Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 866: Assassination of Charlie Kirk

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

This episode of Cognitive Dissinence is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Gloryhole Studios in Chicago and beyond This is cognitive dissonance Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way

We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence To any topic that makes the news Makes it big or makes us mad It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at. Today is Thursday, September 11th. Never forget, Cecil. I didn't. Never. I didn't forget. I know that it is the day after Charlie Kirk was shot. It is the day after Charlie Kirk was assassinated. That's a great way to put it. Yeah. Assassinated. Yeah. So, I mean, very clearly, there's video, I think, from the Washington Post posted video this morning showing what appears to be a gunman on the roof. for the building running off.

They found a gun outside in the woods. So clearly an assassination. And look, I know like a lot of people online. I saw a lot of people that didn't care. They were like, yeah, I don't care.

I don't care. And let me tell you that you not caring about a gun death is actually honoring the memory of Charlie Kirk. That is actually honoring his memory. Well, what did Charlie Kirk say about? Because his life, his entire life,

was like, well, in order to make an omelet of the Second Amendment, you got to break a few eggs. That was literally his whole spiel. And if those eggs are children in a school, that was an acceptable price, according to Charlie Kirk to pay for the value that the Second Amendment brings to the- -day. Yesterday, there was a ton of posts, irreverent posts. So there's a bunch of provocative posts yesterday. But I would say that if Charlie was alive, there was a mass shooting yesterday, there

would be one more. Charlie would have posted that it's okay that those kids died yesterday in that mass shooting because there was kids who died in a mass shooting yesterday. And Charlie wouldn't have gave a fuck about those kids. He wouldn't fucking care. And somehow, everybody in the world has to fucking cry in their fucking pillow over Charlie Kirk's death because Charlie Kirk was a young man. Well, you know what?

You know who else is young? A bunch of fucking kids who die every year in a perfectly preventable thing. I don't want to see people die by guns. I think people dying by guns is a bad thing. I think it's horrible. Charlie Kirk disagrees with me. Right. Well, he did.

He did. He did. His disagreeing days are over. Yeah, his memory disagrees. You know, like, I think, I want to talk about my personal complicated feelings when things like this happened. Because I think a lot of people probably feel similarly. And I want to, like, hold space for the two wolves, right?

Because I think it's important. No, yeah, absolutely. I was thinking about this and I was kind of comparing it to my thoughts and feelings around things like incarceration and the death penalty, right? So as far as like policy is concerned, as far as my thoughts, and I think this is really important to distinguish between our thoughts and our feelings. My thoughts are with things like the death penalty and mass incarceration and excessive jail time sentences and things along those are the retributive justice model. like that is all a horror right and there are reasons for me why that's a horror and those reasons are almost entirely strategic reasons and what I mean by that is they do more harm than they do good and so when I look at the broad picture of things and I say like you know like we I don't want to live

in a world that does more harm than good it's a very utilitarian kind of outlook I recognize that and that's not the only moral outlook and I'm not saying you have to share that outlook but for me I When I think about things like public policy, when I think about like how should we structure our society and our moral space that we build together socially, I have to think with this utilitarian mindset. I just don't know what elder lens to apply to it. So when I think about it that way, I'm like, yeah, like we should not want to live in a society where if I don't like what somebody says, we get to assassinate that person. We get to shoot that person. We get to murder that person. We should not have a society where we are comfortable with the idea of gunmen murdering other human beings full stop, right?

Like when Michelle Hortman was assassinated for her political views, that was a horror. Yeah. When a guy lay in wait for Nancy Pelosi to come home and then ended up beating her husband with a hammer because she didn't come home and the cops did, that was a hoary. killing Charlie Kirk is the wrong thing to do. We have to catch that guy. We want to live in a world where we don't say

if it's bad enough that you can shoot them, right? Because who then becomes the arbiter of bad enough? That is the wolf that should be in charge, right? It is. It's the wolf that should be in charge.

That's the wolf inside you that should vote. Yeah. Right? That's the wolf inside you that should do the work. Yeah. Like take.

the actions. But I also think it's okay to say Charlie Kirk hurt people in substantive and real ways. It is a lie to say he's a guy just having conversations and just talking. That's not real. This is a man who spent all of the breath that he could trying to build a more racist world, trying to build a more misogynist world, trying to influence the levers of government to institutional, More anti-LGBQ, all of it, world. Like, he was trying to build a world which was less safe for most of the people in it. Any minority. Pretty much any minority.

But, like, you know, when you count women in that mix, it's like he was racist, he was misogynist, he was anti-LGBQ, that's most of the people. Sure. So he was trying to build a world that was less safe. And he was influential with political leaders like Donald Trump. He had influence there. he was working to institutionalize and pull the levers of power to hurt people in real and substantive and actual ways. He's a bad fucking guy.

He was not a guy having debates on campus just exercising his free speech. It is more complicated than that. I think it's okay to feel a sense of, well, fuck that guy, right? I feel a strong sense of like, fuck that guy. I'm strategically though worried about what happens next Yeah for sure How will this be weaponized

By the people who have been Waiting and rubbing their hands together The whole time For any excuse Trump literally weaponized it last night When he gave his address He gave a four minute address Oh I didn't hear it

And during that four minute address He blamed the radical left for this Yeah But what he doesn't do is point The high powered lens High powered lens At Charlie Kirk Who's entire life

was as a provocateur trying to inflame people. Right. He spent his life trying. Like, you don't get to be as popular as Charlie Kurt. If you're not twisting as many, like, buttons, twisting as many things as you can on your way up. If you don't do that, you just, if you're, if you have a nuanced opinion, do you think you gain traction in the influencer market? Fuck, no. Of course not.

