Some More News - Some More News: ... Can We Talk?

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

Hi. In today's episode, we talk about the killing of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing response, and if it's still possible for anyone to "practice politics the right way."Hosted by Cody JohnstonExecutive Producer - Katy StollDirected by Will GordhWritten by David Christopher Bell & Cody JohnstonProduced by Jonathan HarrisEdited by Gregg MellerPost-Production Supervisor / Motion Graphics & VFX - John ConwayResearcher - Marco Siler-GonzalesGraphics by Clint DeNiscoHead Writer - David Christopher BellPATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenewsMERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.comYOUTUBE MEMBERSHIP: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvlj0IzjSnNoduQF0l3VGng/join#somemorenews #CharlieKirk Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial and start selling today at https://shopify.com/morenewsPluto TV. Stream Now. Pay Never.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Can we talk anymore? I hope so. I'm at a desk after all. I've got the suit on, kind of. No pronouns, unless you like that. In which case, they're whatever ones you like the most.

In fact, let's make me a real authority. All right. Hi. Can we even talk? Is that even possible anymore? 24-hour cable news and its hyper-partisanization has seeped into all aspects of the media and internet, and more importantly, social media, which brings on a whole new set of communication problems like parisocial relationships, algorithms chasing our attention and heightening negative emotions, bad actors and partisan political operatives, isolation and atomization and tribalism exacerbated by the pandemic, bots from all kinds of places for all kinds of reasons. Misinformation from bots and humans alike, stories being forgotten too quickly, the boring culture war, all the polarization, and like it or not, a lot of our representatives, officials, media, and billionaires do discourse on specifically Twitter. And then one of those billionaires bought it and created a monetary incentive for posting and getting attention. The most attention gets you more money, you see. That'll fix it.

Oh, also another of those Twitter billionaires. is the president and has his own social media site he also communicates on. So, can we even, like, talk to each other effectively about anything, let alone a tragedy? I don't know. So, what's in the news? About three weeks ago from when this episode comes out, a teen boy in Colorado shot two classmates before killing himself. The shooter had been radicalized online by white supremacist propaganda, which is so often

the case. In fact, snoozers! School shooting is so often the case that on that same day, there was another one. The assassination of political activist and conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk while he was speaking at Utah Valley University. It's on camera. It is a horrific tragedy for his family and friends and fans. and anyone who thinks the wanton acts of gun violence in this country are a tragedy.

It's fucked up that he died like that. It's fucked up that people were there. It's fucked up that it happened when he was in the middle of talking about gun violence for like a YouTube short. It's fucked up that millions of people saw it happen on the same day there was another separate school shooting. How do we even talk about that? Can we? Kirk was, in the most unbiased news language, a right-wing libertarian influencer kind of guy, with some inflammatory opinions on various social and political issues.

He obviously did not deserve to die for those opinions, even were one to think them to be bad opinions. This divisive figure wasn't just murdered, but murdered in front of the entire internet and in graphic, disturbing detail. And then, everyone went on those horrid. horrible social media sites I described immediately and began to express their thoughts and feelings and conspiracies. Those people interacted with others who perhaps had opposing thoughts and feelings and conspiracies. This was all bad. Aside from these specific politics, there's a certain psychic damage one takes from years

of seeing these horrors happen. And with the advancement of the internet, we now have to see them vividly and live, and And everyone reacts publicly, emotionally, and in real time. And we will certainly talk about what those various reactions were. But first, although we here at Cody's Shoddy don't usually focus much on alleged shooters after tragedies for various reasons, we do need to a little bit talk about, for example, the bullets of Shoot Man in our news segment once. I'm sorry, I don't know why it's written this way. Who shot the guy with the, you know, what's up with those bullets that? the one guy shot the other guy with, and also how come?

Did the graphic at least look good? Well, that sucks. So with mass and school shootings, no matter to the specific ideology or motive, there's often this veil of terminally online meme rot with these shooters. Such was the case with the Colorado shooter, though he was also groomed by Nazis online. He seemed to have a fascination with and fondness for mass shooters, as many often do. The Christchurch shooter wrote a bunch of memes and mass shooter names on his guns, for example. They're all losers, is my point. The bullet casings found from Kirk's Killer were covered in ironic memes, though no evidence has pointed to an interest in mass shooters. If one were to believe the shooter's text containing a whole lot of details about motive and location and weapon,

quote, remember how I was engraving bullets? The fucking messages are mostly a big meme. Ultimately, it's seems like he had no concrete political ideology, like Republican or Democrat, which is often the case, even with assassinations. The guy who shot Reagan did so to impress Jody Foster. John Lennon's killer had that whole catcher in the rise stuff. Even JFK's assassins' motives are considered confusing and mysterious. There's usually a pattern of wanting fame as well,

which is why we don't use mass shooters names on this show. But like, you probably knew I was talking about Oswald there. In the case of Kirk's killer, we do have a bit of a coherent motive given. Specifically, we have those texts where the shooter is directly asked why they did it, and his reply, quote, I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can't be negotiated out. It's weird to quote the killer because I don't really like giving him attention. But those two sentences, the only stated motive he's given so far, will likely be cited for a long time. And it seems important to dig into who this person was because the right-wing and mainstream media narrative

is going to be, to put it delicately, terrifying. What all the signs point to, at least according to the texts and discord conversations that have been released, is that he was generally a political gamer kid who grew up with conservative parents. He identified his dad as being a magad dude, but didn't seem to personally regard Trump's election win with any disdain, at least not on the discord server he frequented. according to his mother, he had recently become more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented. Family members also noted he'd become more political as well. Allegedly, he was in a romantic relationship with his roommate, a trans woman, which his family

allegedly didn't know about. But we're still not certain about that detail for several reasons, and the killer hasn't been very cooperative. Not to speculate, but here, let's do it! It's easy to paint a picture of an apolitical and very online person who grew up around conservatives, felt very pent up, maybe unaccepted or attacked or suppressed for who he was, and then those frustrations manifested in a very violent, horrible way. I'm not framing that as an accusation toward anyone except the shooter, the fucking idiot. Also, people are complicated. Nobody is

just one thing. But after events like these, people tend to oversimplify it. And ultimately, for those first few days, everyone simply chose what they want to. the shooter to be. If there's a shooting at a synagogue, it is very likely to be either a white supremacist or a radical Muslim. If it is a shooting of a Republican politician, it is very likely to be a trans-antifa Marxist shooter. That is just not true.

We don't know. We don't know what this kid is. Thanks, Ben, I really needed that. So if it is the shooting of a Republican politician, it is very likely to be a trans-Antifa Marxist shooter. That's a direct quote from this shooting expert. And I'd really like to know what he's basing that on. Was Reagan shot by a trans-antifa Marxist?

Or hey, remember when someone took a shot at Trump? Boy, this country's fucked, I completely forgot about that. It turns out that shooter was actually closer to being conservative. Not saying he was, mind you, but people who knew him said he was. And then later, they found a social media account of his that was filled with anti-Semitic and anti-immigration comments. He seemed to have a wide range of potential targets, from Trump to generally the DNC to Kate Middleton.

He chose Trump because he was in town that day. Point is that I have no idea who Ben is referring to here. Which trans-antifa slash Marxist fits his pattern? The only other example of a Republican politician being shot or being the victim of political violence is Steve Scalise in 2017. That shooter was left-wing. Also, a guy planned to shoot Brett Kavanaugh in 2022. So literally just like one and a half examples from Ben, I guess.

Literally all of the other targets are Democrats, dog. It sure seems like Ben is simply using the moment to point fingers at this blur of words he associates with his political rivals. A mirage he wants to broadcast to everybody of the violent left. You can see this tactic in stark detail in this old clip of current Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy. Here he mentions former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, a mass shooting survivor who was shot by an anti-government, generally apolitical conspiracy theorist who didn't think women should be in positions of power. Maybe you can throw another one. I mean, look at Gabby Giffords, the Marxist, the Marxist who took her life, a leftist guy.

Victim not dead, shoot her not a Marxist. Get used to that. It's lies, it's propaganda. Like what a propagandist or liar might do. More on that later. But first, here's something I need to get out, something extremely important. Everything I just said about Ben or Duff's is quite similar to stuff I've almost certainly said about Charlie Kirk in the past. We've done videos calling him a liar and a propagandist and almost definitely a racist, as we have for a lot of these right-wing pundits seemingly in his circle. And the reason we've done that has always been so that you, the person watching, can see and show specifically how these people are incredibly unserious and to change your or someone else's mind about them. And yes, sometimes we'll use the word fascist.

