The Dispatch Podcast - Charlie Kirk’s Death | Roundtable

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

Political activist Charlie Kirk’s tragic and shocking assassination at Utah Valley University on Wednesday has sparked an outpouring of grief, anxiety, and recriminations over how we arrived at this moment. Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, David French, and Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle to unpack what we know (and don’t) about the murder, discuss how we should think about this political moment, and explore how we can step back from the brink. The Agenda:—Proliferation of violent videos—Navigating threats in political life—Playing into the worst stereotypes—The FBI fumbles investigation—President Donald Trump’s remarks Show Notes:—Yascha Mounk for The Dispatch: “The Assassin’s Veto” The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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or go to explorevolvo.com. While other money managers are holding, Dynamic is hunting. Seeing past the horizon, investing beyond the benchmark, because your money can't grow if it doesn't move. Learn more at dynamic.ca.cath. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On this week's episode, we'll discuss the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and the rise of political violence more broadly.

I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson, along with David French of the New York Times and Megan McArdle from the Washington Post. We're recording on September 11, 2025. Less than 24 hours ago, conservative political activist Charlie Kirk was shot while speaking at Utah Valley University. His shooting was captured on video immediately going viral. Authorities originally announced that they had captured a suspect, only to later say that he'd been released.

The same thing happened a second time later in the day with FBI director Cash Patel tweeting that they'd captured a subject, but later announcing that person had also been released. As of this morning, the Manhud continues. Our job here, in its simplest terms, is to help people make sense of the news. And we're going to do our best to do that. today but charlie kirk was 31 years old a husband and the father of two young children we'll talk about

the larger implications of this political killing but his wife is now without the man she chose to marry and his kids are without their dad and there's no making sense of that kevin i want to start with you i suspect many of our listeners are at least somewhat familiar with charlie kirk and his work with Turning Point USA, the student activist group that he founded. You've written about him in the past. You had occasion to interview him. I wonder if you can just describe first kind of who he was, what he did, and how you first came to meet him.

Honestly, I don't remember when I first met him. He's kind of been around for a long time. I knew him a little bit when he was kind of first getting started. Charlie would have been, I guess, sort of a teenager at the tail end of the Tea Party era, and he was someone who was very interested in politics at that point, and started a little nonprofit, which he built into this very large organization that became Turning Point USA. What he was best known for was his outreach to young people, speaking on college campuses, doing a lot of kind of confrontational, and I would say not very high-quality debates.

I would think he was best known for. These sort of, you know, own the lives, make me watch this left-wing person lose his mind, and make a viral video of it on YouTube. Charlie was not my friend and I was not an admirer of his. I thought his style of politics and his style of communication and engagement was sort of fundamentally unhealthy and spoke to a lot of the worst of the right-wing political tendencies and the populist tendencies of our time. That is no reason to shoot someone, of course.

And that's the thing I think we'll have to be just repeatedly emphasized today is that You don't have to make a martyr of the guy. In retrospect, we don't have to pretend that we didn't have our differences. We don't have to pretend that we thought he was a good influence. It's simply enough to say that people don't get shot for engaging in political speech, even when it's political speech that we don't particularly love or agree with or want to associate ourselves with. The last time I talked to him was he'd been invited to speak to a social group in Fisher Island, which is a very fancy private community off the coast of Miami Beach,

where you can't get there without a permission slip and you have to have either a yacht or a ferry to take you there because there's no bridge from Miami. And it was 2019, I guess, and some of the local liberals there on Fisher Island were upset that he'd been invited to speak to this group and sought to have him disinvited and there was a little bit of a stink.

And I remember the people saying that, you know, they felt threatened by his presence. And, of course, whatever you say about Charlie Kirk, he's not a threat to anybody. He was never a threat to anybody. You may not like what he had to say or how he had to say it, but he wasn't a threat to anyone. The threat to people are people who shoot people at political rallies and speeches. And those people are the threat.

We don't know who shot him. We don't know what their motivation was. We don't know where you're dealing more with the Hinkley or with the booth. You know, which is my sort of archetypal assassins, whether it was an actual programmatic political killing or just some crazy person who latched on to Charlie Kirk because he's famous and available. And you can be sure that there will be gross attempts to make political hay out of this on both sides, which will be despicable. And, of course, we will try not to contribute to here at all. Yeah, I agree with that. Jonah, you've done speaking on college campuses for, you know, whatever, 25, 30 years and worked with a lot of the conservative groups on college campuses.