He's saying the hottest takes he can. Right. The meanest things he can. He literally died talking with a racist dog whistle. The last thing he spoke, the very last thing he spoke was a racist dog whistle. The very last thing that man spoke before he was shot was someone had said, well, you know, how many trans people were involved in mass shootings? And he says, does that include gang violence? And then he was shot.

So with a racist dog whistle, the man was murdered. So like, look, he spent his whole life doing this. And if this was anybody else, any other pundit, other than Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk would 100% be saying we shouldn't take guns away. 100%. He would 100% be like, no, we shouldn't take guns away. That is worth it to him. And like the thing is to realize we're not going to take guns away.

No, we're going to do it anyway. We are not going to take any guns away. No, you might take them away from transpeed. We might. We might take away from transpeas. But you won't take them away from white dudes. You won't take them away from white dudes. That's 100% sure.

Like, I think the Charlie Kirk's of this world are not intellectually dangerous. That's what the right likes to pretend is that these guys are just intellectually dangerous. Oh, they're just challenging these ideas. I think that they are substantively and actually dangerous because they are influencing, heavily influencing public policy in ways that disenfranchise and hurt most of the people that live here. Most of the people that live here. So, like, I don't feel sorry for Charlie Kirk, the person.

The the condemnation that I have is that I recognize we can't live in a vigilante world, right? That's the other wolf. The wolf that I say, like, look, I have to condemn political violence the same way I would condemn

any kind of violence. Like, we cannot live in a world where just whoever happens to have might is right. We just can't do that. It's chaos. It's what's happening in Haiti right now. It's bloodshed and anarchy and chaos, and we can't live like that. We should not accept that as a way to live. No part of me feels bad at all that this happened.

Yeah. I'm worried that this will be weaponized in ways that give cover for the right to take military action, to take excessive, violent, punitive actions. Like, that worries me. Yeah. This is a bad strategy. and that worries me. I mean, you had Keystone Cash.

Yeah, I know. Fucking sending out tweets about shit he didn't even know about while it was happening. That's what happens when you have influencers in charge of stuff rather than actual serious human beings. Dude, I'm glad you brought that up because I wanted to bring that up too. Right after the shooting, like within a really short time frame, Cash Patel, head of the FBI, Cash fucking Patel.

I love Keystone Cash. That's so good. That's so good. He runs into something. while he's tweeting and they run into him and then he accidentally sends it you know ladder falls on him and he's running around his arms are stuck in it and the ladder spinning everywhere he goes around the FBI campus he's carrying one side of a pane of glass for some reason he walks up a staircase and there's like a piano going but like this is a guy who's in charge he should be sending only the most

like stayed and sober and you know considered vetted messaging he's immediately tweeting out like we fucking got that guy you know like you didn't get anybody there's we don't know who the fuck we're getting yet don't you have a person who works for you who should be that person who's going to send that stuff out why do you need all the hearties and the likies and the and the fucking love eye faces that you're going to get on why do you need that well because you're a fucking influencer you're not a fucking you're not like a serious human being oh you're a dude who fucking goes on the internet for likes man yeah well and like doesn't that immediately tell you

one of the most important things about everybody in this administration, which is the narrative is more important than the facts. Absolutely. The facts take a backseat all the time to whatever the story is, whatever story they were trying to spin, whatever agenda they're trying to promote, whatever feelings they're trying to invoke

in their populace. That is more important than the facts. The facts, they don't even bother to figure out what they are. What can I get people excited about? What can I tell everyone? I'm on top of it. Look at me. Hey, trust me, I'm Cash Patel. Yeah. I mean, that's his shtick, right? Don't you think? I remember from like listening to No Rogel. Like, look, I'm the Cash Patel. Don't you think that I, of all people, the Cash Patel? I capitalized the Cash Patel in front of that.

Fuck out of here. Charlie Kirk also, this is something that should be brought up. After Nancy Pelosi's husband was beaten with a hammer. Yes. He made a comment that someone should try to bail that person out of jail. A patriot, he called it. A patriot, he should try to bail. A patriot should try to bail. that person out of jail. So don't, like, let's not try to create a saint out of a guy who spent his life saying shitty hot takes his whole career. Promoting people that hurt Americans, try to change policy that would hurt Americans. He wasn't a good person. Yeah. Like, you know, it's also not the case, and we should be very careful about making sure to call this out.

The right does not care. about political violence. A bunch of people on the right right now are making a ton of noise about how, you know, oh, political violence is always wrong. Look, I agree with you. Politicized violence is always wrong

because I don't want to live in a world that endorses that at all, right? Because that is a world of chaos and it is a world of anarchy. It's a world of devolved systems of justice. Like, there's a whole bunch of practical, strategic reasons why you don't want to live in that world. None of you want to live in that world.

But let's be very clear. The right wants that world. They endorse that world. They've been working hard actively to build that world. I can give you a handful of examples. When Michelle Hortman was recently killed, Trump said, I'm not going to Minnesota. I'm not going to call the governor.