Vice podcaster J.D. Vance wants to know why, though. What is it that you want people to do when you call them Nazis? What is it that you want them to do when you call them fascists? What is the proper response? When you say that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and Charlie Kirk are threatening your safety, what do you expect people to do? I will answer that with sentences, but first, a question answer for J.D. What does your boss mean?

American politics today is between these far-left fascists, led by Harris and her group. We have a fascist person running who's incompetent. She's a Marxist, communist, fascist. She's not actually a socialist. She's gone past that. Somebody's got to explain this one. There's a radical left Marxist, communist, fascist.

There is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. It is the enemy from within, and they're very dangerous. They're Marxists and communists and fascists. They've done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within. This is communist, this is Marxist, this is fascist. It's the enemy from within. That's a bigger enemy than China and Russia. She's a Marxist. She's a fascist. If Comrade Kamala Harris gets four more years, you will be living. a full-blown banana republic ruled by an anarchy and a tyranny. They're scum.

They're scum. And they want to take down our country. They are absolute garbage. He called half the country fascists on the 4th of July in one of those clips. But obviously, hypocrisy doesn't matter to these guys. They're fascists. So my sentence answer is, we don't use the word fascist because we wish harm on anybody.

We use it because words mean things. And as we have explained before, and we'll explain in more detail later, it is the correct word for Donald Trump and the movement around him. And we want people to understand that. We do not wish harm on any of them. Some of them are in my band. That's what I'm getting at. I actually don't feel like we need to defend ourselves here, but it's worth noting this in order to talk about why Charlie Kirk's murder was so horrifying and wrong. I don't think he did politics the right way or whatever the hell, but the correct response to someone using hate speech or spouting propaganda is to either walk away from that person, call them a dipshit, make fun of

them, or demand accountability for what they are saying. Proper accountability, not a death sentence. So in response to the shooter's alleged reason that some hate can't be negotiated out, I would say that first of all, shut up, you stupid kid. You just assassinated a guy in front of hundreds of people, you don't know shit. But even if you feel that way about someone, murder still isn't the answer. Forgive my language, but it's literally overkill. Because yes, I also suspect that these people have no intention of actually changing their minds, no matter how much they act like it, because they're not there for conversation. But the real goal here is to change the minds of the people listening to them. That's the whole reason we cover them on this show. And boy, you know what won't change other

people's minds. Killing their favorite guy. Also, murder is wrong and stuff. It is bad to think that what happened was good or should happen. And as anyone using the word fascist thoughtfully would know, fascists love to use any pretext of violence against them as an excuse to crack down on their opposition and tighten their grip. Again, more on that later. But in fact, another reason we on the show criticize people like Kirk is because we believe their opinions are antithetical to our beliefs that everyone deserves to live happily and with dignity. That has always included the people we dislike. You can't believe that and kill someone for their opinion.

Charlie Kirk was a human with a wife and kids and people who loved him. Everyone except maybe Donald Trump has the potential to change and grow and evolve and give to the world, even Kirk. But this shooter has denied him that opportunity. Predetermined that Kirk could never evolve or grow as a person and be able to like, whoops, my bad. And nobody should be allowed to needlessly take that away, to tear such a deep, dark hole in so many lives. Again, I feel like our audience probably knows this already, but it's worth saying, especially before we get into the reality of who Charlie Kirk was,

or rather who Charlie Kirk was to some of the public. As I said before, nobody is just one thing, except for Carrotop. He's just that one thing. But with Kirk, we saw that the the internet actually had two very different versions of him. I think it's important to describe them both. And to start with conservatives, Kirk has been portrayed as a good man who valued free speech and debate, who was killed for those beliefs. And there are videos out there showing little moments of this version of him. Here's one. Who's your favorite live action Batman? Favorite live action Batman? Yeah, I'm stuck between Keaton and Bale. Oh, Bale. Yeah, me too, Bail. We agree.

That's where we are on different planets. And that's okay. I'm not trying to make fun of you. I'm trying to be graceful in the way that we're going about this. I can see your point. I can see that men do have more testosterone. Oh, okay. That's what I'm saying.

Hello, Charlie. What's your name? None of your business, unfortunately. Nice to meet you, none your business. Thank you. I appreciate it. Now, obviously that's just these quick clips of him out of context. Here's a little more nuanced one of him asking a queer student about that word.

Queer. I totally agree. a dumb question. Yeah. When I grew up calling someone queer was like a slur. Can you tell me what that means? I mean that sincerely. And how is it different than just saying you're lesbian or bisexual or gay? So it can be different for everyone because gender, sexuality, it's a spectrum just like anything else. And for me, personally, I like everyone. But what does queer mean, though? Queer. It's just a label. What does the label mean?

It's, so it's different for everyone. Okay. No, I know, but that doesn't... I hear people going, oh, my God. No, I just want a definition. I mean, I'm not trying to put you as a trap, though. I mean this, because when I grew up, if I called somebody queer, I'd get in trouble. Just give me, like, a working definition.

The video keeps going and seems to be Kirk asking, in good faith, to define that word and how the definition progressed. It honestly gets a little frustrating as it goes, because the person answering it doesn't seem sure of their definition, perhaps a symptom of only debating college students. And I can't speak for the queer community, even though they gave me that cool plaque. But I think the word queer is a catch-all term for the spectrum of the LGBTQ community, kind of reclaiming the word from the days when Charlie would, by his own admission, use it to bully queer people. As I keep saying, nobody is just one thing. And that's why we have broader terms like that.

But anyway, there are a bunch of clips like this of Kirk engaging with people or sharing jokes, people thanking him for helping them in some way, or finding Jesus or whatever. It's all subjective because, again, nobody is just one thing. So ultimately, all I can really do is show a clip of Charlie Kirk expressing an opinion that I personally agree with him about. Revenge of the Sith is the best Star Wars movie of all time. Yeah! Yeah! You think that's the best Star Wars movie? I'm going to die on this hill.

The original Star Wars is way better than anything so. I'm sorry. I'm gonna die on this hill. I think that you just like the prequels because of the nostalgia. I like the nostalgia, also, the acting is better, the story is better, it's firmer. The first ever star was, considering when it was made, you wanna talk about the most advanced CGI, the fact that they had those kind of graphics back in like, I think it's 1978, it came out, 77? Well, you guys really know your stuff.

Did that college kid just call the original Star Wars movies the prequels? Fuck that! Get him, Chuck! Tell that kid how wrong he is! So Charlie Kirk was a Star Wars fan. Father, husband, probably a nice guy if he was speaking to you, at least in a public setting, he didn't deserve to die. And his murder was sudden and shocking and very public.

And for his fans and friends, it was extremely upsetting. And it's good to feel empathy toward those people and what they are going through. And we certainly would expect the media to handle this with care. But we don't need to pretend. that he was just this nice guy who simply wanted to talk to people. He also has a legacy of propaganda and bigotry that he devoted his career to, all the way to his death, when he was shot while in the middle of implying that trans people were responsible

for a disproportionate number of mass shootings before also implying that high mass shooting numbers are due to gang violence. His last words were in response to someone asking him how many trans shooters there were in America. Charlie responding too many, and then the guy he was talking to pointing out that there's only been five. In reality, that number might actually be lower. He then asks Kirk if he knows how many mass shootings have happened in America in the last 10 years. Charlie responds, counting or not counting gang violence, and is then killed.

And I guess to answer that, 81-ish, maybe? It weirdly depends on where you look and how things are categorized. As for the number of trans shooters during that time, like three or four. Again, it weirdly depends. According to the Violence Prevention Project, less than 1% of mass shooters have been trans, because it's only been a couple to a few. This is all to say that, in his final moments, Charlie Kirk was in the middle of lying. He was in the middle of trying to exaggerate the severity and frequency of trans shooters

and downplay gun violence while throwing in a racist dog witch. about gang violence, and then was shot by a gun. And you can't look away from that fact. You can't ignore it. It's an important part of his life. Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. I'm sorry that he did. But you can't ignore that he spent his entire public life

advocating for beliefs and politicians designed to harm or even kill other people. When history looks back on him, that will likely be his legacy, along with being cynically used as a political market, by a pack of fascist jackals. And that's sad. He didn't have more time to be like,

oh, whoops, sorry about that stuff I said and that all these people around me are kind of evil. He could have put such better things into the world, but he chose to say stuff like this instead. If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Katanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called the racist.

