Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 868: Post Truth Blame Game, Free Speech for me not for thee.

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

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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, November the 18th, and a lot has happened.

Holy cow, my friend, in the seven days since we've recorded. You know, we are obviously going to spend some time today talking about the Charlie Kirk killing. Some people, by the way, were pushing back. I just saw one or two pushing back on the use of the word assassination. I think that's a bad pushback. I just want to pause there. It's a bad pushback. I think the assassination is the right term for the way that this,

for the impact that this has on our political landscape. Yeah, I mean, we don't get to decide who's political just because we don't like them. Right, exactly. The government literally lowered the flags across the country to half mass. So we can't, just because we didn't like him, and we didn't think he had anything real of importance to say, and thought he was divisive and said racist and transphobic things doesn't mean he's not a political force. Absolutely. When the vice president of the United States gets on the deceased parties

podcast the next day and says out loud, I wouldn't be vice president if it hadn't been for Charlie Kirk. I don't think that it is a reasonable position at that point to take to say that this does not have political impacts such that this is an assassination. Yeah, absolutely. I just want to, for sure. Just like pause there. But so much has happened, and we've learned so much. And then really importantly, we still don't know so much. Yeah, there's a lot we don't know. And like, I want to kind of take a step back and have a little bit of a meta-conversation about our responsibility as skeptics. And then a little bit, Cecil, I think, about our responsibility, meaning mine and yours, as people that have an audience. Because I know it's something that you take seriously. And I know it's something that that, that, that, I take seriously as well.

Like we are privileged enough, you and I, to have this soapbox, this microphone soapbox, and to be able to reach out and to say, hey, here are my thoughts, I'd like you to hear them. And then when we reach out and we touch, you know, however many thousands of ears in that process and reach out and connect with those people, I think, concomitant with that is a real, I feel, a deep sense of responsibility to try my, best to only say true things first as best of my ability and then also i think crucially to avoid speculating about things that i don't fucking know about right to not try to create

a sense of expertise where expertise doesn't exist sure you know it's a very different thing than having an opinion an opinion's like hey here's my take on it here an opinion is essentially here are my feelings and thoughts around this topic but i'm not trying to do any i'm not trying to engage in the process of reality creation. And I think there's a real essential and important difference there. We are living in a post-truth world where the process of reality

creation is a endeavor of all of the technocrats currently in power. The power brokers on both the right and the left are all engaged in this real distinct and purposeful process of reality creation. I don't want to add

to that information ecosystem. I don't. I don't want to add to it. And I want to call ourselves out as a team. We on our social media posted a couple of things that we then took down because on reflection after they were posted, the concern was this may add to the disinformation or misinformation ecosystem, even though that's not how it was intended. And when that happens, I look at that and I'm like, man, this reaches a lot of eyes. This reaches a lot of ears. And I don't feel a sense of certainty around it. And there's no good hard news reported that backs this claim up. And it's got to come down. So for those people that saw those items and maybe wondered why they came down, they came down because we felt like on reflection, it didn't reflect our values as skeptics. And we don't want to add noise and reality creation attempts into that information ecosystem. It's just not who we are. It's not the value of the show. It's not the message of our book.

and it's been something that's been a through line for us as a value for 20 some years now. Yeah, I think, too, one of the most important things we don't want to do is become a stop on someone's adventure of confirmation bias. And what is happening and what I'm seeing a lot of, especially in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death, is that there are a bunch of people who are finding a thing they think is true because it matches. their values. It matches the things they want to be true. And then they say that thing as if it were a true thing, regardless of where they found it or what it means or in the greater context. As long as that piece, that sliver makes them feel like they are right, they will carry it to the next place and drop it off. And that is a bad way to think. I want to say this, and I think this is an important way to frame this whole conversation. Regardless of what this person who shot Charlie

Kirk's motives were, that is not a reflection of the left. So I don't believe that he is left, first off. I don't think that that's, I haven't seen any evidence to say that that's true. But even, like, let's just for a second roleplay for a moment and say that he was someone who was deeply entrenched in leftist politics, that doesn't mean that those things are the things that made him violent. Because there isn't a sense that people need to be killed for their opinions on the left. And it's not a thing that's repeated often on the left. Sure, are there people who say it on the left? Yes, of course. But there are not a large group of people who think that that's true. So it's not like it's cultivated here. And then that person did it. So if you happen to

identify with a group of people that Charlie Kirk was harming, you don't have to feel responsible for anything, because you didn't do anything, nor did the ideology that you're trying to protect do anything. That was not part of this equation. So you don't have to find pieces that reinforce this because there is nothing there. What we have is a group of people who want to hurt people that are marginalized and they have found a way to manipulate this in some way to do it. And that's what we need to defend ourselves against. Yeah, man, a thousand percent. I think that you very much hit the nail on the head there. There's, there is, and we're going to talk about this in some detail in just a moment with a really great article from NPR. But I want to,