I am not going to reach out. When she was murdered as a political assassination, when she was politically assassinated, the right did not fucking lower the flags to have. half-mast. They didn't do shit. They didn't do shit. I just read an article like a week or two ago that Trump is considering full pardons for the crew who were convicted of trying to kidnap and probably murder Whitmer. Governor Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. A plan which was activated by the tweeting of Donald Trump, who was talking about, we got to liberate Michigan

and all this stuff. Like, these people have never blinked at, and Nancy Pelosi, they were selling fucking hammers. Hammers, after Nancy Pelosi's husband was beaten with a fucking hammer in an act of craven political violence. Like, the right was selling fucking hammers on their official merch pages, including Charlie Kirk. So, these guys have never been anti-political violence.

Don't believe them now. When they lower the flag down, half staff. What they're saying is, our guys, when Charlie Kirk said, it's okay to crack a few eggs, he never meant him. Yeah, no, he 100% never meant him. These guys never mean someone I love and care about. They never mean white dudes. Yeah. Right. Well, they mean minorities. They mean LGBTQ people, they mean women. They mean kids. Yeah. Who's helpless? That's who they mean. When people in power get assassinated on their side, all of a sudden it's a fucking tragedy?

Yeah. I don't believe you. Yeah. Nobody was... All these right-wing pundits were all crying yesterday when I saw a bunch of life streams literally crying.

I've never seen one of them cry when a kid gets killed to the school and that happens pretty much every week in the United States. It literally happened yesterday. It's fucking wild. Couple hours afterwards. It happened afterwards. Yeah.

Go ahead. Do you have any ideas why this might have happened? So there's a possibility that a witch may have cursed. There's a Jezebel story, guys. So we talked about Etsy witches with their fucking, like, charkoitary boards of, of Wiccanocity.

So, like... They paid some Etsy witches to curse Charlie Cook. I can't wait. I cannot wait for the, like, the people who are like, I believe in demonic forces to pick up on this story and talk about how this is like a spiritual warfare, blah, blah, blah.

I can't wait for. Well, in any case, they did put an editor's note that says that they don't condemn violence of any time, and of any kind, and this is published before he was murdered. So they want to try to get ahead because I think almost certainly people have already said, oh, look, they, you know, they're jumping on his death. Right. You're like, no, they posted it before he died. The time continuum only works in one direction, guys.

But I think, I think that there's probably a lot of people on the right who are pissed off this. I saw a bunch. I saw a guy get his ass kicked because he went over to one of these vigils, and And he said, fuck Charlie Kirk and a bunch of people just kicked the shit out of them. Really? Yeah. And there's a bunch of people online, too, that are posting like, this is the next civil war.

This is the first shot in the civil war. So there are people right now. Like, you know, how you said, the right is trying to incite violence. They are trying to incite violence on Twitter. I mean, there is a group of people right now that are saying, we need to, we need to, you know, react to this. We need to arm ourselves. We need to react. So this is a, it's a dangerous time to be in the United States.

I mean, like, it's so funny because they do this other podcast with Marsh, and Marsh is always blown away, blown away, by how many people die by guns, you know, and how much gun violence is here, and how many people come on Joe's show and talk about how great owning guns is and protecting yourself and all that. He's always, it's always just such a culture shock for him. Yeah. And, you know, what wouldn't happen in the UK is Charlie Kirk wouldn't be assassinated like that in the UK.

He could go out to anywhere he wanted and have a conversation. because what if it was a knife? Wouldn't they even come close to him? You're going to throw it from 200 yards? Yeah, I mean, like, what are you? Like, fucking dead eye? Like, you're not going to do it. Like, even if you did, it probably just fucking the handle hits.

Oh, God, ah, shit. I got a bruise. Like, so what? Like, it's just, it's such a different thing. We're the only country where this happens. Yeah. We're the only one, man. We're the only one that thinks it's okay for people to just have these weapons

wherever they want wherever they want. You know, and how easily they want. The Utah State has like a, like, they just allowed fucking guns on campuses. Yes. Right? They just like, I don't know if they just love, but they definitely have like, hey, you're 18. Concealed carry's cool.

You can just do it if you want because you're fucking a human. It's fucking nuts, man. It's insanity, man. Utah is an open carry state. You can just walk around open carrying. If you're on a campus, you have to conceal carry. That's the fucking, oh, if you're on the campus, you got to hide that gun. You can still fucking have a gun in the school.

What? Wait, what? Did anybody pull a gun here and aim it up in the sky? Anybody? Did anybody stop this shooting? No, because like the whole good guy with a gun, bad guy stops the bad guy with the gun. That's bullshit, right? We know it's bullshit. Because how many times, I mean, look at like Yuvaldi.

Look at like Columbine even. That's a perfect example. Columbine, they had armed security and Columbine. Like there was armed security. There was police at Evaldi. There were armed security at this event. Like people underestimate how fast it is to create gun violence. Yeah.

It's insanely fast. It takes no time at all. We built the most perfect killing machine we could. If we could build a better killing machine than a gun, we would build it. The U.S. military would not be like, there's a better thing you can carry in your hand, but we don't invent it. They're inventing the best killing machines possible. We've never gotten better than the gun. We just improve upon their accuracy, their firing rate, et cetera, et cetera.

Guns are incredibly efficient at the thing that they're meant to do, which is to prove. poke high caliber holes and shit. Yeah. You know, and like Charlie Kirk very much was a supporter of guns and a, like, a minimizer of violence.