But now they're coming out. But now they're coming out and they're saying it for us. They're coming out and they're saying, I'm only here because of affirmative action. Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person slot to go be taken somewhat seriously. Now, you can pretend that Kirk was only talking about those specific women and not all black women,

but the implication is clear. It's why he says he gets nervous when there are black pilots. In fact, one could say that his point over and over has been that he doesn't trust black people to be in positions of power, perhaps related to being a conservative high school student and fan of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh right when Barack Obama became president, but who knows? The point is, claiming he said black women don't have the brain processing power to be taken seriously is slightly paraphrasing, but the meaning remains, regardless of what Kirk's friend and the vice president might say.

The writer accuses Charlie of saying, and I quote, black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously. But if you go and watch the clip, the very clip she links to, you realize he never said anything like that. He never uttered those words. Well, he did say something like that, J.D. He did say most of those words. Instead of saying all black women, he simply talked about several prominent black women, for some reason. Black women who happen to be given more opportunity

that they were historically denied, which are the exact kind of compensatory measures supported by Kirk's nemesis, I guess, Martin Luther King Jr. Additionally, J.D. Vance himself was a DEI hire, so maybe he doesn't have the brain processing power to correctly interpret words, or he's a liar. A liar lying to spread a racist lie about DEI programs

were getting off track. Kirk did say racist things. is what we're pointing out. Not only racist things, but he did. A bunch of slimy, white supremacist stuff couched in mild civility and plausible deniability. That's why people are calling him these things. We're not going to play all the clips. They take too long to unpack and explain. But Kirk has absolutely said that he thought the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, I guess because he believed it as being abused and fuels anti-white racism. You can claim he's a moderate, but he himself called that view radical and not in a pizza turtle way. His general demeanor in these clips is callous and

trolly and racist. He showed very little empathy during his career to the point that he said empathy is fake and bad and useless, also saying that gun deaths are worth the price of the Second Amendment and calling for the public execution of the president and making light of and spreading conspiracies about violence against his political opposition. Why is the Republican Party? Why is the conservative movement to blame for gay schizophrenic nudists that are hemp jewelry makers breaking into somebody's home or maybe not breaking into somebody's home. Why are we to blame for that exactly? And why is he still in jail?

Why has he not been bailed out? By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out. I bet his bail's like 30 or 40,000 bucks. This was the side of Charlie Kirk a lot of people saw, not just on the left. Yes, a lot of conservatives and Christians appreciated his conservative activism and Christian advocacy. But he wasn't actually popular or even as well known as people think or have implied. As of this past spring, nearly half of people under 30 had never even heard of him.

According to a poll from days after his killing, only 24% of adults under 30 had a somewhat or very favorable view of him. Apparently on campus, he was well known, but 70% of college students disagreed with his views. His actual fans were much older, with 43% of 65 and up having favorable views of him. He's a boomer guy. It makes sense. He's paid for by a bunch of wealthy conservative boomers for maybe a little bit of a racist boomer to watch, you know, who thinks this about Martin Luther King, Jr. But I can say declaratively, this guy is not worthy of a national holiday. He is not worthy of godlike status.

In fact, I think it's really harmful. See, that's not a very popular position, actually. The fact that he's so seemingly despised MLK for both his message and who he was makes the MLK comparisons that much more disgusting. But the point is, he was a dime store shock jock with a weird amount of political importance and involvement, a 17-year-old Glenn Beck fan who came of age while being a part of the world of partisan political punditry. Really he cared about the deficit too, apparently.

but, you know, I'm sure Trump and the GOP will get right on that. Any day now. Kirk could be cruel and racist, and he ran a propaganda machine designed specifically to benefit the rich people who funded it. And that wasn't a secret. Listen to Vice President J.D. Vance eulogize him. He was a critical part of getting Donald Trump elected as president, getting me elected as vice president.

And so much of our success over the last seven months is due to his efforts, his staffing, his support in his friendship. I don't think that I'm alone in saying that Charlie was the smartest political operative I ever met. A political operative who Vance personally credits with getting him and Trump elected. That isn't just a podcaster. That isn't a free speech advocate. That's the reality of who Charlie Kirk was. And it, for whatever reason, makes some people uncomfortable. This discomfort is expressed with phrases, he was just a guy willing to talk. He just had different opinions, and perhaps the most absurd, he was just a podcaster. They hate him like they hate you. They'll celebrate your murder too, just for having different opinions. Their friends,

their family, their neighbors, that's how evil they are. And it's like, okay, calm down there. By the vice president's own admission, Charlie Kirk was a political tool used by the Republican party, which currently runs the entire government. That's not a justification for violence against him, but rather it's pushing back on the idea that Charlie Kirk was just some guy who simply wanted healthy, honest debate in the marketplace of ideas. Because more specifically, Charles Entertainment Kirk was a political operative and partisan propagandist funded by wealthy right-wing codgers ever since he was a teenager. When he was 18, a 70-year-old businessman named Bill Montgomery saw him speak at a college, told him

not to go to college and gave him a bunch of money to start Turning Point USA to do pro-business propaganda at college students. To quote one of TPUSA's early donors, I was hearing my kids coming home with negativity toward free enterprise and positivity toward more regulation and economic controls. Charlie starts telling me his vision on how he wants to educate kids on why big government is dangerous and why free enterprise is one of the greatest systems ever devise. An early volunteer and eventual employees said they tried to talk about issues young people cared about, surveillance, and free speech, in order to get them interested so they could then be introduced to free market pro-business principles. Propaganda

Over the years of building his conservative political activism organization, Kirk was funded by millionaires like Foster Freeze. One of the T.P. USA board members would be Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' wife, and a key advisor would be the president and CEO of an oil lobbying firm. One of TurningPoint's big projects is Professor Watch List, a McCarthyite free speech-chilling website that targets whomever they deem radical or anti-American, et cetera. As Turning Point and Kirk's profiles grew, he became so integrated into the Republican Party and government that he and his organization were partially blamed by Trump insiders

as the reason for Trump's 2020 loss, having worked closely with Trump's then senior advisor and now still son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Though Trump's loss was probably due to many other things, perhaps Kirk still felt guilty, which is why he proudly announced that he was sending 80 buses full of people to Trump's Stop the Steel rally slash attempted coup. Kirk remained so integrated in the government that in his own words, he's the one who pushed for J.D. Vance to be the VP pick. I assume because of his friend Peter Thiel, who I hear is really concerned about surveillance,

you know, issues young people care about. Kirk was so integrated in the government that when he was debating someone and they said that they were called the N-word and threatened on several occasions by MAGA guys on campus, Charlie told them he didn't believe them, and they were lying because they didn't report it to anybody, and then he yelled at them and said they had to prove it by going to the authorities right then, which he would personally do because he's friends with their governor and senator. I think you're completely making this whole thing up. I think you are a complete liar because I'm now giving you an opportunity to report this at the high.

I will bring this to Linda McMahon, the head of the Department of Education, the federal government. I will make sure these people are arrested by Cash Patel, the head of the FBI. And you'll say, oh, I'll think about it. Because you're making this up. I'm now going to go to the University of Tennessee and tweet this and say, hey, this is a serious accusation. I want the governor to get involved, by the way. The governor is getting involved. I'm going to call Marsha Blackburn.

I'm now going to call Big Haggerty. I know all these people, and we're going to find out really quickly if you're telling the truth or not. I don't know if that student was telling the truth or not, but it's notable that instead of engaging with the premise, Kirk just said, n'uh, and wielded his bizarrely immense political power like a cudgel during a civil debate, mocking him with it, threatening him. In fact, this is going to become a very big issue. We're going to put this on social media because nowhere in America should you be allowed,

to go in front of a microphone with no evidence, no willingness to report, no likelihood to talk to police and say, oh, this happened to be at night and ruin the reputation of half the country. Yeah, you can't just lie about half the country. Not like my good friends, the president and vice president of the country. None of this is to justify the horror, obviously. We've made that clear. I'm saying it too much. But just a podcaster?