I want to just make sure that the position that we, I think, all should hold is articulated clearly. On November 11th, we recorded and we said, hey, there's no reason to say with certainty we know what the political ideology or motivations of the killer are. It is now a week later. The charging documents have been released. I would suggest we still have no reason to say, with certainty, I know what the motivations of the killer are or were. the information that's come out is fucking outlook not so clear right it's it's not definitive it's not clear there was a there was a rush to say oh you know this was a far far right groiper stuff right and i and here's how we can interpret these memes it it all felt to me in the moment like that's possible but it's not certain and i think that we should draw a distinction for ourselves between what we think is likely to be true

and what we are willing to broadcast out to other people. I don't think we have, I think we have a real responsibility, especially as people with an audience, to broadcast out not what we think is likely, but what we know is certain. And what we've vetted through hard news sources only. You might pop around online and see a bunch of really persuasive arguments. arguments that say, hey, you know, I really think that this is probably how such and such

issue works. But if you can't say that with real certainty, vetted through actual hard news and facts that support your supposition in multiple ways, you really should be careful about what you broadcast out. Because when we broadcast stuff out, both individually and like as an organization, like, you know, Cogdis as an organization, but also people individually, that shit can go viral. That shit can reach eyes. That shit can reach ears. I think we as skeptics have a responsibility to not do that. And again, that doesn't mean that you can't speculate among your friends. You can't have conversations personally. You can't or shouldn't feel a certain way about, you know, hey man, I just get a sense that this evidence points in this direction. But if you're not certain and the evidence from hard news sources doesn't say this with certainty is true, I think we need to be better skeptics about how. we interact with other people, right, and persuade with other people. So that will lead us, I think, real well to this really terrific article from which I'm going to quote extensively, because I just think it's like real important for us to think

through together. This story is from NPR. Why was Kirk killed? Evidence paints complicated picture of alleged assassin. This is an article that just came out this morning at 5 o'clock. And really this article starts off. I'm going to read it to some things. It mentions the charging documents.

And in the charging documents, authorities cite text messages that Robinson allegedly exchanged with his lover slash roommate, a person they describe as a biological male who is transitioning genders. The document also includes another text in which Robinson allegedly explains that he killed Kirk because he had had enough of his hatred. The presumed motive has added fire to a rash of speculation by high-reach conservatives who suggested that this motive equated to a political ideology. to pause there. What I think is important to sort of reference back to what we just said is that those high-reach political conservatives were saying this before they had this evidence.

That's real fucking important. There were a lot of people, to be very blunt, like there were a lot of people who were saying this before they had evidence, and then we're saying it wasn't this before they had evidence. There's a lot of people making speculations. But really, Cecil, the only people that count are the people with authority and the people who can act based on their speculation. And what I mean by that is that the truth matters less than what those in power will do with the story. We have this like focus, I think, because it matters to people like you and I to try to say, well, I want to learn true things. I want to focus on what's true. I want to get to the bottom of this. That's a great impulse. That's the

right impulse as a person. I also think, though, that from a strategic, political, pragmatic perspective, the truth is actually less important than the story being told by the people in power. And there are sort of two different lanes. And we need to pay attention to both lanes. If we try to fight the story being told by the people in power, if we try to fight that story with the truth, I don't think with bad actors, that's going to be effective. Because they already sort of set the stage, you know what I mean, to be bad actors. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of things that we can glean from their motivations. And one of the things that we know about them is that, one, they had already chosen the

motive before they found the motive, right? So they had already decided that this was the motive before it was the motive. We have a story we may or may not get to of Nancy Mace, the morning it happened, coming out and saying, the Democrats own this, right? Like, that's what she says after all this happens. There's no reason to think at all that any Democrat had anything to do with this period, but she 100% walks out and uses that as their motivation to go after people that she doesn't agree with politically. They used this as a tool. They were excited when this happened because they knew they could use it as a tool as soon as it happened. We shouldn't believe that they, one, we shouldn't believe this administration unless we see some really solid evidence

because we've seen what they do on low-stakes things. So, for instance, and this is something we've brought up many times before, the hurricane. So that hurricane's coming in. President Trump misspeaks and says it's going somewhere. It's going to Alabama. It wasn't going to go to Alabama. It wasn't going to reach Alabama. But instead, the next day, he with Sharpie on a map, draws a circle around Alabama to say it was going to go to Alabama.

That is an exceedingly low stakes thing, right? That you can lie about so that you 100% were right. So you don't look like you were wrong about anything. When they announced this, you knew no matter what they found, whether or not they found other things in this person. You noticed what they released and what they didn't release, right? So there's a whole online life of this person that they didn't release. What they released was a snippet of their online life.

their text messages in these charging documents. So we know a small portion of what they have, but we don't know the entirety of their life. And so I think it's important for us to remember that when low-stakes things were something that they were willing to lie about, what do they do with something like this, which is a high-stake thing

that they are trying to manipulate and attack people with? Yeah, and a couple of things on that. Like, I want to point out something that occurs to me, too, is that the reason this is high-stakes, stakes is not because they care about Charlie Kirk getting killed. The stakes here are how can we politicize this to achieve the goals we've always had? That is why the stakes are high, because their potential to weaponize and leverage this event into a whole host of political gains for them is so great.

Yes. That's why these kinds of, that's one of the reasons, right? if you need more than one, if you need reasons why these kinds of killings are a bad thing, right? And we talked a little bit about this on the last show. Strategically, practically, pragmatically, politically, these backfire. These are not good things. These do not push the progressive cause forward. We cannot kill our way into a more progressive environment.