100%. Gun violence. Yeah. And I say that as a gun owner. Same. I say that as a gun owner. Yeah. I don't think we should have them. How's that? If, if I would vote right now, I would run, not walk to sign a referendum or go punch a ticket or vote where somebody's going to knock on my door. They would have to knock on my door. I would fucking

sprint to turn the guns in that I own to eliminate guns across this country. In a different administration. In a different administration. Not in this one. I will say I am a little worried about what you said. Like, do I think there's a zero percent probability of a civil war or

civil unrest? I don't. Yeah, I think there will be. I think that there's a real strong likelihood. You know, think back, we've got three years and three months left of this administration. and it's already at this point. Yeah, it's already a fucking dumpster fire, dude.

It's already the worst. Fucking scary. It's a long time. This is going to be the long walk. Yeah, yeah, it really... Beautiful Anonymous changes each week. It defies genres and expectations. For example, our most recent episode,

I talked to a woman who survived a murder attempt by her own son. But just the week before that, we just talked to the whole time about Star Trek. We've had other recent episodes about sexting in, languages that are not your first language or what it's like to get weight loss surgery. It's unpredictable. It's real. It's honest. It's raw.

Get Beautiful Anonymous wherever you listen to podcasts. And what you bring a gun now here for? Because you're wanted for murder, asshole. I ain't murder no goddamn body. I don't know that. Well, now you know, because if I could, I'd murder your ass right now coming out

here with a gun and shit. You know, guns don't kill people. Stupid and motherfuckers with guns kill people. I'm enlightened. Yeah. I'm enlightened. Let's talk about guns a little more. This story is from CNN. Trump Department of Justice is looking at ways to ban transgender Americans from owning guns, according to sources.

So a couple of things are really important, I think, about this from this story. The auspices that they are intending to use is to say that if you are trans, you are, because the thing is like you can't have a gun if you are deemed to be mentally defective. So what they are going to try to do in order to do this, if they want to do this, what they would have to do is they would, one, have to compile a list of all the trans people, right? They'd have to create a list of all the trans people. The second thing they would have to do is classify being trans with an equal sign to being mentally defective. So regardless of the gun issue, take the gun issue and set it to the side for a minute, categorizing any group of people

as being definitionally mentally defective because of their inclusion in that category is no bullshit. That's not a bullshit. That's straight up Nazi shit. That's straight up box car Nazi shit. That's not an exaggeration.

That's not hyperbole. That is equal sign Nazi shit. Yeah. No, like full stop. Yeah. Full fucking stop. And the question is, Charlie Kirk was asked right before he was shot was, do you know how many transgender people

have been involved in mass shootings? And his answer was too many. Yeah. And it's five. And it's five. In comparison to the rest of like all of them, which is. Which represents, by the way, so over the course of the last 10 years, there's been somewhere around 5,700 mass shootings, five of which were committed by transgender people. If you do the math, it's percentage wise. It's a rounding error. Nothing. Yeah, it's nothing. You know, what's interesting, I know, we've talked about this before. I won't harp on it too much, but I do want to bring it up every single time. So I think it's important. If we want to look at demographics and say what demographic should we be paying attention to when it comes to gun violence, 99% is men. There is a demographic

you can point to. We won't do it. Yeah. You won't ever do that. Even though it's 99%. Yeah. And I think too, like if people are thinking there are courts that will avoid this, especially very second amendment friendly courts that would maybe push this down don't fool yourself don't fool yourself because i think that second they will twist themselves into knots to make any ruling that they want yeah and they will twist themselves in a knot to at one point in one hand uphold the second amendment and in the other punch a trans person a hundred percent they will do it in it will it will take on their part no effort mentally not for them to do do that. They would do that in a second.

So don't think that there's some sort of savior in the judicial system because America loves the Second Amendment. The America loves the Second Amendment for people like me. Yeah. America loves a Second Amendment for people like me. They definitely didn't like the Second Amendment when black people started getting guns with Black Panthers back in the day.

And they tried to do some gun laws back then too. So don't underestimate the power of the legal system to disenfranchise people. Keep in mind this as well, because that's exactly right, right? The system is designed to make sure that white men have guns.

That's what the system is designed for, right? The system was created by white men. It is designed to keep white men flush with fucking guns. That's how the system works. Keep in mind, too, that, again, the way this is going to work if they do it, with taking a category of people, claiming their building this database or this list, compiling this list, claiming that by belonging to this group means it you're a tremendous,

mentally defective. This also means that the United States government would gain access to people's personal medical record information. Yeah, man. Yeah, man. And there's no reason whatsoever to think that they would stop at a trans person is a mental defective. What about somebody who has PTSD? What about somebody who suffers from depression? Whatever the boogeyman du jour happens to be would be very easy. It'd be trivially easy once this data is collected. This is part of

what we've seen the right doing under the guise of efficiency, but it's not about efficiency. You know, they've made no bones about one of the things they're trying to do from a data standpoint

is to collapse all of the data into a single database or one central repository of data. A lot of data about Americans is sort of decentralized amidst the different government agencies that work with our data. They are saying it's more efficient if we bring all

the data and all the warehousing of that data into one place. Doing that allows for this. It allows for this kind of data. And we've seen how sloppy they are. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Loppy. It's very poor. Very poor. It's provocative.

