a16z Podcast - Charlie Kirk and the Rise of Political Violence

Starting point is 00:00:00 The way that we go back to the era that we all look at and say, wow, we could raise our kids without fearing for their lives, or we could go to church without seeing an armed police officer, go to our synagogue, without having to worry about having private security. The way that we get back to that is speaking up. It's doing exactly what Charlie did. And, of course, he practiced martyrdom in the most extreme way, which hopefully none of us will ever have to experience, but we can practice it in small ways every day. Today, we're sharing a conversation from Honestly with Barry Weiss at the Free Press, featuring A16Z general partner Catherine Boyle. In the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, Catherine reflects on courage, martyrdom, and what it means to speak up in a political climate where words and debate are increasingly met with violence.

Starting point is 00:00:45 Let's get into it. From the free press, this is Honestly and I'm Barry Weiss. Yesterday in broad daylight in front of a crowd of some 3,000 people at Utah Valley University, Charlie Kirk was murdered. Charlie was not just a husband, not just a father, and not just one of the most prominent young conservative voices in the country. He made his name for doing something fundamental to the American project, debating and disagreeing out loud.

Starting point is 00:01:18 He famously said when people stop talking, bad stuff happened. His thing was going to campus, setting up a tent, and asking people to talk to him to change his mind. And people, tens of thousands of them on campuses across the country would line up to do so to challenge him often fiercely debating. And that was the point. I don't think you can think of someone in American life, whether you agree with him or not, who was more of a living embodiment of the First Amendment. as our columnist Matt Continetti wrote in the free press

Starting point is 00:01:54 the attack on Charlie Kirk didn't just deprive a family of its center it struck at the ties that hold a free society together open assembly civil debate viewpoint diversity and like every terrorist attack the shooting was meant to instill fear in this case fear of speaking out fear of exposure and fear of making a difference as shocking as the murder is and it is very shocking to see that video

Starting point is 00:02:25 perhaps more disturbing or as disturbing is the response some of our fellow citizens celebrating his death just because they disagreed with his politics I have felt very shaken by this event And I wanted to talk to people who elevate the conversation and who I learn from. So today, as a free press live, I head on Ben Shapiro, Senator Mark Kelly, Matt Contenetti, Catherine Boyle, Constantine Kissin, and our own Eli Lake and Maya Sulkin, to reflect on Charlie's life, on his assassination, on this awful moment in American history,

Starting point is 00:03:12 and to talk about how we can, if we can. can come back from the brink. Stay with us. I want to bring in now two incredible people who I always learn from, and I'm sure you do too. You're going to know their names. One is Constantine Kissen, and the other is Catherine Boyle. Constantine is the host of the Trigonometry podcast, and his book is called An Immigrants Love Letter to the West. His substack is his name, Constantine Kissen. He is joined by the wonderful Catherine Boyle. Catherine is a venture capitalist, a partner at A16Z.

Starting point is 00:03:55 She oversees the Incredible American Dynamism Project there. And she's also, and I'm very proud of this, a member of the board of the free press, Catherine and Constantine. Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having us, Barry. The two of you wrote things on the Internet over the past 24 hours that I felt touched me in a deep way, beyond just my head, but touch my heart.

Starting point is 00:04:19 And so one idea is that the downstream effects of this are going to be the obvious ones, the chilling effect. What you have been writing about over the past 20-per-hours on Twitter is a very different sort of downstream effect of it. And I want you to explain it. You wrote on Twitter, one of the things you've written, is that a lot of us woke up today with a new mission. And I want you to explain what you mean by that.

Starting point is 00:04:39 Yeah, yeah. No, yesterday I said we were entering an era of the martyr. And this is an idea that is not just because of Charlie's assassination. It's something that's been on my mind as a Catholic after the enunciation shooting of two children who became martyrs that day unwittingly. And so it's something I've been reflecting on a lot. And I tweeted, you know, courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It comes from Chesterton's great book, Orthodoxy. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a willingness to die.