Yeah, there's ISI. There are all sorts of conservative groups that have worked on college of colleges. campuses to sort of rally young conservatives, shape them, bring them together, create sort of an activist culture among conservatives. And Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, when it arrived, quickly swamped all of the others in terms of effectiveness and reach, growth, and influence. Could you just share with us what you've seen of TPUSA? on campus, and any thoughts you have on why he was so effective in motivating young right-wing political activists?

Yeah, I mean, so just to pick up very quickly on something Kevin said, I pretty much agree with his characterizations. It is remarkable the degree to which people think you actually do have to endorse everything about Charlie Kirk. I've been getting inundated with people saying, are you going to recant your criticisms now? And the answer's no. But at the same time, I think,

because none of that stuff matters, right? The fact that he was murdered is so frigging fundamentally outrageous and disgusting. And I will say this. I mean, one of the things I think that a lot of the praise about Kirk gets right is that he actually did believe in engaging people who disagreed with him. Now, you can agree with Kevin about how his method, and means about it, but, like, he was serious about it, and he had a, he had a worldview that said, this is better than the alternatives. And I think he was right about that in terms of

not talking to people. And on the substance of your question, yeah, Turning Point USA became this behemoth. And I don't think it would have but for Donald Trump. I mean, there was a enormous amount of good timing, sort of synergistic timing involved. And, And so the moment was sort of ripe. But the big 800-pound gorilla for conservative campus groups for speaking for a long time was the Young America's Foundation. And I worked with them a lot until the era of Trump. And then sort of overnight, anybody who was Trump critical was sort of – the market dried up very quickly for it. It's fine.

But very quickly, TPUSA supplanted Young America's Foundation as the 800-bound gorilla. And one of the remarkable things, which shows you the real impact of Charlie Kirk and Turning Point, is that rather than brand differentiate from TPUSA, Yaff kind of basically said we can be as Kirkian as those guys and joined in, which tells you certainly that that's what the zeitgeist was as much as anything else, right? I mean, because of Trump, you needed to have that kind of populist tone and approach on a college campus. And Turning Point had a comparative advantage for a little while on that. And then basically all campus speaking conservative groups, including ISI, to a certain extent,

which was partially founded by William F. Buckley and was always the egg-hettiest and most cerebral of the sort of campus groups. It got pretty trumpy very quickly, too. But Kirk was very effective at building this organization, of building a sort of a personality brand around himself. He filmed everything that he did. He understood in a way that a lot of the legacy institutions didn't, how social media worked. And he was the right guy at the right moment for building a group like Turning Point USA, and he did it pretty effectively. Yeah, David, one of the things that Charlie Kirk used to say pretty frequently you'd see it if you call up YouTube clips of his interactions, confrontations with people on campuses.

And he did, as Kevin points out, he frequently engaged people who despised him and would usually talk rather calmly and dispassially and sort of try to reason his way through an argument, reason his way through a point. One of the things that he said frequently that people are recirculating online now was that political violence starts when people stop talking, when people stop engaging one another. You've been warning about our increasing political violence for years, really for as long as I've known you. You wrote a book in 2020 called Divided We Fall America's Secession Threat. and how to restore our nation yeah which the second the second part actually really matters because he did prescribe some some potential solutions that i want to get to later um i'm just interested in

your thoughts we see this happen um this is something we've been talking about for a long time as i say yeah i mean it is hard to put into words that sickening feeling i felt when i first saw the news And then triply when I saw the video footage, which became instantly impossible to avoid if you looked at social media at all. So which is now the second video of the horrific brutal murder that has just been put right in front of people's faces here in the last few days. And I had the deeply sickening feeling, and I also was not surprised at all that had happened. In fact, I was talking to somebody not long ago, and I said, it really is only a matter of time before somebody shot on a college campus, that this escalating rhetoric, the escalating hysteria around American politics, you know, the way I almost look at it like a math problem is if you have a room full of 100 people and there's an enormous amount of hysterical rhetoric in that room full of 100 people, the odds that any one of that 100 are violent. or horrible are pretty low. But you add that, what if it's 100,000 people? What if it's a million people? What if it's 300 million people marinating constantly in hatred? What is going to happen then?