What we've done instead is we have emboldened and empowered. Howard like a Reichstag fire, a fascist regime. They need something like this. Something like this is actually of terrific political value. This is a lot like when Trump gets shot in the ear at that event, right? Immediately it turns it into a powerful photo op and immediately it galvanizes a group of people to do work and to make decisions that they otherwise did not have the political cover to do. now there is tremendous political cover to do this. To your second point about, like, look at what this administration was capable of

in terms of lying about low-stakes stuff. Also look at like Cash Patel already lied directly on fucking, in writing and everything, on this event. He said, we have a suspect in custody. They did not have a suspect in custody, right? They were interviewing somebody, and then they later released that, somebody because they had nothing to do with it. So this is already a justice department whose interest in the truth is low. Yeah. Their interest in a narrative is very, very, very high. Centering the

truth is a bad idea right now if you want to make political hay out of this. So they're not centering truth. Yeah. What they're centering is how can I motivate galvanize and get these other agenda items that I have and have always had push forward faster than I would be otherwise able to. That's because there's a race to become the underdog as quickly as possible.

There's always a race so that your side looks like you're the one being attacked because then more people will be sympathetic to the things you do afterwards. So we are being bullied, we stand up to the bully, and now look at all the things we did

in retrospect are justified. And so that's why they're doing it because their narrative depends on them not being the oppressor. Their narrative depends on them being the oppressed. So that is why they do this every single time there is something

because it's a cycle with them. It has to happen this way. They oppress people a bunch of times and then when finally something snaps and it may not even be the thing that you expect, which is you bullied people enough that they step up and attack you. It may not even be that, but they will suddenly claim the underdog status and spin it back

around again. And it's a constant cycle. Yeah, man. So I'm going to read a little more from this article. Little is still known about Robinson's politics. According to the charging document, his mother told investigators he'd become more pro-gay and trans rights oriented within the last year. It also includes a text message allegedly written by Robinson that said, since Trump got

in office, my dad has been pretty diehard mega. but Robinson is not registered with a political party in Utah. There is no evidence of his positions on other issues of importance to the left, such as immigration or labor. The dearth of information about Robinson's political views has suggested to some researchers of online culture and shootings that there may not, in fact, be much more to Robinson's alleged violence than a single issue grievance.

They say that one particular piece of information shared in the charging documents lends support to this theory. He says, allegedly, Remember how I was engraving bullets? The fucking messages are mostly a big meme. If I see notices bulge, oo-woo, on Fox News, I may have a stroke. For researchers who examine how online culture manifests in the real world, this evidence strongly reinforces their analysis

that Kirk's alleged shooter was obsessed with what some call the performance of violence. I think this is a really important part of this article. They say that the use of online memes that are inscrutable to a general public likely was intended not to signal any political tendencies. Rather, these were meaningless in-group jokes primarily circulated among young, extremely online gamers, and they are emulative of other acts of violence that have succeeded in stirring up discourse. That idea of the performance culture of violence is a really important idea.

I think that there's reason to think that he did have an issue, that Tyler Robinson did have potentially an issue of grievance, right? He said that he thought that, according, allegedly, said that he thought Charlie Kirk was full of hate, right? So he's not just singling somebody out in order to create like a ripple, but he's also not not potentially doing that too. And I think that the inscrutability and the sort of divorcing of context that is part of the sort of like perpetually online memeification of like discourse in some of these spaces where there's an intentional deflection away from context for these jokes and for these sort of in-group messages is all blended together to say what I really want to do is show off and show people and

demonstrate and perform. It feels very similar to that guy that stole and disseminated a whole bunch of classified top secret information online. And the motivation for it turned out to be not political at all, but it turned out to be he's online a lot and he just wanted to show off. That is a perfectly valid potential explanation, potential for what happened here. Yeah. And they're talking to people in this article who understand this online culture. And I think there was a rush initially to attach this person to Nick Fuentes and his group, right? A lot of people I saw were saying this is Nick Fentz clearly is this person who influenced this person and they, and Nick Fentz just recently went after Charlie Kirk on his

show and this is a fight between those two. And it was a way in which to distance the people on the left from anything that happened. And I sympathize with that for sure, 100% sympathize with that because there's a part of me that really wants that to be true. But there's another part of me that says that those things don't necessarily mean that he's part of that group. It doesn't necessarily mean that he is in with that crowd. What it means is that some of these things are some of the things that terminally online people in both groups might be attracted to and use. And so we've got to be careful if there's a Venn diagram that shows that maybe people that like Nick Fentas and maybe people that go on 4chan and maybe people that go on these discord spaces and maybe people that

go on to certain Reddit subreddits all sort of share the same memes, we can't suddenly just say this is a person who is allied with this one group and I wash my hands of it. Because those spaces overlap and they interact with each other. That's it, dude. You know, like, part of the problem with nihilistic irony as a sort of cultural humor and value is that if your language, if the online and cultural language

centers itself around nihilistic irony, then definitionally, everything means nothing, and all things are available for appropriation. And that appropriation of every side for this nihilistic ironic humor, which is a hallmark of the perpetually online spaces, it creates a lack of meaning.