Provocatively poor. Appalantly poor. Oh, you've heard it before. They're not calling you the new George Epstein, you know. It's Brian Epstein How's George Epstein Beatles manager That's Brian Epstein

It's fucking Brian Martin It's not Brian Martin It's not Brian Martin The producer George Epstein Come on let's it down This fucking wrong This story is from Huffing to Post In undercover video

Staffer claims Department of Justice Will hide Republican names and Epstein files The Justice Department confirmed the video But said the staffer wasn't speaking Based on knowledge from his job

So Project Veritas people. So it's the same people who try to do hit pieces on other people. And I want to caution people to take this with a grain of salt because this guy is out on a date with somebody. And maybe he's fluffing. Maybe he's talking about some other

stuff. The reason why we don't trust stuff like this. You don't trust hidden camera shit is because you can't see all the things that lead up to it. You don't know what's going on. You don't know how deep this person's access is. You don't know any of that stuff. All you know is that they got you to click on a video.

That's all you know. So we shouldn't be trusting Project Veritas with any kind of information whatsoever in a breaking fashion. That's not how this works. There needs to be somebody who verifies this through the channels that you verify information. You don't just trust some random dude

who's been shown to edit and lie in the past. Yeah. The source is absolutely worth considering. Yeah. The source is a bad source. The context, like you point out, is a bad and untrustworthy context. The staffer here is not speaking in an official capacity, and he's not speaking as an official to another official. Yeah.

So I look at this and I'm like, all right. Yeah. Like, this is literally nothing. Now, that said, do I think that, I mean, would I be surprised? I 100% think the guy is saying something that is true. Right. But I don't believe it just because Project Veritas puts it out.

Exactly. Exactly. Like, do I think that the Republicans are going to work as hard as they can to redact anything damaging for Republicans in the fucking Epstein files? Ridiculous. Well, I mean, like, why wouldn't they already did? They already, that's what I say. Like, they already, like Chuck Schumer just this week tried to bring to the House or bring to the Senate floor a vote to release the Epstein files. Missed it. And the Republicans blocked it.

Yeah, 5149. So they're already working to. obfuscate. They are trying to obfuscate. So is the broader idea that the Republicans will continue to obfuscate like a conspiracy theory? I don't know, man. That's not a conspiracy thing. Yeah, it's not a conspiracy. I think that

anybody sitting across from this person just because they're in the DOJ, right, doesn't necessarily they're speaking from in the no, but this is a pretty obvious opinion from a lot of people. A thousand percent. You and I, we know a couple of people that are personally

responsible for the death of what, 50,000 non-military personnel, librarians, teachers, doctors, women, children, all dead. We've wiped out entire cultures. And for what? Not one CIA agent has ever been tried, much less accused of any crimes. You guys think you're above the law or you ain't above why. This is a fucking huge. There's so many big deals.

It's such a big deal this week. This is a huge big deal. This story is fucking crazy. I can't believe. We got to talk about it last time, but it's a big deal. It's from The Guardian. Republican condemns Vance for despicable comments on Venezuelan boat strike. So, Vice President J.D. Vance said on Twitter or truth or whatever he uses, he said it is the highest and best use of our military to carry out strikes against people poisoning.

Poisoning the, like our children. children, right? And what he's referring to is the exploinating by American military forces of 11 people who were maybe narco-traffickers, maybe not. It turns out now we're just labeling them as terrorists, no arrest, no due process whatsoever, no legal framework, just the on high unilateral declaration that this group of people

are terrorists how would you know anyone has drugs now as a terrorist the implication here is that the United States can at its women discretion murder using the military

anybody for any reason that they just declare as a terrorist just wave their hand you're a terrorist and I can murder you and the thing is is like

just like you say due process is ultra important in this process process. We need to have due process because those people can be innocent, just like you can say, decided that you're a terrorist and somebody puts a bullet in your head and then J.D. Vance types on Twitter, hey, that's the best use of our military is to put a bullet into Tom's head because he was a terrorist. Without any due process, nobody knows that, right? That's the most important thing. The other thing that is so disturbing about this story is that you and I agree with Rand Paul.

Dude, that's horrible. That is genuinely horrible that we agree with Rand Paul. Who called him out, rightfully so. Man, we're living in a world where, like, in the last week, I've agreed with Rand Paul and Marjorie Taylor Green. How does it even work? What is happening? He says, JD, I don't give a shit, Vance, says killing people he accuses of a crime is the highest and best use of our military. Did he ever read to kill a mockingbird?

So that was what Rand Paul put on X. Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without a trial of representation? What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial. So I want everybody to think about this because we talked a moment ago

about civil unrest, civil war. Here's a scenario that is very real to me. Tell me if I'm being genuinely, tell me CISO if I'm being hyperbolic. we just saw the assassination of Charlie Kirk. We've got a president who very clearly has an appetite and a willingness and has already got a history of mobilizing the military in our cities against ourselves. Now we've established that anybody dealing in drugs, we can label as a terrorist and use our military against them. how is it a stretch to say

that the U.S. military can roll into a city like Chicago declare unilaterally who's a drug dealer who's involved in crime label them as terrorists and execute them in the streets of America go to war with our own citizens tell me if tell me honestly does that seem hyperbic

I was actually going to think like he could just murder the protesters if they come in. Yeah. Like, I mean, like, terrorists. What's to stop them from labeling anything terrorism?