Starting point is 00:05:12 And the reason I've been talking so much about martyrdom is just to be perfectly candid. I was in a business meeting when I heard the news about Charlie and I'm not a personal friend of his. I've met him a few times, but I have just the utmost admiration and respect for him and his project. And when I heard the news, I stepped out

Starting point is 00:05:29 and I just went outside and started praying. And the prayer that I prayed was, please, God, do not make this man a martyr. And it just kept saying it over and over and over again. And then, of course, you know, hours later, we found out that indeed he was martyred. And so, you know, I spent some time last night going back through this quote that just came back to me about what is courage, what is this courage of really truly being this juxtaposition of a zest

Starting point is 00:05:55 and something that is so worth living for, the zest for life, you have it so deeply that you are willing to die, and went back into this book, which I would recommend all of your listeners read if you haven't read it. In some ways, I think Charlie would have been a huge fan of it, and it probably was a huge fan of it. But the juxtaposition, it sort of hit me like a ton of bricks, was he was talking about that there are two choices. And it was another quote that I posted today. The choices between martyrdom, which is, again, living your life to the fullest to the point of willing to die for something outside yourself and suicide. And when I first read it, I said, well, suicide really

Starting point is 00:06:32 doesn't have anything to do with this. But of course, you all have been writing for years about the suicide of the West, about what is happening in this country, what is happening in a Western civilization, And there really are two choices now. It is the choice of taking on that martyrdom, taking on we have to stand up for what we believe. Even normal people like myself who often use the excuse, I'm not a professional writer or commentator anymore.

Starting point is 00:06:55 I don't need to be public in my beliefs about everything because that is not my role. We now have the choice to choose between, are we going to be martyrs for the things that we believe? Are we going to be like Charlie? Or are we going to be like those children who were killed for their faith and continue going to our churches

Starting point is 00:07:10 and our synagogues and our places of worship, even knowing that we will potentially be killed, our children will be killed in those places, or are we going to be martyrs for the truth? Are we going to be martyrs for this country? Because the other choice is complacency with suicide. And I was listening to Matthew, who came on and spoke about rhetoric,

Starting point is 00:07:30 and I understand, like, there's rhetoric now that's happening on the internet that feels very heightened. But I think that that seriousness and that heightenedness is important that we are having to make it. these choices. And it might sound extreme to say we have to be martyrs for the things that we believe. But I do believe that what we saw yesterday was a true martyrdom of someone who exemplified the highest order of what that means, which is using words, which is using debate, which is going out and saying what he believes, knowing that there is incredible danger there because he believed

Starting point is 00:08:00 in something greater than his own life. And frankly, his own family, which is the thing that, you know, is, I think, tearing on every mother and father who has children that age. Because I think he exemplary, the best of what we are supposed to be called to be doing, which is to be martyrs for God and for country and for truth. And that's why people like me who don't know him are so touched and moved by what happened to him yesterday. KB, for people that are listening and tuning in and I know people feel so moved by the words you're sharing,

Starting point is 00:08:32 but who think to themselves, I didn't really know who Charlie Kirk was. It's horrible that a father and husband was murdered. He seemed like a good guy. but I don't see myself in what Catherine's saying. I just want things to go back to normal. This is a thing that we hear a lot right now that, you know, I just want to go about my life.

Starting point is 00:08:52 I want things to go back to normal. What's your message to the person that hears the idea of suicidal civilization or martyrdom and thinks, I don't see myself in that. I want you to speak, if you can, to that person who sees themselves as a normie that has a lot going on in their life.

Starting point is 00:09:09 Yeah. I mean, and I sympathize with them, right? because my job is not what you all do. But I think the important thing is that, you know, as I said, I woke up with a new mission. I feel called to be much more vocal because I have friends like you and people who are putting themselves out there day and day out. And there is not only safety in numbers,

Starting point is 00:09:26 but the way that we achieve normalcy in this country and the way that we go back to the era that we all look at and say, wow, we could raise our kids without fearing for their lives, or we could go to church without seeing an armed police officer, or go to our synagogue, without having to worry about having private security. The way that we get back to that is speaking up. It's doing exactly what Charlie did. And, of course, he practiced martyrdom in the most extreme way,

Starting point is 00:09:49 which hopefully none of us will ever have to experience, but we can practice it in small ways every day in our university classrooms where we say what we're thinking, or we can do it with our business associates. We can say the thing that we're actually thinking. And I think that's what we are called to do, to do it in a way of practicing martyrdom every day where, yes, we will possibly lose some things,

Starting point is 00:10:09 possibly lose some friends. But that's how we get back to that normalcy that everyone is craving and the America that people all want to get back to. So I'm committing myself to do that in small ways, not in the way that Charlie did, but in the small ways, and I hope I never am in a circumstance

Starting point is 00:10:23 where that happens to me, right? But in the small ways where I know that I'm going to be sacrificing, but it's for this greater good of getting back to exactly what you just said. Constantine, do you want to jump in? Yeah. I wish I felt that the, there was some sort of way of going back to, there's no going back to anything. You can't move back.

Starting point is 00:10:44 You can only move forward. And we do not get to choose the times that we live in. And the times we live in are what they are. I wouldn't even put a label on it at this point. They just are what they are. We do not live in the age of normalcy. We live in the age of extremism. That's just a fact.