And then when you have that level of scale of the way in which we talk about each other, the way in which we interact with each other, in my view, what this does is it makes this kind of violence inevitable. You know, back when I was in the military, we would talk about terrorism in terms of, for example, you can't predict any given terrorist attack. If you could, terrorism wouldn't be a problem. But one thing you know is if you give terrorists space and time and a safe haven, you will see an attack at some point, somewhere. And I also think about when you talk about unrestrained hatred,

unrestrained animosity, that doesn't mean that on any given day, something horrible is going to happen, or that any given person is going to become horrible. But what it means is over time, over time, it renders this kind of action inevitable. And that's where, you know, that's one reason I was very heartened to see a lot of the bipartisan, overwhelming sense of disgust and revulsion at what happened. But I guarantee you the takeaway is going to be those few voices that celebrate this. And that's going to be used for the next. round of stoking rage and anger and hatred.

Yeah, Megan, immediately after the shooting, Utah Governor Spencer Cox, spoke to exactly what David is talking about. He said, quote, if you celebrated even a little bit at the news of this shooting, I would beg you to look in the mirror to see if there's a better angel in there somewhere. I don't care what his politics are. I care that he was an American. You know, David speaks of sort of the just the percentages, the raw numbers of people who could take out a political speaker who could be, we're sick enough to sort of undertake something like this. How worried should we be about the numbers of people who are doing this?

We've seen an obvious increase in political violence over the past several years, and it seems to me that, Something like this happens, and your immediate concern among many others is that it will prove to be the spark that sets off a bigger wave of violence in response. We should remember that this is still quite rare. It's every instance is bad. We should also remember that we don't know why this happened. You know, there are people, the natural assumption after one of these things is that it was for politics. But if you remember Gabby Giffords, who was shot by Jared Lochner, I think that's how you pronounce his name. You know, there was this, the New York Times editorialized about Sarah Palin, putting like a target map out. There were all of these, well, Republicans have caused this with their rhetoric. And it turned out that this guy was a schizophrenic who had a bunch of really bizarre theories about, like, language.

He was getting grammar instructions through his TV. Yeah, and so you don't know, and even someone like Luigi Mangione, who I think is extremely, I mean, his attack was extremely well planned. The guy who killed the United Healthcare CEO, he's also very clearly disturbed. And it is likely that he's going to, I would say, probably end up in something like an insane asylum or the guy who shot up the Aurora movie theater. Right. These things are quite complicated and the fact that people are famous, people fixate on famous people. I remember being in Vietnam and two in the morning, frantically trying to contact the San Diego police because a random guy who sounded extremely disturbed had emailed me that he, if this person did not stop hurting him, he was going to have to take action. And there I am in fact I'm trying to explain to the San Diego PD. No, I don't know this person.

He just decided to email me that this was. These are things that journalists are familiar with is that, you know, you disturb people will send mass emails with increasingly escalating threats about this or that. That said, look, political violence is on the rise. And I think what we have to remember is a few things is, first of all, to the extent that you glorify it, you get more of it. And this was why it was so dangerous. that people were glorifying Mangione because the only people who do these things are off in some way, right?

If there's a famous example, if you could go back in time, would you kill baby Hitler? And the thing is, I think actually most of us couldn't kill baby Hitler. We would look and be like, it's a baby. I can't kill a baby.

To be able to do this. That's why militaries spend so much time trying to condition people to overcome what's actually a pretty natural aversion to hurting other people. And so this is always going to be a rare subset of people. But on the margin, if you signal to those people, this is cool, I admire it.

More of those people will want to do the thing that is cool and admire it among a community that they feel they belong to. The other thing is the notoriety of these things. And this is the really unfortunate stuff about the videos and so forth. What we know about mass shooters, or I would put this in a category of mass shooter, even though it was only one victim, is these random acts of planned out violence. What we know about them is that they pour obsessively over the videos, over the accounts of these things. And the more you publicize them, the more likely you are to get copycats.

And, you know, one interesting thing is we think of school shootings as having to do with a variety of cultural factors. But I think the real factor there is just that one happened. We paid a lot of attention to it. And it gave that idea to a lot of other people. And so all of these things, the more there is violence, the more we are going to get violence because it is going to suggest to people that this is a cool way to go down in history to make a mark on the world despite your failed life. I think that's probably what the motive of the guy who shot at Trump was. He was just kind of a 20-year-old socially awkward kid who didn't have a lot going for him and figured, you know, what do I have to lose? do something big and go out with a bang and that is a really unfortunate so we have to be