There's not a single-centered meaning that you can say this symbol symbolizes this other thing because all groups using nihilistic irony as a primary tool for their cultural signaling are going to say everything is available for the same level of appropriation for humor. and so nothing is everything is nothing

and that the ability to sort of suss things out in a meaningful way really is stripped bare and shouldn't be I mean the level that you have to have of real certainty has to be raised then it can't just be here's a picture on Facebook or he posed like the fucking Pepe Frog right I've seen that picture here's a picture of him posed a pepe frog

well did he do it ironically you always have to say am I certain he did it intentionally or ironically, was it a troll of this other group? Was it just something he thought was? There's really no reason to attach that to anything. That is the nihilistic irony problem. And nihilistic irony is a trademark of these perpetually online spaces. And it's important to repeat again, it doesn't matter to the Republicans and the people in power. Exactly.

They were 100% going to twist this. however they wanted, what we shouldn't do is do the same thing. What we shouldn't do is do what they're doing, which is twist it to our benefit whenever we can to try to attack them and then usurp the underdog position. We should just follow the truth.

And like I said at the beginning of the program, even if you follow the truth and it led you to believe that this person was doing this because he thought marginalized groups were being attacked, doesn't mean those marginalized groups are responsible for this. It means that those people attacked marginalized groups

and this person took something too far and he doesn't represent those marginalized groups at all, at all in any way. Even if it was true and I'm not saying it is, but even if it was, it still doesn't mean what you think, what they think it means and what they're trying to make it mean.

And this is a big, what this is, is a way for them. They've been doing this for a long time. They are trying to make this a reality by attacking constantly. They are trying to make people on the left be violent. You ever see those videos, Tom, those videos of people driving, and they'll be driving a car along. They'll have a dash cam. And someone will literally cut in front of them and break check them to try to get an insurance thing.

You've seen that happen, right? Oh, yeah. The right has been trying to do that to the left forever. They're trying to bait you into hitting them so that then they can call you violent. They've been doing it for, we've been doing the show for a decade and a half, and they've been doing it for at least that long. So they've been trying to bait people for a very long time. And they've been doing it constantly. And they've been waiting.

That pole has been in the water for a real long time. And most people don't bite on it. Most people just say, you're a fucking idiot. You know, you're an asshole. You're an idiot. Shut the fuck up. And they get madder and matter and matter. And they keep trying to bait.

And so they say worse and worse and worse things. And then when something finally happens, it may or may not be because of that, they will blame it. Would you say, Cecil, that they are masturbators? As soon as you said that, I was like, I am. listening, but I have to write down my joke. I get it. No, 100%. I mean, doesn't that make sense?

That's how they act. Yes, yes. Absolutely. And that's, you know, I really do think there was a lot of discussion going on online where, and we talked about this on the last show. I think there was a lot of discussion that was going on online that really was like, hey, you know, I feel like the world is better because this happened. I'm not sorry to see him go.

Charlie Kirk was a bad guy. He held these bad views. right? And I think that that misses the most important point. The most important point is that because this happened, worse, like all of those ideologies that Charlie Kirk and his ilk were spreading and working to create, all of those things will now move faster. Because they were baiting. Somebody killed Charlie Kirk. They will create a narrative now that pushes their ball forward. Yeah. And pushes their ball forward faster and harder. This is, you know, they're going to get their insurance claim to use your analogy. Yeah. They are going to get their

insurance claim now. That's it. This is done. Like, that's fucking locked in now. Yeah. That is fucking locked in now. So it, this is, this is the danger of martyrdom. This really is. This is the danger of creating martyrs. But this is also, this really, I think, speaks so much to the danger of living in a politically charged post-truth world. We cannot, this was never a space that was safe for us to be in. This was never a space where our rights were ever safe and safely protected and we knew the things were going to turn out, okay. It relied on good actors of good faith working to safeguard us against a post-truth

reality when you have the guardians of power working to. promote a post-truth reality in order to drive narratives that further their political goals, this is exactly what we should have and did foresee happening. A couple other things that I want to read directly from this article. I know we've been talking about this a long time, but I just think it's the most important thing going on right now. I just feel like this is the zeitgeist at the moment. For those who study political and extremist violence, the substance of the messages on the bullet

casings is far less revealing than the simple fact that the shooter made the inscriptions at all. They say that this act, combined with information revealed through other news reports and combined within the charging document in Utah, indicate that the suspect was thinking deliberately about how he would ultimately be situated within the universe of mass shooters and high-profile killers in the U.S. Centers, this is this expert, said it was particularly revealing to read about discord chats that Robinson reportedly participated in after the killing where he claimed his doppelganger

had committed the shooting, and he better get rid of his manifesto. What he was doing here with this act was very performative. He was performing internet culture, and specifically mass shooting culture in general, with the etchings on the showcasing being memes, with the joke about having a manifesto. It is all very performative in that regard. We talked a little bit about the performative nature of it. I want to talk a little bit about performing internet culture. I know it's something that I've expressed concerns about before.

Internet culture, when it is this sort of like dark space culture, where is this sort of like everybody is open and available for attack, you know, there's a distance between us and them that is, I think, inherently dehumanizing when we are online. When we are online, we exist in place. that I've been thinking about this a lot. You know, the idea, do you know the idea of friction, like transactional friction? No, I don't.