They hate him for having you or your neighbor's opinions. Get real. He went around college campuses with the goal of indoctrination into one specific political philosophy and party, not to actually have a debate, but to get dunk clips to post on social media, a practice that amplifies the most extreme rhetoric in order to get attention. It's not good faith, it's not conversation, it's live propaganda to get a clip. That is what he did. I'm not even saying that as an insult.

That's just what he was. And he did not deserve to die for that. but there are a lot of people, perhaps LGBTQ people, or people of color, or just people who aren't going to mourn him. And in fact, might callously celebrate it the same way people celebrated when someone like Anita Bryant or Rush Limbaugh dies. Of course, those people weren't shot in the throat on camera for everyone to see. It's so fucked up that that happened. Unfortunately, we've normalized posting, rest and piss, Henry Kissinger, piss person. We've normalized frequent gun violence specifically at schools. We've normalized joking about tragedies from a distance via the internet.

People like Kirk and his friend, the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., have normalized joking about and dismissing targeted political violence. Political activists and propagandists and politicians are almost definitionally divisive these days. So they're not going to be mourned by everybody or mourned in the same way as everybody, especially on the already negative and disconnected space that social media can be. The bots, the misinformation, all that stuff I mentioned at the beginning, everything happening instantly with everybody at once. In other words, Everything's a computer. Exactly, sir. It's such a huge part of the problem. We can't be normal anymore. And not in the This is Not Normal 2017 Lib way, although that is still a serious problem.

All the Trump stuff is not normal. Look it up. It's bad. But what I mean is, we can't like talk normal with each other anymore. I'm specifically talking about how so much of public communication these days is the exchanging of content and dunks and people posting immediate thoughts in real time. Discourse between much of the political and business and media class happens on Twitter. People post on TikTok or Instagram. They live stream in real time. People comment, et cetera. You know, you've been. It all happens right away. Today, you might have a bad or stupid opinion and post it for literally any and everybody to see as soon as you think of it. But in the before times, you might first tell your friend or a family member, maybe to a table

full of people. They'd say, that's silly, or I agree, or that opinion makes me feel angry or hurt, and you would talk about it a little bit. If a public figure was shot, you'd read about it in the news, and maybe you'd make a crass comment or tasteless joke, and your sweetie would say, Oh, Harold, you can't say stuff like that. Maybe the next day you'd comment still. Horrible thing to happen to a guy. You'd see on the news an interview with the shooter's family member, and your neighbor would be like, oh yeah, I saw that too.

We have a shared reality. Now, however, it's everybody at once right away. A disturbingly normalized but horrific thing happened to a divisive figure, and it was caught on camera and ostensibly live streamed, And then social media happened. With all its negative effects and bad actors and disconnection and heightened emotions and harmful incentives at once, at each other,

past each other, callously, it's just a screen after all. Nobody can be normal anymore. We can't talk normally on the platforms that incentivize attention, sensationalism, misinformation, and negativity. And in this case, it's the assassination of someone who was born born of our warped political and internet culture and who helped shape it.

Everyone who was aware of him or engaged in politics the way he did had a paris social relationship with him, whether it be negative or positive. For some people, it was even a spiritual relationship. For others, it was just from seeing Kirk's channel full of videos about him destroying or owning the lefty queers or whatever. Nobody gets to process or grieve properly when something fucked up happens. Discourse is fried. Everyone hates each other. And unfortunately, some of the people who struggle the most with all of this are in the current regime. Some were allegedly this guy's best buddy. And instead of mourning properly or being normal, they're scrolling and seeing all the mean things everyone's posting. And what I'm really trying to say here

is, what a horrific thing to happen. If you knew or liked or even loved Charlie, you have my sympathy. And even if you don't want it, my empathy. I'm sorry a bunch of people online said your friend sucked. But that doesn't mean you get to kill everybody, you guys. Like, oh, slow down there, all right? Okay, well, we are going to come back and we'll talk about the very normal reaction from the Republican Party and media and government. Important note, all advertisers for this episode agree with every single thing we've said so far, We'll say. Hi, everyone.

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Something that I've never tried before. Hmm. It could be a bearded white man. Okay. The possibilities are endless. Shopify.com slash more news. Welcome back to our advertisers present Cody's thoughts on that political assassination. We were talking about fucked up things, so let's keep that going.

After the controversial figure Charlie Kirk was shot on camera for everybody to see, some people online said some nasty things about it. So in response, there's like this. weird, forced national mandate that everyone has to grieve Charlie Kirk, a guy that only a little over 50% of people were even somewhat familiar with. It's gotten weird and dark. They're proposing a statue for him in Florida. Look at it. Look at the AI slop. He's got a fucking mic in his hand and he can sit down and debate him, I guess. In fact, a bill in Oklahoma wants to force every college campus to have these statues. Also in Oklahoma, they're going to start integrating Turning Point

USA chapters into all high schools in the state. So like an explicit right-wing political activist group and ideological witch hunter that encourages a culture of hyperpartisan online punditry and has close ties to multiple arms and key figures of the U.S. government in all high schools in Oklahoma. Why not just play Prager U. videos too? Oh, they do that too specifically in Oklahoma? Weird. But the NFL, you see, the NFL, they must pay tribute, or else! A Washington Post columnist was fired for simply posting Charlie Kirk's own words, and according to the letter she received, it was actually because she did anti-white discrimination against him?

What? You are apparently not allowed to just say, objectively, who Charlie Kirk was. Heck, you can't even mention that fascism exists, I guess, as the Uber online freaks will accuse you of actually talking about Charlie Kirk. Bethesda posted a game screenshot mentioning fascists from their Indiana Jones game, and this quartering guy assumes it refers to Kirk, which is telling. Meanwhile, he and all the right-wing blue check slop accounts are saying they're radicalized, and Charlie was the moderate, so prepare for something worse,

and the left calling them Nazis is a self-fulfilling prophecy? So, is it okay to use the word fascist then now? What else is that quartering guy up to, by the way? Oh, well, here's the attention you wanted, I guess. Am I allowed to call you racist yet? Good Lord. They are doxing people. Randos online are harassing any business that doesn't fly their flag half-mast.

They've gone far beyond looking for people saying mean things, but rather anyone not treating this like a national tragedy. In a way, it is. We're a tragic, violent country. But in this case, the tragedy has to be about Kirk the Great Man specifically. Most people would compare this to cancel culture. It's fun to throw that back at conservatives, but it's not that. Do not make the mistake of comparing it to that.

Aside from the fact that accusations of hypocrisy don't work on them because they're fascists, this is not canceled culture, which is already barely a thing. It's a government-sanctioned purge. So when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out in hell, call their employer. That's the vice president co-guest hosting his martyrs podcast with his other fascist propagandists, one of whom claimed to be attacked by a literal demon, telling everybody in the nation, and if we're including people like Ian Miles Chong, the world, that cancel culture

is real and good, and everybody should do it about this one thing, this one thing about my friend, who was pretty controversial and not actually popular, and who incidentally was integrated into and supportive of my administration. So it's time to do the thing that our president calls totalitarianism. One of their political weapons is cancel culture, driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism. Great try, sir.

Things are so abnormal that in the wake of Kirk's death, a bunch of people, including veteran political operatives, got together to make a doxing and harassment website called Charlie's Murderers. This is not to be confused with a doxing app that has since leaked its users' data. Charlie's murderers claim to expose Charlie's murderers, like the employees or students who are

supporting political violence online and celebrating Charlie's murder. I'm going to read to you the very first example, they had at the top of their website. This is a post from someone named Rachel, one of Charlie's murderers, apparently. Here's what one of Charlie's murderers had to say. Terrified to think of how far-right fans of Kirk, aching for more violence,

could very well turn this into an even more radicalizing moment. Will they now believe their fears have been proven right and feel they have a right to retaliate regardless of who actually was behind the initial shooting? Wow, good point. She, quote, tweeted her initial post, adding, I don't believe violence is ever the answer. It just makes everything worse.

That was my point with this post. I don't want to live in a world where this is how we resolve disagreements. This event risks bringing that world closer to reality. I hope Charlie survives. End of quote. From one of Charlie's murderers supporting political violence and celebrating Charlie's murder, if that doesn't give the whole thing away, I don't know what does.