Starting point is 00:11:01 And so we are going to have to reckon with that and act accordingly. Now, one of the things that I think is clearly, I don't know if you talked about this with Matthew when you were talking about rhetoric because I jumped on fairly late. But we have to recognize that quite a lot of us, even though we've been willing to say something, we've nonetheless been very careful to not challenge some very, very important and very false claims about reality that have been being made for a long time.

Starting point is 00:11:32 And one of them is this idea about words being violence, which we heard initially. then we heard that silence was violence during the summer of BLM. And all of these things are being called violence, which are not violence. And the reason this really matters, Barry, is that once you say words of violence, or once you say that silence is violence, well, historically speaking, our understanding of violence is that if you are violent towards me, I'm entitled to be violent back towards you.

Starting point is 00:12:00 So if we allow these realities to be rewritten in this linguistic way, we end up in a place where, let's be honest, if you look at the polling of Gen Z in particular, there's quite a lot of people. I mean, we've lost a good chunk of a generation to a mind virus that tells them that actually it's okay if you're upset about big pharma or insurance company CEOs. It's actually if someone goes and murders one of them, that's actually a good thing. Let's celebrate that person. And on and on it goes.

Starting point is 00:12:28 So there's a re-education project that needs to happen in America and across the West. And it starts with our own children. It starts with us taking responsibility as parents for reminding and very powerfully reinstating the key messages and distinctions of Western civilization. And one of them is that there is a big difference between words and violence and just because your feelings are hurt or just because someone has a different political opinion to you,

Starting point is 00:12:56 you're not entitled to punch people you wrongly label as Nazis. We live through that era. And if there's one hope I have, for this tragedy is that the result of it is, is we simultaneously stop taking this nonsense seriously and also take it so seriously that we actually begin to address these lies in a very powerful and profound way. And this has to be the moment when we all say, enough of your bullshit, words are not violence, silence is not violence, violence is violence and it's completely unacceptable.

Starting point is 00:13:26 And it has to end. But that, I think, is a generational project because, as I say, we have been miseducating our young people for a long time, and the circumstances of their life are more challenging with the rise of social media, with the rise of atomization, with the rise of, you know, powerful economic currents that affect people's lives. And that is a fight we're going to have to win. But to win it, we're going to have to fight it properly first. One thing I want to pick up on here, and I'm curious, both of your answers to this is what Constantine is saying about us living in the era of extremes. I don't think the extremes are the majority, but I

Starting point is 00:14:03 think the extremes feel like the most generative and sort of a live place right now. I think that is certainly true culturally and politically. And I think one of the things Matt mentioned earlier in this conversation is this idea of sort of like bringing back the center. And I think most people hear the center and they think like an absence of passion. They think about like a negative identity that is the opposite of what the extremes are offering right now, which is. profound charisma and power. And I wonder, you know, Catherine, and I hear a little bit of what you're saying,

Starting point is 00:14:40 I know you would never phrase it as bringing back the center, but speaking up for what used to be called common sense and normalcy, decency, civility, the things that we used to think of as water, we didn't even notice it until it went away. How can we, you know, and whatever language you want, bring, like how can we make that charismatic? Because that is the thing that I think is a sense. if the extremes are going to be,

Starting point is 00:15:07 if the extremes are not going to become the mainstream. Yeah. Well, the irony of, I think, the murder of Charlie is that he was not the extreme. He was representative of exactly what you were talking about. And he was the right-wing version of that. He went on college campuses and he debated in a way that in some ways looks very tweet.

Starting point is 00:15:27 You don't see photos of Charlie Kirk around the internet holding machine guns and threatening violence. He was the man who went to campus and would talk to anyone. So he is an example. And, you know, it's the thing about what's so horrific about martyrs is, you know, a lot of the tweets that are going around about, you know, his view is someone asked him, what do you want to be remembered for? He said, I want to be remembered for my faith. I want to be remembered for my faith in Jesus Christ. And I always point out that Jesus Christ never picked up the sword.

