hope that Sounds distressingly familiar. This unsustainable economic position led to the French Revolution, during which guillotines were brought out into the streets and the elites were found themselves being beheaded. Within three years of the French Revolution kicking off, over 16,000 people had been executed. The bad thing about bloodlust is that once it gets started, it is nearly impossible to stop. Because it's not about ideology or even problem solving. It's about thinking emotionally and being enraged and then riding the wave of lunatic certainty that comes along with that. That's why by 1794, Robespierre, the guy who had originally called for justice in the streets, was himself dragged to the guillotine. Violence stops being about a cause and starts being the solution for anyone you don't like. That is the loop. And that's why the French Revolution didn't end in equality, it ended in tyranny and empire. Napoleon understood that bloodlust couldn't just be switched off, it had to be refocused. And that's how he rose from the bloodshed, by channeling France's revolutionary rage away from itself and into 16 years of near constant wars of conquest that killed over 3 million people across Europe. It simply didn't matter that the wars had nothing to do with equality. Once the masses get a taste for literal blood, once they are reasoning emotionally, they become a swarm of locusts that will devour anything before them. That's us, all of us. Nobody escapes that. History is clear. When economic despair fuses with envy and ideology, violence is inevitable. It's only a question of scale. Eric Weinstein introduced me to a term he calls revolutionary empathy. Now, honestly, I don't know if he came up with that or if I'm even using it in the way that he intended it. But for, for me, those words perfectly encapsulate what's happening right now. And it's critical to understanding this moment. If you want to know how it's possible that someone could justify murder, or how people could cheer it on, look no further than revolutionary empathy. Evolution had to come up with a solution for making sure that humans could flip a switch in their mind and go from loving and protecting their own to the wholesale slaughter of of an invading group. This is the anti empathy seen in times of war and revolution. That's how you get Luigi Mangione and Tyler Robinson, two men with disparate motivations being connected by the same psychological virus. Both believed in the absolute righteousness of their cause. Both believed the person in front of them wasn't just wrong, they were Evil. And they both clicked over into revolutionary empathy, making it possible to for them to pull the trigger. Beliefs, drive, behaviors. And if you've been taught that words are violence, capitalism is slavery, America is evil and has no right to exist, and denying an insurance claim is the same as murder, well, then shooting someone in the back or the neck becomes justified. That's revolutionary empathy. Love of in group, murderous hatred of out group. Expect more and more people to slip into revolutionary empathy in the coming years from both sides of the aisle. Everyone has an in group and everyone has an out group. Even if one side is more likely to choose violence than the other to preempt violence, you only have two. Persuasion and compromise or violence. And unless we halt the escalating division in tribal thinking, the bloodshed will continue until we're trapped in our own revolution. This is predictable from simply looking at a spreadsheet of wealth inequality. I know we like to think humans have all of this free will, but the reality is, on historical timescales, we are ridiculously predictable. And that brings us to part three. Our current path only leads to more division. After Charlie Kirk's assassination, freetyler trended half a million times on X. That means hundreds of thousands of people weren't mourning, they were celebrating. 87% of Americans now say polarization is a direct threat to our country's survival. But that's done nothing to slow it down. Instead, both sides think it's only a problem with the other side. Oh, the irony. Here's the bad news. This is a self reinforcing feedback loop that grows stronger over time. There are three main drivers. One, algorithmic echo chambers. The more people engage with polarizing content, the more the algorithm feeds it back to them. That's how social media works. It doesn't care about truth. It cares about engagement. And what engages us most is outrage. So we're all being radicalized by our own tendencies. And machines desire to give us more of what we want, no matter how bad it might be for us. The cycle is brutal. The more you interact with content that outrages you, the more enraging content you're going to see. Thus ensuring you're outraged all the time. Two, violence begets violence. Every time blood is spilled, the desire for revenge intensifies. One, assassination becomes an excuse for another. One attack becomes a justification for retaliation. As the bodies pile up, each side convinces itself that restraint is weakness and vengeance is justice. And violence also just proves to be an expedient tool. I wish that weren't true. But. But it is. Don't like someone take them out. Don't believe it works like that. Consult history. All of it. The norm is totalitarian dictators as far as the eye can see. Whether kings or despots, it hardly matters. The outcome is the same rule with an iron fist because it works. The modern Western democracies are the historical exception, not the rule. The notion we can't and won't slide back into that kind of monstrous dictatorship is naive. A master America's biggest competitor on the world stage is a murderous autocracy that as recently as the 1960s was starving its own people to death en masse. Within my lifetime, their middle schoolers were beating teachers to death at the request of the head of state. As a reminder, how did Napoleon come to power and kill millions in Europe by capitalizing on the murderous zeal of revolutionaries? It doesn't matter if the movement starts out with righteous grievances. What comes when humans embrace murder as a solution is more murder. 