That was their first example. They are purposefully conflating any criticism or in many cases defense of Charlie with the actions of the one guy who murdered him. It's so dangerous and fucked up and as we'll discuss a little later, it's a tactic used by the current administration. Side note, that site has since taken down

all of their posts and changed the name to the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation on account of, we have to assume, not wanting to get sued into oblivion. Meanwhile, it's not just a government-sanctioned purge, it's a government purge. Jimmy Kimmel was pulled off the air for making extremely light and expected comments about how the administration reacted to Kirk's death. You may see people lie and claim that Kimmel said anything about Kirk himself, which he did not, or that he said the shooter was Maga, which he did not.

He correctly stated that many in Maga World, and in fact, King Maga himself, immediately tried to prove the shooter was a radical trans-lefty and not a right-winger. Regardless, this too wasn't cancel culture. There wasn't a huge mob of people demanding he get fired. There wasn't even really time for people to get outraged. Since then, Kimmel has been brought back on the air, which changes nothing about the reason he was suspended in the first place. And that reason is this. But frankly, when you see stuff like this, I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or, you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.

That's our FCC chair, Brendan Carr, threatening to revoke ABC's license if it didn't pull the show off the air because he personally didn't like the thing he said. People can say it doesn't matter because he got back on the air or because his ratings were bad or because it was the private company's decision to make. make, or in our vice president's case, I, look, I want to answer your question in good faith. What people will say is, well, you know, didn't the FCC commissioner put a tweet out that said something bad? Well, compare that, the FCC commissioner making a joke on social media, what is the government action that the Trump administration has engaged in to kick Jimmy Kimmel or anybody else off the air?

Zero. What government pressure have we brought to bear to tell people that they're not allowed to speak their mind? zero. We believe in free speech in the Trump administration. We are fighting every single day to protect it. In good faith, a lie. I just showed the clip. It wasn't a joke or a post. It was him seriously saying it out loud on camera. Also, in response to ABC, putting Kimmel back on TV, the president posted, okay, well, in that case, I'll just sue you. There is now a, dare I say, witch hunt against any teachers or public servants, pilots, or just any employee who didn't pass this test.

Some of it is legal, some is not. And like, sure, if someone says something that upsets a lot of people, I can see those people getting worked up and calling for them to lose their job. It happens. But we're seeing the vice president flat out encourage people to go out and hunt for anyone making light of this event. Or, in some cases, to simply report the reality of who Charlie Kirk was. There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination.

And there is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers, who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father, deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words with which they disagree. Now, you might be wondering what article J.D. is referring to there. From what I can tell, it's one of the articles put out by the nation after. Kirk's assassination. Probably this one, which is specifically in response to all the people bending over backwards to honor or whitewash Kirk right after his death. If you're wondering, it does not say he deserved to be shot. But you know this because you know J.D. Vance is only a liar. The quote actually says the opposite. So instead of an only a liar now, like J.D. Vance, the vice president, if I were to directly quote the exact quote, the quote would be,

I do not believe anyone should be murdered because of their views, but that is because I don't believe people should be murdered generally, regardless of who they are or what they've done. It also talks about all the horrible things Charlie Kirk said and supported. It's not nice to Kirk, but it's not terrorism. It's not justifying anything. It's saying he wasn't perfect or harmless. The article is just the writer reminding people of stuff Kirk said.

This is why we've gone beyond. canceled culture here, because here's the next thing J.D. Vance says. Did you know that the George Soros Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie's death, do you know they benefit from generous tax treatment? They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer, and how do they reward us by setting fire to the house built by the American family over 250 years? Soros, of Coros. It was the guy you already hated all along.

When I say that this goes beyond cancel culture and that this is a government purge, it's because there was a right-wing effort to immediately use Kirk's death as a reason to justify any actions against their opponents, even though there's currently still zero evidence the shooter was associated with some kind of Antifa terror network or Act Blue assassination Webb

or any left-wing group. the president and his toady, Stephen Miller, are still going to go after whatever they define as a left-wing group. For so many pundits and politicians, many I assumed were like friends with Kirk who should probably be taking time to mourn him. There was instead an immediate call for war. A holy war, really, a desperate attempt to make the shooter trans from the moment the news of his death spread, aided by the mainstream press. The Wall Street. Street Journal reported falsely that there was transgender ideology on the bullet casings, which turned out to just be meme shit. Bad job. Stephen Crowder was scooping this as well,

because of course he was. Jimmy Kimmel was right, you see. And after this, it really didn't matter who the shooter was or how nuanced his background was. It didn't matter that he grew up around guns, or was white, or had maga parents, or was in Mormon country. He will be defined by one detail, that he allegedly had a relationship with an allegedly trans person, because they really, really want to justify the bad shit they are doing and will do to specifically transgender people. So this one person being in a relationship with a trans person is all they need. This shit ends. Like, enough is enough. And now I have to deal with real safety concerns. it sounds like the shooter was a tch-a-kney or pro-ch-ch-de-and just because I want to protect women

that I'm worried about getting murdered. Are you fucking kidding me? This is, it's out of control and enough is enough. Jesus. Fucking Christ. That's Nancy Mace and elected official. Is she going to lose her job or nah? This is the horror that's unfolding before our eyes, politicians and pundits who hate trans people, grasping at any excuse to fuel and accelerate that hate. They were already doing this before Kirk was shot, but it became incredibly blatant in the immediate aftermath. Just take a look at self-proclaimed theocratic fascist Matt Walsh's tweets. See Trump saying they're looking at trans-terrorism. See the FBI looking to add gender ideology extremist to their nihilistic violent extremism category. After years, years of ignoring

ignoring white supremacists, shooting up churches and mosques, ignoring years of hate speech, they are now going to start cracking down on what they will call extremist ideology and hate speech. There's free speech and then there's hate speech. And there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society. We will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything. and that's across the aisle. So, firstly, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. We can discuss how to address hate speech and private companies can do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But it is protected from the government by the First Amendment. I'm almost certain that when Pam says this... Anything. And that's across the aisle. She's lying, right? Across the aisle. Pam! Can I call you, Pam? Are you going to investigate hate speech like saying we should just kill homeless people? What about the Nazis on Elon Musk's Nazi website?

What about Elon Musk's little gesture that he did twice? Or all the other stuff he's said over the years? Or how about a United States representative using a goddamn slur multiple times in and out of Congress? Did anyone show Pam that video of Nancy Mace? What about, I don't know, everything that was said during Trump's Madison Square Garden rally last year? How about when the former president accused immigrants of eating cats and dogs in order to specifically incite hate against them? They're eating the dogs, the people they're eating the dogs, the people they're. came in, they're eating the cats,

they're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there. That sure is hate speech. I mean, we all know how many examples I could be giving here. We'll put some up on screen for now, but of course, there are many examples of Republicans or conservative pundits or the president calling individuals or groups

or political parties terrorists or satanic or fascists or et cetera. In fact, we already showed you earlier, so real quick, Let's show you this. The left calls Trump a hate monger. They have called me a hate monger because I ridicule the left.

I ridicule protesters. I ridicule academia, Hollywood, the news media. I make fun of the view every day. I make fun of the U.N. Guess what? No one acts on the things that I say because my side doesn't do that. We say people are stupid.

We say people are wrong, but we don't say they're evil. That is your game. followed by this. It was placed there by your clan, your evil clan. It's all one tangled web of evil. And the Dems, they chose evil. That means that all those pardons that he gave

to some very bad people, very unpatriotic people, very evil people. Grossly incompetent and evil bad people, too. These people are evil people. They are very evil, very sick people of that group. There were some brilliant people, but they're evil people, and they're going to be brought down. You know, they're evil.

There are a lot of evil people. I don't know who you are, but only a very evil person would ask a question like that. Now they see how bad these people, they're evil, they're sick. They're evil people in many ways, but they stick together. Somewhat evil, and in some cases, very evil people. He's either evil or stupid, and either is really not acceptable. Oops! Stephen Miller, who will have an entire episode about next week, actually like and subscribe,

is whine screaming about the violent rhetoric from the left that calls Trump and him fascist and all that. Well, let's see what Miller has to say about the Democratic Party. It is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization. Double oops. These people suck and are liars.