careful about how we talk about this um i have advocated like completely unsuccessfully for media just not reporting on these things at all yeah um because everyone we report on causes um more people to get the idea i don't know how you know like the thing is the media did in fact decide we're not going to report the names of rape victims it's not because it's illegal they decided that, like, that was a bad thing and it was socially harmful. We could decide, you know what? We're just not going to publicize these. Because, interesting fact, you know when Matt, the first wave of mass shooters broke,

when school shootings broke, when 9-11 happened. And basically the news crowded out school shootings and people weren't getting the idea. But, of course, now the Internet's out there, and it just magnifies everything, seeing all these videos. That's the question. People feel like they're trying to help address the problem, and in fact, they're making the problem worse

because they are giving people the incentive to seek that notoriety. Yeah, let me ask you about that. Because I think I would have agreed with you 10 years ago. I'm not sure it's practical at this point to suggest the media not cover this stuff because it's happening, it's live-streamed. It's happening in real time. It's no longer our choice.

You know, the gatekeepers of 10, 20 years ago can't gatekeep anymore. You know, this video, there were dozens of people shooting video of Charlie Kirk speaking when this happened. I don't know if anybody was live streaming, but it stands to reason that somebody was. I'm with you in terms of the logic, in terms of the argument, in terms of asking for some restraint from media outlets to nuts. to not create incentives for people to copycat. But I just don't think it's not up to us anymore. Am I wrong about that? No, I think that, yeah, I have been advocating this for a long time,

and it has gotten less and less practical to advocate for. And of course, at the time, liberals who felt like this was a really good argument for gun control, were like, are you kidding? No way. I'm not giving up, not, you know, suppressing this. And now conservative, if you've seen what the conservative reaction to this has been, many people have been measured and sad and then you have people saying

like the left is trying to kill us we need to like sweep through and put three times as many people in jail and all of these it's just like everyone feels like as long as I can get some political advantage I can't drop it now yeah you can do that sort of media

censorship in a small country with a very cooperative culture you know in Singapore for example you have a media that will de-emphasize or declined to report certain kinds of crimes that might be seen as tending to heighten religious or ethnic conflict in the country because that's sort of an ongoing issue there with this sort of, you know, sectarian sensibility, but you can't do it in the United States.

There's too many of us. We're too crazy. We're too uncooperative. And in fact, one of the reasons you can't do that in the United States is the same reason that we have more violence and more political violence than other countries do even proportional to our population, which is we're just a very unconstitutional. unruly, very uncooperative, very independent and open to violence sort of people. It's just part of our culture. You know, you think the United States being so much bigger than a country like

Norway, you know, we've got 30 times the population, so we'll have 30 times the violence, 30 times the political violence, but we don't have 30 times. We've got 60 times or 90 times or 150 times. It's just, it's just part of our culture. It's just something that we're not going to be able to change about ourselves. And it's kind of a package deal that goes along with other aspects of our um he's very independent and unruly and freedom-minded sensibility well also just i mean i think that's right but to steve's point about how this seemed possible 10 years ago it's sort of like saying you know porn has become a huge problem in our culture so we should uh really make it more difficult to go to porn movie theaters right and the thing is it's like the porn movie theaters are

just not the issue anymore because it's the kid's tablet up in their room right and and i don't think we can't put that genie back in the bottle as much as I know David French would like to. You know, every time someone brings up the, would you go back in time and kill young Hitler? I think I might go back in time and punch Steve Jobs in the face and tell him not to invent the iPhone

and to kill that project and maybe even try to persuade him before I punched him in the face that it's a bad idea because I think it's really a good example of technology driving the culture more than the other way around. we should just reframe this as like you could go back and offer Hitler like an art career right we don't need to just go buy all this paintings take a billion dollars look and you know 50 years later you have a lot of bad paintings see my objection to the killing hitler thing the killing baby Hitler thing is to the physics um I think if you go back in the past you create an alternative timeline and you don't change your own timeline but that's something david and I can talk about offline yeah comic book nerds.