You know? Yeah. I mean, especially with this death of Charlie Kirk, you're going to see them start to ramp up that rhetoric. You already saw it.

Literally watch the president give his speech and blame it on the far left. Yeah. Blame that before anybody knew anything. Before anybody knew anything about it. You know, can we talk about, like,

the blatant real quick, the blatant hypocrisy that is at play to with the way that this is being spun. So the people who would defend Charlie Kirk, right, what you hear very often is that, oh, it's just, you know, he's just a guy engaging in speech. He's just a guy engaging in speech. But he's not just a guy engaging in speech. He's a guy. I'm saying, like you're saying, he's a provocateur. He's intending to provoke. He is intending to engage in speech that will have

consequences. And I'm saying that because I believe in the consequential nature of speech, right? I know that speech is what moves people to action. So when it's Charlie Kirk doing it, he's just a guy using his free speech. There are no provocative ideas which create violence. However, when the left has an idea,

they have a dangerous ideology. The left's speech is labeled as dangerous, violent. We're just lying. We are not applying the same standard. I want to apply the same standard. Let me be clear. I want to the same standard. I think anybody who is promoting violence is a problem. Anybody who is

seeking to disenfranchise people by their identity within a group is a problem. And they should be taken on as a problem. We need to head that off at the past. We need to do social, legal, and political work to stop that and to minimize that and to disenfranchise those voices. It doesn't matter to me if they're left or right. But these guys are very clearly like, hey, man, the left has a dangerous ideology. When they speak, it's dangerous. When we speak, it's free speech.

Not just to remind him, but to remind everyone else, what happens when you don't pay up on time? This story is from Reuters. This is good news. Trump fails to overturn E. Jean Carroll's $83 million verdict. So it went to appeals, and the appeals court was like, yeah, it looks good to me.

No, it's fine. So the one big one, the million, and millions for fraud, that one stays. All right, but the verdict stays, the judgment goes back, right? So they have to re-figure out how much money he's going to owe or if he's going to owe money at all, right? This one, they're like, no, this is perfect. This is exactly how it should be.

You owe her lots and lots of money. You defamed the shit out of her and you sexually insulted. And you defamed her and you lied. And so enjoy paying lots and lots and lots of money. So it went past the appeals. And in those places, you have to put up that money. money. So you have to put up that money before your appeal. And clearly it's, they'll probably try to appeal to the Supreme Court or whatever. Sure. But you have to put up that money for

appeal. So that means that it's not like he can drag it out further. It's that money's there. Yeah. And so like, like if he loses this next round, if the Supreme Court won't hear it or whatever, then that money just immediately goes to her. How many astronaut NFT baseball cards do think he's going to have to sell to cover this? Gosh, it's got to be like 20 pairs of snakers. How many fucking bibles and fucking rump watches? Money is mine. I have the money. The money is mine. I got it for the first time. I got the money. Trump tried to kill the infrastructure law.

Now he's getting credit for its projects. So signs bearing President Trump's name have gone up at major construction projects financed by the 2021 law, which he strenuously opposed ahead of its passage. Not only that, but the previous signage that said this project brought to you by Joe Biden's goddamn infrastructure plan are being taken down. They're being taken down. This is double speak. Yeah.

We've always been a war with OSHA. This is exactly what you would expect from a Trump presidency. Take credit for everything. And the thing is, look at all his sycophants and all the people in his office, like an office underneath him. All those people take credit when they vote bills down. Absolutely. All those people will be like, I voted that shit down. But you're going to get a nice benefit out of it.

So because I vote. And it still went through, but I voted against it. They don't, these people don't care about the constituencies. They claim everything that is. that's positive as a win and they decided it was good and anything that's negative, even if they decided it, they weren't part of it. They just immediately washed their hands. And they'll say shit that's just like crazy, like, well, what am I supposed to do?

Just not take the money? Yeah. And like, well, if you thought the money should never come to you, if you thought this was a bad idea, then yeah. Like, if I think something's a bad idea, I'm not going to be like, well, I mean, I'll still take it. I'll be like, no, bad ideas are bad ideas. I won't engage them. there's a handful of states that have actually been a little more consistent about that.

They have deprived their citizenry of benefits that they would otherwise have access to. And while I think that's despicable, it is at least intellectually and politically consistent, right? It would be like the farmers now who are freaking out about the tariffs. Oh my God, I know. And they're crying in their TikTok saying, we're going to be ruined. It'd be like them refusing the subsidies that come after this. all of them that fucking voted MAGA, which is most of those dudes.

Yeah. And refuse it. Then you shouldn't take the fucking government money. To be intellectually honest, you would be like, well, I thought it was the right thing to do. Well, if you thought it was the right thing to do,

then it was the right thing to do, right? Isn't this something we should not be as a country? You voted against it, so you should just not take it. I want to tell you real quick, I drove on my way to the studio today, I drove past a wastewater reclamation plant,

and it had a sign because they're evidently doing work and upgrades on it. It had a sign that this project was brought to you by Joe Biden's infrastructure. No shit. Yeah. It's on my way here. Good. And I thought like, awesome. I hope it stays. I hope it stays. You could tell from the article that one of the guys who was asked to make the change from the Biden sign to the Trump sign, even though like he knew that this project, he clearly knew the project had begun in 2021. But he's like, yeah, but Trump got rid of the DEI that was slowing the project down.