So if you're in business, one of the things that you want to do and you constantly are working toward is reducing friction. Friction is the anything that makes a transaction more difficult for the consumer. I also think of that idea of friction as like interpersonal or relationship or communicative friction. I think about how that idea translates. I think it translates really well when we think about differences between online and offline interactions. When we interact with people offline and in the real world, we learn how to interact and we don't get to seek out only friction-free spaces, right? So when I interact with you, Cecil, I have to say something and contend with you seeing me say it.

Yeah. So if I say something cruel to you, you're right there. And you're probably, not going to punch me in the face, but I might see that I hurt you or angered you or upset you. We are in a space where that tension, the vibe, so to speak, will be palpable. In the real world space, there is a tremendous amount of friction to our ideas, to the way that we interact with people, to how comfortable and free we are, to do or say certain things and behave in certain ways. As we remove ourselves from that one-on-one space, and a car is a great example of a level of remove. When I get in the car, I might be driving and make a driving mistake and somebody might fucking hit their horn, break check, and flip me off. That's a level of

remove that gives people a little more license to express a certain amount of anger that they're much less likely to express one-on-one in person, right? That kind of interaction, that kind of quick to anger, yelling and scream. That kind of stuff happens less frequently in person. Move it on to the online space. Now I'm seeking out places where I'm enjoying my space because there's less friction. These people agree with me. These people hold the same values. They hold the same ideas. We talk about an echo chamber or a bubble, but I think also about the idea of it is very bad for our psyche to be in friction-free spaces all the time, where we do not have to contend meaningfully with the consequences of disagreement, of violent behavior, of misogynist, racist

behavior, of hurting people, that sort of nihilistic irony stuff, it actually isn't funny in real life. If you were to try to perform that in real life, those same kinds of jokes structured in that deflected from context sort of way, it's not funny in real life. It's really only funny in these friction-free spaces. It really only works well in these friction-free spaces. performing internet culture, I think, is intensely dangerous, and it is going to become more and more common. And I think we need to be really aware of that and really aware of, like, making sure that we too

and the people around us are not falling into too many friction-free spaces because I think that therein lies the slippery slope into radicalization. Under the new emblem of the double cross, liberty was banished. Free speech was suppressed, and only the voice of Henkel was heard. All right, so we're going to talk about this article. A bunch of stuff, I think we're going to blast through because you spent 35 minutes on the first thing. But this is from the New York Times. ABC pulls Jimmy Kimmel off the air for Charlie Kirk comments after FCC pressure.

So this is an example, I think, of the sort of what's next that we should expect as a result here, which is the weaponizing of the government's ability to shut. people down. The FCC can just reach out and flip the fucking switch. And they're like, yeah, here's some fucking pressure. Guess who's off the air now? It's reinforcing the things they wanted to get done. You said this earlier,

right? You said they're going to use this in any way that they can to do the things that they had already planned to do. And then they'll just point to it and say we did it because of this. We did it because this, but they wanted Kimmel off the air anyway. They were just waiting for a moment that they could use. Now, this is a really

sanitary moment if you watch this clip. And this clip is all over. I'm not going to play it on our show because it'll get demonetized on YouTube if we do it. But basically what'll happen is, what happens is Jimmy Kimmel says, hey, the mag people this week are really trying to find out that this person is on the left. And they're really doing their best to make sure that they find this out. We catch up with Trump in front of the White House and we found out how brokenly up he is about this. And it's a sarcastic comment because the next comment is Trump being asked, how are you holding up? And Trump responding, I'm okay. Oh, did you see that we're getting this ballroom done? I mean, he literally in the same breath says, oh, did you see

we're going to fix the ballroom in the White House? It was a hundred years. It's been terrible. And I came in and fixed it. Someone asked them about Charlie Kirk and he turned it into the ballroom. So it's 100 percent perfectly on point exactly how Trump thinks and exactly what Trump thinks about Charlie Kirk, and he just pointed it out to people, and he was removed from his job because he just showed, he made a comment that said Trump is broken up about it in a sarcastic way, and that was the end of it. I mean, like, it was something that they had already planned. They already had it in the bag. Right. And they pulled out that tile already before any, before even said anything about Charlie Kirk. Absolutely. And like, there's, there's people who are

sort of throwing the consequence-free speech dialogue sort of back at people in this instance. But I want to point out why this is different. So our right to free speech is that the government is not to infringe upon our free speech. And we, on our side, myself very much included, has long said that our right to free speech means the government is not to impinge upon my free speech. But if I am otherwise canceled or faced consequences for what I say, well, then that's just the natural consequence of saying stupid and shitty things. What's different here is the FCC is a, that's the federal communications, whatever the other C is. Commission.

That's the government. Commission, thank you. That's the government. That's the government. That's the difference. Yeah. That's why this is different. This is an impingement on free speech.

Well, and here's what I would say to those people. Your values mean nothing then, right? So you have been saying you have this principled stance for years that the people on the left are wrong that there should be consequence speech. The people on the left are wrong when somebody says something there should be no consequences, free speech, free speech, free speech. But the moment something happens to someone you don't like by a person who you do like, you suddenly change your tune on it. Well, that means you had no principle. You didn't. That principle meant nothing to you. You weren't, that wasn't part of what you wanted. All you wanted was the outcome.