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Now let's jump back into our conversation. So, David, I want to ask you, let's pause for a moment on the proliferation of these videos. I mean, they're everywhere. You know, when I was growing up, it was a long time ago, there was i think it was a documentary you all probably know it and know it better than i but it was called something like faces of death and it was right a film that actually captured people dying and i remember it was such a subversive act even to watch it to take it in and um you know people would talk about have you have you seen it um how does it affect you i remember i finally

watched just a clip of it and you know it was as horrifying as as you would imagine um but that was a small percentage of of young people i think who saw that and it didn't have any broader societal effects i i just wonder you know i saw these videos coming out yesterday the first thing i thought of was how do i keep my kids from seeing this and you know i we all probably talked to our our kids and I encourage them not to watch because the video is incredibly gruesome. It's something that nobody should see. What are your thoughts on the effects of how common these things

are not just this, but I mean, you go online. It's almost like you now have to be actively seeking to avoid these things rather than looking to consume them. Yeah, it's going to be really hard for us to even predict this because we're just dealing with something we have no precedent for, this idea that at a very young age, you could be exposed to the most gruesome things in the world. I know of kids, you know, even going back a few years when my kids were in school, there would be kids who would sort of forward around gruesome videos to each other as like a joke. Oh, hey, I can top

this. Look how shocking this is. And you reach a point where you know it's not good you know there's nothing conceivably good that can come from that but you don't know what we're doing to each other because we've never done it to each other really before i mean i think of you know there's that phrase waving the bloody shirt which would be a way that you know you would rally a mob by showing evidence of the gruesome act you know so you're trying to make it less abstract and more concrete right so you wave the bloody shirt look at this well you can now see the bloody video again and again and again and again. And the question I have is, does that continue to inflame us as much as the bloody shirt would?

Or do over time we get desensitized to the point where it doesn't actually inflame us any longer? I don't know, but it is, I think we're, if possible, actually underestimating the extent to which younger Americans are marinating in these bloody images. You know, there's, adults are drawn to it. Adult, I mean, the old phrase, if it bleeds, it leads, showed that adults were drawn to this stuff. Kids, we even have less impulse control are also drawn to it, and perhaps even more.

And I don't know that anybody knows where this is going to put us because we've just not been here like this before. I think we should, I think what's actually worrying in some way, I want to phrase this very carefully, is that they're not that gruesome. Right? If you think about kids, kids don't grasp death anyway. And then you look at the video of Charlie Kirk and like if someone had told me, if I didn't know what it was, it could have been like, Charlie Kirk got stung by a horsefly on his neck in the middle of his speech, right?

You wouldn't, he just slaps his neck and then it cuts off before you see anything particularly bloody or at least the video that was I saw auto playing. Yeah, just a correction on that. I saw one where you see just heart-wrenching massive amounts of arterial blood coming out. Yeah, yeah. But the one that was circulating most widely was that, and the United Healthcare CEO, right? He just sort of drops. And I think this plays into a broader tendency of the Internet to dehumanize people to strip the physical harsh reality of stuff often, right?

I thought, so like, I, after 9-11, I worked down at the site for a year, and I went there three days after the buildings fell. And the thing that struck me was that it was very hard to believe that it was real, even though I was standing there, I could smell the smoke, because it looks so much like a movie. And my brain, which had seen similar scenes in a zillion movies already, it just was like, yeah, this is what a movie set looks like. And I worry that that happens, that we, it doesn't desensitize us in the sense of like we are willing to embrace the actual horrible physical reality of a person dying. It's that this looks like a movie. It looks like this very remote thing. And like we're all old and we have dealt with people who are dying. We have dealt with that harsh physical reality.

But if you're young and you haven't. And so our imaginations fill in what that looks like in meat space, where there's a human being there who will never be there again. But if you're 20, it's just, it feeds into this perception that none of the world is quite real. All of these people online are just imaginary straw figures that you can, that you should advocate violence against, that you should delight in imagining how they could be hurt. because it's all play in some sense to them. If you want to get a real good direction for a sense of the cultural vector, something Steve didn't mention because maybe he's misremembering it, is that faces of death was fake.

You know, it was mostly stage stuff that was mixed in with some... Oh, was it? I didn't know that. I thought it was real. Yeah, it was sort of a comic mockumentary, but a lot of people took it seriously. So it was a lot of staged, spectacular violence stuff mixed in with some actual news footage and some war footage and some other things like that. So we've gone from a world of spectacular but fake

to real and horrifying but banal. And it's less dramatic, but it's everywhere. Unlike, I guess, all of you, I haven't seen the video because I don't use social media and I don't seek that sort of thing out, but it's not hard to come across 10,000 other, you know, sort of similar examples

of this stuff just being kind of everywhere and being accepted. The version of it that really stuck, in my memory, was the television show, Cops. I remember watching an episode of that with my mother one afternoon, and there's a guy who's being arrested, and he gets hurt in some way. I think maybe he had a heart attack or something, but he dies. And he dies there on camera.