In fact, since we're living in an absurd parody of tragedy, let's hear the president be as literal. as possible. He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent. And I don't want the best for them. I'm sorry. I am sorry, Erica. Hate, speech, or like a really great joke for the memorial or whatever, demonizing their opponents, normalizing hate against them. And so ultimately, what they will actually be doing is targeting speech they decide is hate speech or bad speech. Trump has already called too much negative coverage of him illegal, so that, and they'll go after, you know, lefty stuff that hurts their feelings. We know that

because they are specifically saying they will target liberal groups. That's actually what they want. Trump is trying to designate Antifa a terrorist group, despite that being a broad ideology and not an organized group, not to mention there being no legal way to label a domestic group as terrorists. In other words, the same way he decided that suspected drug smugglers were terrorists, he's doing the same with this. And this is very important to think about, how has he been using the terrorism label so far? We did a whole episode about ICE and how they have been detaining and jailing anyone who even,

no joke, appears in photos with suspected gang members, who he, now labels as terrorists. He has bombed at least three, maybe four boats that were suspected of smuggling drugs, a war crime. What do you think is the line he won't cross? It's zero lines, right? And I was talking to Secretary Hague, Seth, and you know what he said? He said, you know what, Mr. Vice President, we don't see any of these drug boats coming into our country. They've completely stopped. And I said, I know why. I would stop too. Hell, I wouldn't go fishing right now. And area of the world. Okay, so the line is apparently not joke about all the innocent fishermen we probably blew up. Cool, truly civil. The civility of joking about

violence they are themselves committing. Of course, it's okay because the fishermen aren't personal friends with J.D. Vance. He and they are willing to go as far as people let them. I can't stress this enough. They 100% do not give a shit about Charlie Kirk. I mean, this This guy definitely doesn't care. How are you holding up for the last thing to have to? I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the Trumps.

They just started construction of the new borough for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years. And it's going to be a beauty. It'll be an absolute magnificent. I'm sure a lot of his friends and family are mourning him. But for the people in charge, these Trump freaks, the fucking DOJ, they don't care. They don't care. who killed him, but they do care that they can use him as their martyr and cudgel against

their political enemies, i.e. half the country. Everybody has to praise Charlie Kirk or they're fired. See? Meanwhile, the president is saying, it's a time of healing, it's a time of whatever, and using Charlie's memorial to brag about tariffs and say he hates his opponents. Did he do his tight five about toilet water pressure? They don't care why. They simply see this as an opportunity to do the bad shit they already wanted to do. But the last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. That was the last message that he sent me.

Aww, how touching! It's like how my grandma told me on her deathbed that I get to stay up all night playing video games. I have to stress this. They do not care about Charlie. If they could, they wouldn't bring him back. They like this because it allows them to accelerate the plan they already had. It's just like what happened with Kimmel. They suspended him because of the FCC chair's threats after Kimmel's Charlie Kirk comments. The FCC chair publicly responded to a tweet about how this was all a part of Project

2025, with confirmation because the FCC chair literally wrote the FCC section of Project 2025. They've got their plans and their enemies, and they're going to do it no matter what. Now, they just have an extra tool in their box. Anything to conflate their targets with one guy who did a murder. You may have noticed that much of the right wing has been using a specific pronoun lately. Normally, they would fear the pronoun, but here it's useful. And that pronoun is they. I'm sure you've seen the tweets, the statements, all of it, claims that you shot Charlie. They did this from public figures, from elected officials, from random right-wing blue checks. It's part of the tactic. Literally, they'll say leftists shot Charlie and then made

fun of him for it. Excuse me, kind citizen, but that's actually different people. Here's a freak saying David Pacman did it. Here's a freak saying the worst mistake the left has ever made was assassinating Charlie Kirk. They didn't do that freak. It's all over the place from random and politicians. Here's Elon saying, they killed Charlie. Here's the vice president last year saying they tried to kill Donald Trump. No, they didn't, JD. One guy did. A mostly Republican guy, in fact. It's absurd and it's deeply insidious. But they need to say it in order to do the thing they already planned on doing. And the media, being complete cowards, are probably going to usher it in. They certainly helped by demonizing the pro-Palestine protest as being pro-terrorist

and anti-Semitic hate protests. And while I suppose we appreciate journalists like Jake Tapper going out and defending Jimothy Kimmel for his comments, it's weird that many of them are saying it's the biggest threat to free speech they've ever seen? I mean, I thought it was pretty much the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I've seen in my lifetime. Yeah. Maybe he could Google Mahmood Khalil. Check out some of that. They're gonna revoke passports of people who say mean things about Charlie.

He fired hundreds of journalists at Voice for America. Hi, Jake. This all just kind of feels like something very familiar. Specifically, like that part in Disney's zombies where Bucky, the head of the cheerleading squad, hacks Z's Z band, forcing him to have a violent outburst at the football game so they can justify their anti-zombie movement and Bucky can purge any zombie sympathizers

from the cheer squad. Also, the Reichstag fire. It's like Disney's zombies or the Reichstag fire. I feel like most people know what this is, but just in case, there was a lime soda explosion that caused a zombie outbreak. Fine! I won't talk about Disney's zombies.

The Reichstag fire was the inciting incident to Hitler's rise. The German parliament was lit on fire by a former construction worker accused of being tied to the Communist Party. This event allowed Germany's president, who was also Hitler's buddy, to invoke Article 48, which in turn abolished the freedom of speech and assembly in Germany. This also is how they could go after journalists.

In other words, a group of people used a single event to throw up their hands and say, well, that's it! Democracy is canceled, because those people secretly just wanted to do that anyway. Also, it's still up for debate if that construction worker was the true cause of the fire, or if it was an inside job to justify these actions. It kind of doesn't matter. This matters right now, but ultimately, they just needed something. Much like how they just need something right now. If Trump hurts his back sneezing, that might trigger martial law.

I'm not the only one comparing this to the Reichstag fire. At least one actual fucking white supremacist did as well. But in the way where they were like excited, they get to do the Hitler stuff now, the president's advisor and friend of the administration, I guess, guess, Laura Lumer, made it very clear as well. This is the opportunity to crush the left. She even tagged Stephen Miller, who she correctly asserts, understands the assignment. Because Stephen Miller is straight up just a fascist. It's why he says and does the things he says and does, and it's why his speech at Kirk's Memorial was so similar to two specific

Nazi speeches, one of them being at the funeral of Hort Wessel, a Nazi who was murdered and became a martyr and propaganda symbol for the Nazi. And so I guess it's as good as any time to stare directly into the abyss and talk about what this all adds up to. Look at the larger and darker picture here before hopefully coming out the other side of it. Like a colonoscopy. This is our colonoscopy in that we don't really want to do this, but at least we're on drugs for it. Well, at least we will be on drugs. It's time for more ads is my point. Enjoy the colon. Maybe I am on drugs. This September, or in the September that just ended,

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Full seasons of the CBS shows you love. This month only, maybe. On Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never. Welcome back. We were sad or angry or something. And now we're talking about something hopefully. happy finally. Political violence. Well, maybe we'll get happy eventually. So most Americans don't

support political violence. However, younger and more left-leaning people are starting to turn on that, specifically in relation to our leaders. And I want to talk about what led us to that and why more people might feel like there's no other option. The goal here is to de-escalate, to prevent violence. But in order to actually do that, we have to be honest about who has instigated it, and not let them off the hook for that. There's a reason why accountability is so important, because without consequences, people begin to feel like they are losing their minds.

When a group of people simply ignores the law and does whatever they want, including pardoning violent actors because they personally agree with their politics or because they benefit them or flatter their ego, well, then it feels like all bets are off. That's not extreme to say. It's literally the plot of Batman begins.

We all recognize this. If you call them or their administration authoritarian, they say you're a terrorist and inciting violence. What do you say to that? When can you use the word authoritarian? And to be completely blunt in a way that's borderline pissy. Well, they fucking started it. Or rather, Donald Trump started it. Sorry, I know we should be working to bridge the divide.

But that's how we do it. In order to actually de-escalate a situation, the people responsible for cops are, causing it need to face actual consequences. That's why Disney's zombies didn't work, because Bucky literally tried to incite a mass murder and then got away with that. You can't heal a country while simultaneously ignoring and enabling the people hurting it. And Trump has absolutely zero interest in uniting this country. He has shown that loud and clear.