Starting point is 00:15:56 And a lot of people will feel called to anger and violence in Charlie's name, just as some people feel that way in Jesus' name. But the point of martyrdom and the point of, I think, what his project stood for is it did not stand for violence. It stood for debate. It stood for dialogue. And so I think in some ways the extremes, if they are looking for a cause, it is the opposite of what his cause was, which was to engage with one another. to have proper dialogue, to have dissent, to meet your enemies, right, and to not even think of them as enemies, to think of them as people you can convert to your cause. And I think that's a very important part of this, is that we cannot call people who are on the left or the right extremists when they are part of what the center is, which is speaking, which is debating, as Constantine said,

Starting point is 00:16:48 it's putting your voice out there, but it is not taking up arms, it is not violence, It is not silencing the other side's view because that would mean that Charlie died in vain and we cannot have that. I think one of the things that's just so disorienting is that for those familiar with the kinds of things Charlie Kirk did, he's just about the most mainstream, conservative, magnanimous conservative

Starting point is 00:17:14 that you would ever hope to encounter. And yet there is just a chasm between the reality of who he was and the way that he's being talked about on certain cable networks who I don't even need to name. And that is enraging to many people because it sort of creates what Ben opened this conversation with talking about, which is a sort of permission structure in which violence is acceptable against people

Starting point is 00:17:43 who sort of fall so well outside the overtone window of what's normal in American cultural and political life. When he was so deeply inside, what has always been considered the 40-yard lines. Constantine, I want to just bring in a little bit of news, which is that as we're having a discussion, the Wall Street Journal put out a photo of the person of interest in the shooting. It was already going around online, but it's now official,

Starting point is 00:18:12 and the FBI is offering a reward of up to $100,000 for any information. As you both know, but as people just tuning in, will want to know. A high-powered rifle, including ammunition engraved with transgender and anti-fascist ideology. CNN, I believe, described it as cultural slogans, which was incredible, was recovered in a wooded area where the shooter fled. I wonder if there's anything that either of you want to say about, I mean, there's a way of seeing this, which is, you know, there's political extremists and violence on both sides. That is always, is true. Many people are mentally ill. Many people in a country of washing guns can pick up guns

Starting point is 00:18:56 and kill other people. But there is a specificity to this ideology, which, if true, also drove the shooter at the Annunciation Church, at the mass that Catherine was talking about. And if I think back even to five or six years ago, there was this trope that Antifa wasn't really a thing. It was some kind of imagined construct, that Antifa was actually the same thing as our, you know, great-grandparents who went and fought the Nazis. They're simply anti-fascist and who has trouble with anti-fascist. Constantine, I wonder if you want to comment on that. Well, it comes back to what I said, which is we have to stop pretending that when people say ridiculous things, those things are acceptable to discuss. The things that have happened to the words

Starting point is 00:19:49 Nazi, fascist over the last decade discussed me more than almost anything else that this woke progressive extremism has done. Because I've been saying this for many, many years, Barry, as you know, if you truly believed, you're a person of passion and principle, if I truly believed, if Catherine truly believed that Hitler was here and about to take over the United States government or the British government, would it not be our duty to pick up a rifle and go to the front line? So when we allowed these people to use words like Nazi and fascist, and when I have heard to say we, I don't just mean me, you and the three of us, I mean our culture. When we didn't say in shock and horror, how dare you? How dare you call somebody a Nazi?

Starting point is 00:20:41 I mean, we have this in Britain, David Lammy, who was until recently our foreign secretary and is now the deputy prime minister of this country, he's repeatedly called people in British conservative movements Nazis. We just had a former labor politician just accused Nigel Farage of being like Adolf Hitler, right? When you have this type of rhetoric, there will be people who are, of course, tempted to take that literally. Some people will be mentally ill, and that will be their cover. But my point is, we have allowed these terms and these labels to be used with such careless abandon that I think we've become completely desensitized to just how inaccurate, horrific and unacceptable these claims are. And so when you have CNN or MSNBC or left-wing publications in Britain, allowing this

Starting point is 00:21:34 type of thing and not challenging people who say these sorts of things, I think that inevitably contributes to a climate when people who are labeled as such will be killed. I so agree with what you just said, Constantine. And the thing that I think you said earlier about, we can't go back to normalcy, is that the reason why things got so bad is because normal people who just wanted to keep their head down ignored it.

Starting point is 00:22:00 They said, okay, I'm not going to question it. I just want things to be normal. I'm just going to sit there and take it. I'll do whatever is asked of me at work. I'll change my LinkedIn, I'll put my pronouns up, I'll do whatever, even if we didn't believe in it. And I think we have now seen the consequences of not taking a stand as normal people. And so that I think is the call, is that now all of us have to call that out to say that, yes, rhetoric and words have power. And if we hear someone using words incorrectly, we have to debate them.

Starting point is 00:22:32 We have to tell them that they are wrong. And we can no longer be silent. Catherine Boyle, Constantine Kissen, thank you so much for joining me on a really emotional day. It's really wonderful to see two friends. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at rate thispodcast.com slash A16Z. We've got more great conversations coming your way.

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a16z Podcast - Charlie Kirk and the Rise of Political Violence

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