3. Humans are herd animals. We've always sought the protection that comes with groups, and in times of fear and chaos, the pull of the tribe becomes irresistible. Just like there are no lone wolves in prison because you need allies to survive, there are no moderates. In a revolution, the middle gets hollowed out first. Moderates are the first to die, specifically because they have no team to defend them. Over time, the cost of being in the center becomes so high that no one stays there and both sides sprint away from each other at the speed of light. And as we're seeing this, tribalism becomes complete touching everything. Even commerce companies today get attacked not just for what they sell, but for who they employ, where they advertise, or whether their CEO took the right political stance. Even silence is treated as an offense. I remember, long before I started covering politics having to spend hours trying to decide how I was going to respond publicly to blm. Not because I didn't care about the issue, but because I knew that whatever I said or didn't say would be taken as a political stance. It's only gotten worse today. Math has been called right wing. Being on time has been called white supremacy. Refusing to round up migrant farmers with criminals has been called suicidal empathy. Every single issue gets shoved into a partisan box instead of being analyzed through the lens of cause and effect. No one is thinking backwards from their goals. No one is asking what are the first principles that are going to take me from where we are to where we want to be? Instead, it's endless team based talking points, dunk contests, and everyone trying to own the other side. And when that happens, we lose our shared humanity. We stop being neighbors or fellow citizens, and we become mutual combatants. That's how you end up with half the country in tears over Charlie Kirk's assassination, while the other half memes his death and celebrates a man bleeding out in front of his family. It's not everyone, to be sure, but it's a growing number of people. And the more one side dehumanizes the other, the more it guarantees that the same thing is going to happen to them in reverse. That's the cycle division accelerating by nature and by algorithm. Tribes demand loyalty. Violence justifies more violence. The middle collapses, trust disappears, and restraint evaporates. And once that's gone, there's nothing left but escalation. That's why every revolution eventually eats itself. Because when you've run out of external enemies to punish, you turn inward. You purge the moderates, then the former allies, then eventually anyone. Because murder is just so damn expedient. So the question is, can we stop it? Is there a way to interrupt this cycle before it's too late? The answer is yes, but only if we return to the fundamentals that made freedom possible in the first place. Which brings us to part four, the playbook. Where and how we go somewhere good from here. According to Pew Research, 72% of Republicans now say that Democrats are more immoral than other Americans. 63% of Democrats say the same of Republicans. The number of Americans who have an unfavorable view of both major parties has tripled in just the last 20 years. Only 35% of Americans have trust in the media to report the news accurately. 70% of Americans believe corporations and the wealthy control the government. And they're probably right. The US is now $37 trillion in debt. That's $100,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. We're at 122% debt to GDP. And historically speaking, when debt to GDP goes above 130 for any meaningful amount of time, collapse has always followed. And the collapse is always from revolution or civil war. So when you see politically motivated violence occurring, don't hand wave it away or ask what side it's coming from. Look at the dashboard with all the warning lights and alarms going off. Ask yourself, what are the underlying factors that's driving this litany of problems? These kinds of trends do not happen in a vacuum. They are the result of predictable patterns in society caused by human nature itself. If we don't address these knowable factors, the violence will escalate until the country fractures too deeply to be safe or economically viable. Here are the factors we've discussed and what we need to do to address them. 1. It starts with the most foundational principle of freedom of speech. We have to learn to cherish it. When people can't argue with each other, only violence is left. Speech is the pressure relief valve of a free society. Ideas, even terrible ones, have to be aired in public because that's how they're defeated. Even good ideas often start off on shaky ground and require debate in the public square to be sharpened and improved. To remove debate in the name of avoiding offense is to eliminate the mechanism by which progress itself is made. Also, when we empower governments or mobs to decide what can and can't be said, violence becomes inevitable. No one ever agrees on the boundaries of acceptable speech, so violence becomes necessary to enforce compliance. Kill off freedom of speech and watch your society stagnate. Therefore, we have to double down on free speech. Not the sanitized, feel good version, the real thing. Even ugly speech, even offensive speech, even evil speech. Because the alternative isn't compassion, it's bloodshed. 