How do we fix this country? How do we come back together? I'll tell you something that's gonna get me in trouble, but I can couldn't care less. The radicals on the right, oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime. They don't want to see crime. Worryed about the border. They're saying, we don't want these people coming in. We don't want you burning our shopping centers. We don't want you shooting our people in the middle of the street. The radicals on the left are the problem, and they're vicious, and they're horrible, and they're politically savvy. He was asked directly

how to unite the country and immediately turned it into the same partisan sloppy all does, except more terrifying. He is now excusing radical right-wing actions by saying that their concerns are good and, in fact, amplifying their reasons. He is implying there that when a right-wing radical, say, shoots up a black church, like the Charleston Church shooter, or when a right-wing radical shoots up to Moss because of the Great Replacement, well, they did it for the correct reasons. His and Stephen Miller's and Elon Musk's reasons. The Charleston Church shooter's motivation stem specifically from reading propaganda around the Trayvon Martin killing and then Googling Black on White crime. Now let's play that Trump clip one more time. The radicals on the

right, oftentimes they're radical because they don't want to see crime. They don't want to see crime. Again, he's saying that in order to excuse radical right-wing actions and then saying that it's actually the left we have to worry about. I know he's not specifically citing the Charleston church shooter and like Kash Patel apparently probably doesn't even know who he is at this point, but he is broadly excusing him and people like him. I'm sure people can argue in a way like the very fine people stuff. So I'm gonna just lay this out. America elected its first black president in 2008 and the GOP went completely out of their minds. Obama said something about Trayvon Martin and then there was no looking back. They still bring that specific thing up. It was devastating

to them somehow. And the moment Trump announced his candidacy, you can see, with your eyes, that right-wing violence skyrocketed. We've pointed this out so many times and will again that political violence has been overwhelmingly from the far right. To directly quote a report from the Justice Department, quote, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism. Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives. In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that

took 78 lives. That's from an archived version, because that report was removed by the DOJ mere days after Kirk was shot. J.D. Vance keeps lying over and over about how left-wing violence is the the more severe and only problem. But it's just not true. They know this, we know this, everyone knows this, Grock knows this, but actually it's time to once again let the almost trillionaire force it to say what he wants.

In this case, more lies. Trump lost the election and his supporters broke into the Capitol chanting that they were going to hang the vice president. Then he pardoned those people and many went on to do other crimes. It's embarrassing and sickening to watch Trump and all these pundits try to act like, oh, actually, it's, it's the left and trans who do all the violence. To see the New York Post act like there's some epidemic of trans shooters. To see right-wing pundits sweatily try to clutch their pearls as if they would never do or encourage violence. Just three months ago, two Democratic lawmakers were shot in their homes.

One of them died along with her husband and dog. That shooter was a pro-life Republican three months ago. Trump didn't order flags half-mast then. Trump barely seems to know who they were. Do you think it would have been fitting to lower the flags to half staff when Melissa Horman, the Minnesota House Speaker was gunned down by an assassin as well? I'm not familiar of the... The Minnesota House Speaker, a Democrat.

Oh. Well, if the governor had asked me to do that, I would have done that. But the governor of Minnesota didn't ask me. I didn't. I wouldn't have thought of that, but I would have, if somebody had asked me. Man, get fucked. See, there's this weird sudden shock from both the right wing and some liberals after Kirk's death, where people seem to be asking, how did it get this bad?

As if this happened overnight. Here's Ben Shapiro, our favorite guy, voice, voicing this concern in a very human way. On a personal level, obviously, I have 24-7 security. I've had 24-7 security for a decade. I've spoken in a lot of college campuses. I never, honest to God, thought that we were going to get to this point. Even the assassination of political figures is not the same thing as just being shot in

the throat for the crime of debating issues in the public square. And I thought wrong. I thought that's not what America is or what it should be about, and we've come to someplace It's incredibly dark in our nation's history, and, you know, I, I weep for the country. I weave for Charlie. It's terrific. I'm sorry, Ben. I am.

I'm sorry that you never thought we'd get to this point. I don't know if you would ever watch this show, like and subscribe. You're never at band practice anyway. But if you see this, I'm sorry. I'm sorry about your friend, Charlie. But I also have to tell you a fact, which might not care about what you're feeling right now. When you say, I never thought we'd get to this point, and we've come to something. and we've come to some place incredibly dark.

I need to point out that we've been at this point for nearly a goddamn decade. In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, you lamented that in a lot of ways, the GOP has become a party of grievance, correct? And President Trump is post-ideological, and that the right has become sort of a repository for anti-left feeling.

Again, right on the money. Very funny to just admit your party is all about feelings now. But, Ben, Since I have known about you, you have been selling leftist tears tumblers. You continue to sell them. What did you think tears were? Doubly hilarious is that years earlier, in a conversation with the same Ezra Klein, he brought up the leftist tears tumblers and suggested maybe it sends an unhelpful message.

But Ben, you brushed it off. You've even admitted that this is all Trump's fault, actually, by the way. Back in 2018, Ben was on Bill Maher and said, While he didn't vote for Trump in 2016, Trump winning officially broke the social fabric. So now he was free to vote for him. You can just say and do whatever now. Social fabric busted. But now you're surprised years later when things have gotten so much worse?

Who's the president again, Ben? Did you think he'd break the social fabric once and just stop there? No more fabric for him to rip apart, right? Like, did you think those were happy tears you were wanting to drink? Ben, do you remember when a man shot up a mosque back in 2017 and specifically said his motive was anti-immigration and he was a fan of Donald Trump? And more specifically, we learned that in the month leading up to the shooting,

he had checked your Twitter, Ben Shapiro's Twitter, 93 times. Six people died. And the shooter closely followed the accounts of Laura Ingraham, David Duke, Mike Cernovich, Richard Spencer, and most of all, Ben Shapiro. Ben, hi, was that not an I never thought we'd get to this point situation for you? Did that not ping you that perhaps something was very wrong with political violence in this and other countries, a problem with our discourse and the social fabric, and perhaps your rhetoric was causing some violence? I'm not even saying it is your fault, but did you not reflect

at all about the fact that you had been openly lying about Muslim violence, making an entire video about it, and then one of your followers shot up a mosque. There's plenty of violent material in the Old and New Testament. Hey, I'm an Orthodox Jew. I read the Old Testament a lot. But believers in those particular texts are not currently ramming airliners into towers, or beheading journalists, or mutilating female genitalia. You made a video, Ben, listing the Muslim populations of every country, and then claiming lying that the majority of them were ratified.

of them were radicalized, adding this. You scared yet? We're just getting started. Yeah. We were just getting started, weren't we, Ben? Do we want to look into how many mosque shootings have happened since then, how many hate crimes occurred? No, they aren't all on you, but you didn't even reflect on this one. You made a video where you claimed that the majority of Muslims in every country were violent,

people's neighbors and friends, fellow citizens, and you said, are you scared yet? And you ended that video with this. In other words, the myth of the tiny radical Muslim minority is just that. It's a myth. And, unfortunately, it's a myth that's going to get a lot of civilized people killed. The fucking audacity of Ben Shapiro to suddenly say, I never thought we'd get to this point. Hey, Ben, and everyone else, I guess, do you remember the Christchurch shooting? Back in 2019, 51 people dead?

The right-wing shooters manifesto and weapons were, of course, dripping with internet-poisoned irony and shitposts, as was and is the stupid trend at the time. But the shooter also wrote the manifesto called The Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory about white replacement by non-white immigrants. When you drill down into it deep enough, it's usually explained as being concocted and perpetuated by the, you guessed it, Jews, in order to destabilize the West. But it takes on various forms on a spectrum of extremity.

White genocide, you will not replace us, all that. You may have even seen Elon Musk, tweet about it. Now, we obviously don't normally do this on the Shoddy, but I'm going to read to you a passage from that Great Replacement Manifesto. The Great Replacement Strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different. They hate those of you that live in rural and small America. They hate those of you that own land and have guns and believe in a better country, and they have a plan to try and get rid of you. You believe in God, country, family, faith, and freedom, and they won't stop until you and your children and your children's children are eliminated.