You didn't want to have the principle that held that outcome up. What you wanted was the outcome. You wanted to be able to say the unword. You wanted to be able to say, mean shit. You wanted to be able to say, you know, call mentally disabled people by a slur. You wanted to call gay people by a slur. You wanted to call trans people by a slur. You wanted to call black people by a slur. You wanted to be able to do all that stuff. You wanted to make fun of people based on things they can't control. You wanted to do all that stuff. And you wanted to get away with it.

And that's what you wanted. And you used a principle that you lied about forever and said, this is the principle I hold dear. But then the moment someone shows you, well, that principle isn't being upheld now by the side that you support, they immediately throw it out. And they say, well, what about, what about? Now you're bringing up what aboutism. You never had a principled stance. Never, never. Like you've said before, where my libertarians are my libertarians at?

Where are my free speech absolutists at? Yeah. Where are you guys at? Where's the outcry? Hey, you know, you know, it was a big free speech absolutist? Elon Musk. Yeah. Except the many, many times he's not.

And the many times he's not are when he feels like somebody else's use of speech intersects with him in a way he doesn't like. Yes. This has always been about, I want consequences for thee and not for me. That's what free speech absolute. Lutasar. They're liars. They are going after all the people, you know, because they're using, you're using, what's his name, Kimmel, as an example here, but they're going after a ton of people and a bunch of people lost their jobs over saying they weren't sorry that Charlie Kirk died, right?

There are a bunch of people lost their jobs over that. But I want to, I saw a bunch of things this week that I had forgotten that the right had done. After Trayvon Martin had died, they were trevoning. They were taking pictures of themselves lying on the ground with skittles next to their head. Jesus Christ. And they were calling it Trevani, right? They were doing the George Floyd challenge, where

they were taking pictures themselves in the same position George Floyd died in. They elevated Kyle Rittenhouse to a position of political status and celebrity status on their side of the aisle. They have always,

always politicized violence and and praised political violence. So they have always done this. So their idea that they're attacking the other side because they're the ones who are the ones who are politically violent and spewing political violence is a lie. And it's been a lie forever. Man, after Nancy Pelosi's husband was beaten with a hammer, there were Trump 2024 hammers for sale like on marketing websites that were

purporting to be campaign websites, right? Like, Trump literally made fun of it. Donald Trump, Jr., posted a hammer and a pair of underwear and said, this is my Halloween costume. Like, these are people making fun of political violence when it's not their side. They have no principles, right? Yeah, yeah, none whatsoever.

And nobody, I don't, I didn't hear a lot of people making fun of this, just not caring about it. No, I didn't hear. The bulk of what I saw was people saying, I don't give a shit. Like, he didn't give a shit about guns. Why should I care about his gun death? The end.

It is wild that I'm not sad this guy is dead, is getting people fired from their jobs. I, you know, I posted very little. I posted like something to my face, my personal Facebook page, which only has like 150 people on. It's just my actual friends. And I fucking took, even though my profile is not a public profile, I've got every security, I took that shit down. Yeah. I took it down as soon as I heard that people were.

we're getting fire. I'm not getting fire from my day job for this. For Charlie Kirk? Are you kidding me? I wouldn't skip fucking lunch for Charlie Kirk. Did you or did you not say that?

No, no, no, no. Answer the question, motherfucker. Did you or did you not say that? Yes, I said that. However, whatever would you, however. This story's from the Huffington Post. Reporter reveals Nancy Mace's stunning hypocrisy on Charlie Kirk's death

with just one question. So South Carolina Republican Nancy Maitz, as you mentioned before, she came out and she said that Democrats own this. That is a direct quote. Let me read it again. Democrats own this was what she said, referring to the Tyler Robinson shooting allegedly Charlie Kirk. NBC's chief, Capitol Hill correspondent Ryan Nobles, then asked Mace, by that logic, do Republicans own the shooting of the two Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota? isn't it on isn't this on both sides and mace responded with an outrage saying are you kidding me some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through kirk's neck and you want to talk about republicans right

now no no i'm asking you you said the democrats were going to no this is the democrats own this nancy repeated but is there a problem with political violence across the spectrum nobles asked yeah we're talking about charlie kirk right now mace dug in that's the subject of this that's what we're talking about right now. Democrats own this 100%. They can't answer the question, honestly. They can't take on the subject of the real question, which is, do political parties have a responsibility when they stoke violence and otherism and vilification and demonizing of half the country, half of the rest of the country? Very clearly, that answer is yes. Yeah. Very clearly. Like if we're going to say our words mean something

and every side is agreeing to that piece at least, right? Otherwise, you wouldn't get canceled. Jimmy Kimmel wouldn't get canceled if his words didn't have impact. Yeah. Everybody is like in agreement with, hey, words matter. Words actually matter. They have a real impact. I think we're all on that same page now.

Before maybe we weren't, but now we've got to be. We have to be, right? There's no getting around it. So there's no way for the Republicans to pin this on us without them saying, hey, I've got some shit that's got to stick to me too. Unless they just avoid. Yeah, and that's what they're going to do. And especially the people who aren't smart enough in the moment, you see what she came out with, right?