And you're like, you're the worst. You're the worst. This sign's been up since 2021. The project's been underway for fucking four years. And you're going to be like, yeah, I still want to give the other guy credit. Yeah. You still want to. How do you sleep at night? All those people want to just, they just want to, like, sweep as many crumbs as they can. Like, what is it? I got rid all the DEI that was making it story. Like, you fired the black people working here? What is happening? Every time I, I hear things like that. I always think of like, when there's like a king chimp

and a bunch of chimps are picking shit out of her fur to like eat it. Like that's what I think. I'm like, you're the guy who's following Trump around picking fucking mites out of his hair

to fucking chew up. Dude, for real. Like you're existing on his crumbs. You're pathetic. Exactly right. It's exactly right. A bunch of fucking lice eaters. Are you standing here telling me

I don't know how to run my business? I'm standing here telling you that your math is shit. This story's from The Guardian. Trump claims Chicago is world's most dangerous city. the four most violent ones are all in red states yeah they really are and and if you look at this like chicago's the least on the entire on the entire uh graph so chicago is well below baltimore

below philly below washington dc and in all three categories and then if you look over at the other uh the four red states it's birmingham jackson memphis and st louis all tower over every single one it's not even close it's not even close the thing is like The only sensible way to measure this kind of violence is to measure it on a per capita basis, right? Because Chicago as a city has somewhere around 2.7 million people, which means that on a population basis, it's larger than, I think, about 12 states, 12 whole states at a population basis. So it would be insane to just look at a raw number of activities. It would be like saying, like, well, you know, they sure give up. a lot more speeding tickets in Chicago.

People must drive. Well, that's actually a bad example. We drive like a motherfucker out here. Awful. But like with 2.7 million people, there's just more people doing things. More littering. Right. There's going to be, yeah, more littering.

More people are going to jaywalk, right? Like, sure, you've got 2.7 million people. It's literally impossible for a smaller space to do more. You have to look at it as a per capita level. It's the only thing that's sensible. And when you do that, what's also interesting is that Chicago, because it's a blue state with a blue governor, blue Chicago, we actually measure this.

This article brings up that in a lot of these states, they don't have a statewide way to measure violence. They don't look at it. So you have to actually pull all these different police precincts data and compile it yourself because they're intentionally not looking. Because they know their numbers are shit. And there are definitely dangerous parts. of Chicago. For sure. Absolutely. I mean, like, sure. Are there dangerous parts of Chicago? Sure.

But looking at these numbers, I would rather be in some of the more dangerous areas for Chicago than in some of these other whole cities. Like some of these other whole cities, I mean, first of all, I'd have to be in Mississippi for some of them. Yeah, hard no. Why would I want to do that? Oh, no. Jesus, that seems like a terrible idea. No. But genuinely, there are real dangerous parts of Chicago. But Chicago's, Chicago's dangerous neighborhoods are hyper-localized. And the people who live in those neighborhoods, they have the highest risk. The people who live in most of Chicago, it's relatively safe. The thing that drags it down and the thing that changes those numbers, some of these people have thousands of times more chance that they're going to be involved in something violent

versus other other people. And make no mistake, Cecil and I strongly believe that there is work and action that needs to be done to fix that, right? Because like people deserve to grow up and live in neighborhoods that are safe for them and their families. You know what would change that? A lot? Taking guns off the street. Yeah, man. That would change a lot of that. Make a big difference. Make a huge difference. We got no food. We got no jobs.

Our pets' heads are falling off. ABC News, hiring slowdown continues in First Jobs Report since Trump fired the commissioner. Well, la-a-da. Turns out, Cecil, that numbers are still numbers and the fucking Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner doesn't have anything to do with the numbers.

Do you imagine, what is going to happen? How is he going to have to change it to finally change what he wants to have happen happen? Like how will he have to manipulate the system to finally get the answers that he wants? He's going to have to have the Doge Boys hack it. He is. He's going to have somebody go in and change the counting method. I really think that the way that this will, if it gets changed, and it might, if this gets change, they're going to have to change the accounting method. Right now, the Bureau of Labor

Statistics compiles all of its information by sending out surveys. You could twist the numbers by selectively surveying. So you could change who you're counting and how you're counting, and you could get a very different number. I wouldn't put that past them at all. At all. Like, we get these numbers, actually, typically we get these numbers three times. So we get the numbers like kind of right away. There's the initial jobs report. There's the ghost of Christmas past. Right, yeah, there is.

Yeah, and then there's a revised jobs report every time. The ghost to Christmas present. Literally every time. And then there's a final. And that's because, like, economically, we know we want data as soon as we can get data. We need to see those trend lines so we can act quickly on those trend lines. But you rather have quick data than perfect data that takes a long time. It's just there's actions that need to be taken.

So this, this the economy, like, 991,000 jobs revised down since March. It's massive. It feels like a lot, Tom. It's massive. It feels like a lot. It feels like the lies that they told about the economy are finally coming home to roost, right? Lies that they told, the lies that they sold the American people.

You can go to your grocery store right now and see the lies in real time. Absolutely. You can go to your gas pump and see the lies in real time. you can go to your checking account and see the lies in real time. They've been lying about this stuff. They lied to get people to vote for them because they were like, hey, man, you got to flip this switch. You got to turn it off.