Oh, no, wait, that was Charlie, five years after the Christchurch shooting. It's weirdly worse than with Ben, where his words may have had some impact on a shooter, maybe. Here, Charlie read the manifesto and was like, yeah. It's Trump talking about right-wing extremist violence and saying, okay, sure, but they're correct. How can we even talk about this stuff when our politicians and pundits completely hand-wave away their words and the actions connected to those words? Again, this might sound childish and pissy, but you first! What a lot of these people are actually saying is, I never thought this would happen to my group. It never occurred to them that the things they were saying had consequences.

People have been dying for years now, and for a lot of them, it just never seemed real. Well, now it seems pretty fucking real, doesn't it? And if we want to actually de-escalate this, the first step is realizing how long it's been going on. And the truth, the very mean truth, is that while Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die, his death was the product of an increasingly volatile partisan and terminally online world that he helped create and foster, in large part in service of billionaires and the one man to unite them all, Donald's stupid Trump, the male cult leader of the MAGA movement, who Newt Gingrich once correctly identified as the most effective uprooter of liberalism in his lifetime.

Illiberalism, one could say. A fascist. But we're not allowed to say that word, actually. Or the Nazi word, Nazi. You know, everyone you don't like is Hitler. It's like J.D. asked. What is it that you want people to do when you call them Nazis? What is it that you want them to do when you call them fascists? What is the proper response when you say that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and Charlie Kirk are threatening your safety? What do you expect people to do? Another question answer for J.D. Why don't you ask you? You're one of the few people who have actually called Trump Hitler. The other is RFK Jr. We at the Shoddy, notably, have not. But he is the cult leader of the modern American fascist movement. Vance saw this back in the day. He just decided to go along with it.

it. Because all of what we've been talking about, Ben admitting they're just an anti-left party, using one horrific act to paint the entire left as the violent extremist that must be crushed, all the right-wing blue checks that J.D. Vance probably follows, saying, oh, you want to call us fascist, well, I guess we are now. Trump, being the incredibly effective uprooter of liberalism that he is, it's all swirling around this phenomenon that historian Robert Paxton described when trying to find an accurate definition of the word fascism. Dictatorship against the left amidst popular enthusiasm. That was the unexpected combination that fascism would manage to put together one short generation later.

And that is what this is, or at least what it's trying to be, an attempted dictatorship against the left. Sometimes they just say it out loud. We've actually done many episodes on the different tenets of fascism and the definition and similarities and all of that. Historians have, too. There are many. One of them is surprise how they treat and demonize and target trans people. In fact, someone once asked Kirk about this, citing the Nazis' first book burning and destruction of Germany's first trans health clinic. And you'll never guess what the response was.

Um, do you have a dog? I do have a dog. So did Hitler. Are you a Nazi? Oh my goodness. You have a dog and so did Hitler. Got him! No need to consider similar targets of political movements. He had a dog.

Selective populism, a cult surrounding a strong man, demonization of immigrants and other marginalized groups and the disabled and homeless, a fear of difference, and obsession with conspiracies, anti-intellectualism? Okay, but do you have a mustache? We think fascism is still the correct word here, is my point. Even if it doesn't succeed and democracy and the Constitution hold strong. We also know that these kinds of horrific acts will just be used to their advantage and everybody else's detriment. So we won't really spend any more time trying to prove to you it's fascism. Go read about it. Read what historians are saying about this moment.

Here is what Paxton eventually landed on. Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties, and pursues with redemptive violence,

and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. Hmm. Luckily, though, we have the internet now, so everything's worse and stupider. Rage is an industry now. Libs of TikTok makes a living, scrolling through social media looking for things to be mad at.

Sites like Surrounded are gamifying political discourse while giving platforms to people who, frankly, shouldn't be platformed. Every fucking pundit livestreams themselves reading and then reacting to the news in real time with zero fact checking. And yeah, this has always kind of existed with politics. But now it's spilled out into the real world. We have the director of the FBI tweeting through the manhunt for Kirk's Killer, posting about two false suspects for, I guess, the likes. likes? The president making him sit on the arrest so he can reveal it on Fox News, saying a bullet was engraved with anti-ice politics, and it's a picture of a bullet with anti-ice scrawled on it with a ballpoint pen? Social media is, as we all know, the most toxic

landscape for discourse. And now the president of the United States runs his own special social media site, competing with the world's richest man. The vice president, guest hosts his martyrs podcast, Our American Gerbils' wife starts a podcast. The president of the United States makes his official announcements via all caps, rage posts on social media. We took the concept of a comment section,

viral videos, social media posts, the most incendiary method of discourse, and have made it a key infrastructure in our government. What the fuck are we doing? How can we talk? And yes, our show is in this ecosystem. this ecosystem. And we grapple with that fact every week. We spend a lot of time thinking about what we put into the world. Do they? Does Ben? Can he and these other pundits take that hurt

they are feeling right now and realize that they have caused it to others? And perhaps in order to actually de-escalate and unify people, they need to atone and take responsibility for that, for supporting the broken social fabric guy. And look at who is actually inciting most of the violence in this country. I'm guessing they'll just blame trans people in Gen Z Libs, but maybe they could do the better thing. Maybe. Probably not. It's hard not to feel like we still have to go through the darkness

in order to come out the other side. We've lived through political assassinations in the past, many in fact. Someone once shot the president in the head twice. We've endured assassinations. But can we endure what Trump is going to do in response to this one? We've seen the threats, we've seen some of the actions. Maybe the WW-style memorial with all the Nazi speeches already went too far and turned people off.

We don't know. Can we de-escalate? Can we endure Trump nonviolently? Can we even talk? Can I say something? Not now, Monkey. This isn't about you. What I can do is go back to this shooter, this person who, from what I can tell, was struggling with who they were in the environment they lived in, who clearly couldn't talk to anyone about those feelings, and who, frankly, was pretty fucked up and terminally online. His brain seemingly melted by memes or love or whatever. And I think about this increasingly online world of people owning and destroying others and how it's seeping into our real world. internet brain rot, infecting the most powerful people in the country. And then I think of this news story about a pro-life activist lady who brought her kids to see

Charlie Kirk and lost one of them during the shooting. And then later learned that her kid was helped by some young lib wearing a supposedly satanic shirt and how she wished she could thank that woke college brat. Not her word, she was nicer. But my point is, those are two people who would have called each other terrible things on social media, having a real moment in the flesh world. She even notes that before the shooting, everyone was being really respectful of each other besides having wildly different political views.

And that's most people. The internet, this torrent of escalating horrors. It's not most people. I'm not saying that the internet is inherently bad or causes violence, but rather that being terminally online, doom scrolling, trolling, whatever, it's a symptom of loneliness and a very easy way to spiral out of control. It's this murk, this nihilistic soup of rage that some people love to splash around in. And we can't let those people control the rest of the world. We're not a fucking chat room. We are people, neighbors, co-workers. And a lot of us are very

terrified right now. We need to be kind even when talking to people we don't agree with. And if you are feeling hurt by this event, if you are hurt and scared about what happened to Charlie Kirk, You need to think about that hurt and project it on other events, other people. There's a word for this, but I guess I'm not allowed to say it, but think about that hurt when hearing about the next spree shooting or the next family being rounded up by ice, or the next politician who demonizes a broad group of people. These are real things that hurt real people seen through an imperfect lens. It would be so nice to not feel anything right now, but we just gotta.

We are human beings with a soul, after all. Let's act like it. And most importantly, I'm back from a Louva! What did I miss? Oh my God, what are you doing here? What? You come back now? Now?

I've been gone for months and you show up now. Warmbo, what do you do? Why would you, fuck, man, what was, don't get out of here. I was in the middle of the whole thing. What was I even talking about? Like the, the, the, the, Oh, well, I don't know. Oh my god, I forget what we were talking about. Was I talking about... Oh, oh! I'm so sorry. Fuck!

Was it like a... was it... was it like an hour and a half episode about Wormpo? I don't remember. Oh my god, it's, oh, no, get, it was, uh, we gotta hear some news, I think I said. I didn't even say that this time. Warren, bro, come back, come back. I feel, I missed you. I missed you so much. Hey, folks, thanks for watching. Like and subscribe all the YouTube stuff.

I don't really have much more to say. Just a quick, 10 more minutes about, just kidding. We got a podcast, go even more news. Check it out on the channel. We do it twice a week. It's at the podcast store. We got a patreon.com slash some more news. We got merch.

Warmbos on it. Warmbo's back. Ah, yeah. I think we've said enough.