She came out with the conclusion that she wanted to make clear to everyone. And it's the conclusion that everybody on that side had come to well before there was any evidence for it, was they immediately wanted to do what they could to reclaim the underdog status as fast as possible. So that's what she was trying to do. and when someone came out and said, wait a minute, hold on a second. Let me just see if you're logically consistent with the position you're holding. She immediately pushed back and she floundered. I mean, she literally flounder.

She says, like, well, I wasn't talking about that. I wasn't talking about deaths on my side. I was talking about deaths on your side. There was a video that I saw the other day. I wish I'd sent it to you. But it was one of these things where a, like, a erstwhile personal reporter, right? like just some guy is what I'm saying with a camera. He approached a congresswoman and asked her to sign.

He said, oh, it's so nice to meet you. You've done such great work. I really appreciate it. Would you mind? And she's like, oh, thanks so much. So it's so nice to meet you too. And he's like, would you mind signing one of your tweets? And it was a tweet calling for like the execution of Democrats.

And she got fucking mad as hell and like stormed off. Because they can't face their own words right now and call out the other side. It's impossible. You cannot call out the other side for stoking violence and then also not embrace the reality of your own calls for violence unless you just literally run away from your own words. Well, and another good segue here is let's talk about J.D. Vance,

bringing Stephen Miller on Charlie Kirk's platform a day or two after Charlie Kirk died. So when they re-aired Charlie Shud, So, J.D. Vance, the vice president in the United States, who's taken many, many, many vacations this year, decided not to take a vacation and decided to, instead, push Charlie's dead body out of a chair, sit in that place because he knew that he could attach himself to millions of motivated people who were upset. and tuned them up how he wanted to tune them up. Yeah. Because he had a willing audience, upset and willing to listen to whatever he, he would say. So he brought the most hateful person he could find in Stephen Miller to come threaten all the people who they are going to blame for Charlie Kirk's death.

And it was a perfect confluence of things because they knew they needed to get that message out as fast as possible. because, again, that feedback loop requires it. They require them to get that message out so that their side can then dig their claws into something that makes them rabid and makes them upset because that outrage culture is the only thing that they can cultivate. Yeah, man, and this is going to be, there's a couple of things I want to, one thing I want to speculate about,

another thing that I guess I'll also speculate about. I strongly suspect that this will be the ongoing and galvanizing message that they center their 2026 strategic midterm plans around, right? I think that that is almost certainly now the case. That has been handed to them on a silver platter. They are going to use this to fire people up to show up in turnout and the 2026 midterms that otherwise may not have been fired up to turnout. They are going to, this is like, if I was a strategist, I would say, awesome. As a strategist, this is valuable to me, right? Because I am a crass and craven opportunist.

I would be thrilled for this. Here's the thing that I also think is, and this is, again, this is Tom Curry, just speculating about stuff. So, like, don't take this as a certainty, right? That's just speculation. But I think that there's a really intentional confluence of really unnerved. statements and actions that are coming out from the administration right now. So the first thing, just to piece three things together, the first thing is J.D. Vance and Donald

Trump both came out and said, and so of other administration officials, have come out and said, hey, we are going to look into prosecute and go after groups that fund or are engaged in violent leftist ideology and tactics. That's one thing that we know is true. Another thing that we know is true is that over the last two weeks, they have shown a willingness to declare anybody that they would like to declare as a terrorist, a terrorist. Right. So who have they declared in the last two weeks as terrorists without any color of law or

operation of law or due process? People in boats from Venezuela. Yeah. And Antifa. Yeah. the other thing that they've shown is that once somebody has been declared by fiat as a terrorist

they can be executed summarily executed by the United States military those are just three facts right because they blew up they can hold you without uh like isn't it still that if you're a terrorist they can still like break some of the rules in which they hold you and question you

and all those other things too there's due process isn't the same for terrorists than it is for other people. Right. So now we are declaring leftists the subject for investigation and elimination, an elimination as an ideological force. We know that the administration is very willing to declare by fiat who is and who is not a leftist, who is and who is not a terrorist. And we know that they're willing to use the military, both as the National Guard, right? And in terms of using the full-time service members to shoot out boats, blow up boats. I don't think that it is without possibility.

In fact, I think that this is going to happen, that this is all laying the sort of legal and ideological groundwork to literally kill and attack and imprison and disappear those on the left that pose the greatest political challenge to those on the right. I don't disagree. It feels like all the pieces are in place. Well, and yesterday, like you said, he designated Antifa, a terrorist organization.

And that's why you didn't come over today is because I am the president of Antifa, which is a tough place to be because I don't think that we're a terrorist organization. I think we're anti-fascist. But as the president of Antifa, I've got to worry about that sort of thing. So I'm trying to keep certain people away just in case they come around. My garage is where all the Antifa meetings happen. And so I've got to be real careful. I do go out of my way to say what happens at Antifa Club stays at Antifa Club,

but some people don't listen. They go out and they talk about it in different places. It's a whole thing. So I've just, we've got to be careful now. We do. We do have to. Don't tell anyone I'm the president, by the way. Whoever's listening, don't tell anybody I'm the president of

Antifa. It could really be very difficult for me if you do that. And also a client. Yeah. Do I guarantee it? I guarantee it. Clark took an herb once and he had heart palpitations and diarrhea. No, it's true. I shit myself, mate. And I had a boner at the same time. In Let's Never Forget about Epstein until it's all revealed news. This story is from Reuters.