This is bad for you. It's bad for the economy. I'm going to stand up here with a thing of Johnsonville Bratz and tell you how expensive there, even though I don't even know how the sausage is made. Literally. Yeah, that's a great, yeah. So he's going to hold it up and he's going to pretend that he actually has one time in his

life gone to a grocery store and bought things. You know, you need an ID to buy grocery things. Remember that? He walks in and pulls out his ID to show people. But seriously, like, this is a guy who doesn't know what's happening, but will lie to you, lie straight to you to say he will fix it. And he hasn't done anything whatsoever. He's, in fact, done everything he can to endanger our economy and to endanger the

reputation of the United States as a place that is a good and safe place to store your money. Absolutely. And he's going to, and the more he's, fiddles with these things behind the scenes about fucking with labor statistics and trying to pressure the Fed into doing stuff and et cetera, et cetera, the more other countries are going to see us as a place that's dangerous to store your money and it's going to downgrade us as a place to keep money and it's going to be a major, it's going to be something so major that you're going to have to fight your way out of it when he's finally out of office. You're going to have to fight

as hard as you can to change that reputation back to what it was. Yeah, I mean, to some degree, economically, the United States has always been a Ponzi scheme. So we are always in an increasing amount of debt. And there are people who are worried about that, but there are other people who have said, because it's historically been true, that because the United States is the default international currency, because there is this unparalleled level of economic and political stability in the United States, that essentially there will not be an end to the number of people who want to invest in the bond, in U.S. bonds. And as long as there's a huge amount of money

international and otherwise flowing into the bond market and buying U.S. bonds, we can continue to borrow and you can borrow at a level that is maybe sustained. But like if that collapses, If that falls apart, all of a sudden, we're out of fucking money, guys. We're out of money. We're out of money. And if we're out of money, we're talking about a global depression. Yeah. Hey, I told somebody the other night I was a male nurse.

I'm ashamed to admit that I'm a criminal. Me too. New York Times. Trump says, have a little fight with the wife should not count as a crime. President Trump said that offenses that happen at home should not undermine his record of crime reduction in Washington. This is another example of him cooking the books. Right? Yeah.

This is him trying to figure out a way so that he can win even when he's losing. And he does this all the time. Yep. He did it in 2020 when he lost the election. He wants to show that he can win even though he's losing. He did it. He did it with the job numbers. He's doing it with the economy.

Listen to him when he, he seriously on two social, we'll send out messages that say gas prices are as low as ever. And people are like, no, they're not. Like, they're just lying. So, like, he's going to do anything you can to make it look like. whatever it is, whatever crimes happen, those don't count. I didn't pull them out of the hat. They don't count. But also, embedded in that is a deeply misogynist, horrible thing to say.

So much. So, like, not only is it a terrible thing for him to be lying about crime statistics just to make his record look better. It's also that he's saying you should be able to sock your wife at home. That's exactly what he said. Like, he's not referring to an argument. The police don't get called. for an argument.

It's not like you had a disagreement with your wife, and then the police showed up, and they're like, okay, now tell us the story, we'll adjudicate. That's not, we're talking about- Did he not put the dishes away, and then they'd go take you outside and talk to you for a little while? That's not how that works. No, we are talking, when he says a little fight,

he's saying a little fist fight, punching, hitting, violence, domestic violence. He's saying you should be able to beat women at least a little bit, right? And it's not a police matter. At least it's not an important one. It's not a serious one. And certainly one we wouldn't write down.

Yeah, this is, this also is part of that work that the right constantly does to differentiate different kinds of assaults as lesser assaults, as if like beating someone that you are supposed to love is a lesser assault than beating a stranger. And it's only people on the right who are misogynist violence apologists that do that shit. Yeah. Everybody else, like if you are a sensible human being, you'd be like, Like, yeah, like, the person I love the most is the person who should be most shielded from my violence.

Like, like, there's no way that the person who I love the most in this world, my wife, my children, they should be more immune than everyone to violence from me. But they're saying, you can hit your wife a little, and it's not even a police matter. And make no mistake, this would be disqualifying of any other candidate, any other president. Absolutely. Now it's not. And what that should tell you, too, is that the overted window has shifted so far toward misogyny in our culture, toward embracing it, toward recognizing that, like, a certain level of violence toward women is actually now becoming in vogue.

It's becoming, like, promoted by people on the right. You know, like, again, going back to Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk's views on women were intensely misogynist and regressive. Like, he believed and advocated for women to drop out of school, drop out of the workforce, get married early, have kids, even if you don't want them, and subjugate themselves to men. That's the world. These guys are working to build. Those are not. That's how you win in cell votes. Right. Yes. And now you've got a president who's like, it's not real violence if it's against your wife. All right, that's going to wrap it up for this week. We will be back

on Thursday with a long-form show about Jeffrey Epstein. You're not going to want to miss this one. It's fucking weird and disturbing and crazy. And there's two articles we're going to be covering they're both about Jeffrey Epstein. One of them from the New York Times, one of them from the Atlantic. You're going to want to check it out. That'll be this Thursday. But we'll be back next Monday with a full show.

And we're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter mommy issue, hypno-babelon bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double-bubble toil and trouble, pseudo-quazial,

alternative acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead, pan, sales pitch, late-night info docutainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death and towers, tarot cars, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, wizards, wizards, wizards, wizards. Vaccine nuts. Shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata nonsense. Expose your signs. Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this.

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I don't know.