2. We have to fix the economy. We must, must, must fix the economy. Or every other solution is just managing symptoms. If the balance the budget, reduce the debt, focus on real growth, not just money printing. If we need to temporarily tax the wealthy more, fine. Do it strategically though, because if capital flees, jobs flee with it. We also need to strategically forgive, stroke, restructure some portion of the debt that is crushing entire generations. We also must make housing affordable. Again, I cannot stress this point enough. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. All right, let's dive right back in. We have to stop the addiction to printing money because inflation steals from everyone. But it only gives to asset holders, which is another way of saying the rich. Now, technically, anyone can become an asset holder, but it's confusing and risky. So most people will never have a meaningful percentage of their wealth and assets unless it's a house. If we don't solve that problem, we will only see worsening income inequality. And that is a guaranteed path to violence. But it won't look like that violence is economically driven. It will look like political violence. But in reality, it's the economics that drive people into the embrace of populism. And even if we can't solve the economic issue at the government level, everyone still needs to fix their own personal finances. I'm talking to you. I'm talking to me. We need to buy Assets, because assets are the only way to avoid being gutted by inflation. 3. We must guard against algorithmic hijack. If you don't curate your inputs, your inputs will radicalize you. That's human nature plus algorithms. No one needs to have bad intentions for it to work that way. It's just the outcome of a mind wired for tribal thinking and the deep desire for certainty, even false certainty. The machine is designed to keep you engaged. It's not the system's fault if outrage is what maximally engages all of us. Demand transparency and choice when it comes to algorithms. I think this is going to be a movement that's going to gain a lot of traction in the coming months and years. Algorithmic choice. It is critically important that it becomes a thing, so make your voice heard, even if no one is being evil. In the creation of the algorithms that manipulate all of us, we need to take conscious control of our information diet, just as we take conscious control of what we eat. For we must reject tribal certainty and revolutionary empathy. We need to remember that words are not violence, that none of us see the world clearly and the only way forward is through non partisan vigorous debate. We all tend towards in group out group anti empathy. We all tend towards in group out out group anti empathy. We have to have a healthy distrust of our own thinking and never allow ourselves to view bloodshed as an expedient answer. The state should maintain a monopoly on violence and we should never celebrate someone that takes that into their own hands. And we should all abhor violence when it's aimed at either friend or foe. Otherwise, eventually that revolutionary fervor will will wrap back on itself and we will eventually be the victim and not the beneficiary. And above all, remember this. The other side is human. They love just as you do. They believe in the rightness of their cause just as you do. The reason we need to find our way back to the middle isn't because it feels good or because it feels safe. It's because compromise is necessary for a free society to survive. Dictatorships, even when they're our preferred dictator, are like driving without a seatbelt. When the road is smooth, it all feels fine. And then when we crash, everyone dies. And if you think it can't happen here, remember in the 20th century alone, roughly 200 million people were murdered by their own governments. Don't forget the lessons of history. They will offer the deepest insights and into the truth of the human condition. It's what we're like. 5. Invest heavily in the future by investing in people, especially kids. Teach young people how to think, not what to think. Get them excited about skill acquisition and personal growth and progress. Teach them about how money works and above all, teach them that individual sovereignty, family, personal responsibility, personal property, capitalism, and a religion that upholds the sanctity of the individual are exactly how we ended slavery, escaped the Dark Ages, and pulled millions of people out of poverty. To abandon those Western ideals is to re embrace the thousands of years of warfare and spiritual darkness that led to a world where finally we can literally touch the stars. Because, make no mistake, hard times are here. But so are we. And if we take this playbook seriously, we still have a chance to bend the arc of history away from collapse and towards renewal. All right guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
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If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Granger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.