FBI Chief Cash Patel says, no credible information. Others involved in Epstein crimes. Patel faced the senators as critics question his leadership of the FBI. He was called in front of senators and they beat the shit out of him with a fucking stick.

They really did. They really did. There was an awesome part where Jasmine Crockett said to him, I just want to figure out why you're here and how we can get rid of you.

And he starts to say, but she's like, I didn't ask you a question. It's kind of amazing. And there's multiple moments where Cash Patel is trying to defend himself. And he's screaming over other people. He's so frustrated in this job. I just here's my hope, everybody.

I hope that everybody who can frustrate these people does. And it does serious damage to their health. Their mental... That's all I hope. That's... I mean, I don't have anything else right now. I feel like the guy who every day gets his underwear pulled up over his head and gets his swirling. It feels like that.

every day. But once in a while, if somebody gets to stand up for me, I feel a little good about it. And all I need is those dopamine hits. Just once in a while, I realize I'm going to get my ass kick for the next several years. But if once in a while somebody dumps the bully's books, I'm okay with it. Yeah, man. Yeah, this is watching some of the footage from Cash Patel just getting fucking roasted. Yeah. Crazy eyes. Cash. He's just got these eyes, man. I can't do it. dude, but he has these eyes. They are amazing. They're constantly like,

there is what? Do you seriously have to be the guy from fucking clockwork orange with those things in your eyes in order to fucking match how open his eyes are all the time? He looks crazy. I hope every day he wakes up and is more miserable than the day before. That's all I really care about. And I want to say, I hope that for the rest of his life, not just until he's out of like his position of power and authority,

which looks at watch won't be long. now, I don't think. They're going to throw him under the bus eventually because he is not a competent dude. I'll say this. This administration, this version of this administration seems more personnel

stable than the last iteration. Yeah, and I think that's because there isn't anybody there being like, we are going to catch a ton of heat for this. Right. Because we can't have incompetent people in these positions and then he would fire incompetent people or he would fire anybody who

pushed back before. I think, think the one thing is that nobody's pushing back. So those people aren't on the chopping block because there's no pushback. So that Tillerson guy who came in, who was his first secretary of state in his first term, that dude came in. And when Trump said something, he's like, what, you're a fucking idiot. Shut the fuck up. And then Trump's like, get out of here. I'll throw ketchup at you. And then so he ran out. And he's like, great, I didn't want to be here anyway. You're an asshole. And then he quit. And then he had to find another person. And I think that he's not experiencing any of that because they're all sick of fans. And the other thing is, you know,

is that there's nobody there who's on his ear because Stephen Miller couldn't find anybody who's competent if he had two hands and was walking around a room full of competent people and had his eyes wide open he couldn't find a single person. So he is 100% not able. And so the only person like the worm tongue in his ear

that's whispering poison, that person doesn't know what competence looks like. And there's no risk for them anymore. There's no risk that they have an incompetent person in there. I just want to stop for one second, though, and appreciate when Cash Patel was on the microphone after they found the alleged shooter of Charlie Kirk, he gets on the microphone and he says, and to Charlie Kirk, I'll keep, I'll keep the watch, brother, I'll see you in Vel. Cringes fucking thing. Like my whole body, like I think my arms and legs sucked into my torso at that moment. I was like, like, I was like one of those stretchy men that you let go and they snap back in.

Like it was one of those moments. I was like, I was like all my fucking limbs turtified and I just shot them back into my body. I cringed so hard. Is there like, like, the whole like warrior culture fucking performance shit that the right does is, so fucking embarrassing. So cringe, dude. Not in small part because they look like

the biggest fucking weenies. Yeah. Like as warriors go, I'm like, Cash Patel. Yeah. Really? Cash was coming up

to everybody's waist at this thing, too. Can you imagine like Cash Patel? He'd be like the guy who like a Viking who can't lift his battle axe. You know,

he's like, he's got a little hatchet and everybody else is sort of. His helmet's too big for his head. it keeps, like, shifting and covering his eyes. That was amazing. He's like Elmer Fudd.

Like, he's like Elmer Fudd in the Kill the Rabbit thing with the fucking, like, spear and magic helmet, like, 100%. For real. And, like, any of, like, Charlie Kirk as a warrior, he's going to, like, bear his baby teeth in defiance or whatever. Are you gumbing at me? What are you doing? Dude, until the tooth fairy gets your last tooth, I'm not afraid of you, man.

Like, are you kidding me? All right, that's going to wrap it up for this week. We'll be back with a Patriot Show on Thursday, 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-Babillon, bullshit. Couched in Scientician, Double Bubble, Toil and Trouble, pseudo-Quazi 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, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlanta, dolphins, truthers, birthers, wizards, wizards, vaccine nuts. shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your signs. Thrust your hands, bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash dissonancepod.

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