And this is, you know, Prime Times is a very, very popular television show. And, you know, I'm sitting here in Lubbock, Texas, with my mother watching snuff films. This is not a good sign of where our culture is going. And, of course, that was, you know, that was a produced television show long before having the the ubiquity of our little camera phones and that stuff being everywhere all the time. It's not a fixable kind of thing, and it's a very, it's a very corrosive and very warping way of experiencing the world. And I think Megan's right that because people interact with other people on social media so much, they think of them as being imaginary. They think of this as being kind of a great game of cowboys and Indians, and we're all just kind of play acting.

And so it's easy to treat these people as though they were just disciples. who stood in for a set of values that you didn't like rather than being people with, you know, in Charlie's case, a wife and kids at home. I think that gets to one of the most difficult aspects of this rising tide of violence, which is trying to determine what are real threats and what are not. You know, we've dealt with that to a certain extent here at the dispatch. I've dealt with that in working in television over the years where, you know, there are so many keyboard warriors who are accustomed to, you know, some of them spend much of

their day firing off invective at people they disagree with and making threats. You know, firing off invective that doesn't get much attention, doesn't get much response, and so they step it up to get more attention and more response, and suddenly that turns into threats. And, you know, one of the things in conversations I've had with security professionals over the years, that they struggle to do is making a determination about which of those people to take seriously, which of those people are just firing off those emails

or texts or Twitter comments and which of the ones might present a threat in the physical world. David, I know you've had a lot of experience with this in trying to sift through these threats and trying to understand what's a real threat versus what's an imaginary threat. what comes from keyboard warriors. Is there anything you've learned in your experience

in trying to understand that that you can share with us today? Well, yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of other, some broader things and some narrower things. I think one of the broader things that I've learned is that if you go all the way back and you look at 2015 and 2016,

and I know Jonah remembers this well because he was one of the most targeted journalists in America in that time period for anti-Semitic attacks. One of the things that we saw in that moment, and you could tell coming in that moment, was a lot of people dismissed it as, oh, this is just all online.

It's just people trolling. You need to ignore it. And anyone who knows anything about the psychology of this stuff, it's no, wait a minute, what ends up happening is that very attack and critique is made internally to these people who are online. They're saying to, oh, you're not seriously. is you're online. And then somebody then says, no, no, I'm going to take it to the next level.

And these things don't stay online. The problem, though, is the percentage of things that move from online to real world is really small. So you might be in the middle of just a storm of online attacks and maybe not have anything that migrates into something like an email even, or when I say online attacks, I mean social media, a direct email or personal. email or an interaction out in the public world. But the one thing is for sure, the more this happens, the more the chances of that migrating into the real world, the greater those chances become. And so you reach this point where on the one hand, you almost have to reach a comfort level with this just goes with the territory now. And then on the other hand, you also have in the

very back of your mind that this could get very real, very fast, and you have no idea when or how or who or what. And it's a very difficult, I think it's a very difficult way to live and that this is the way that a lot of people have had to live over the last several years. You know, there has been an enormous amount of good reporting on the avalanche of threats in acts of intimidation and say school board members or election workers

or how threats have escalated against members of Congress. And I think that if there's one thing, that I think a lot of folks who are not in this world don't appreciate is how much the omnipresence of threats and fears of violence is distorting our political process and how an enormous amount of what you might consider to be like, okay, well, that person's just a total coward. They have no soul. They have no, they have nothing, you know, what an empty suit, what a jellyfish. A lot of those people are responding to actual fears, physical fears for their families, for themselves. And it's distorting us because we don't know right now how to live like this in a way that is

going to be, how do we live like this, how do we endure this and push through this in a way that this is not the new permanent reality of public engagement, that this is hovering over people, this atmosphere of threat and intimidation. Yeah, and I think it's gotten a lot easier to dismiss, or a lot harder to dismiss, rather, than it was. I mean, so when my grandmother was dying 10 years ago, one of my cousins, who was already a little unstable, went completely crazy. My mother was the executive for estate and starts sending my mother an escalating number of emails that start with just saying mean things, then escalate to like the world would be better off without you in it. And my mother is understandably freaked out and is like, do I need to get a number of emails that? a restraining order, and I am, like, she's really freaking out, and she was not someone who freaked

out a lot. And so I am just frantically trying to calm her down. I was like, Mom, Mom, I get death threats all the time. They never do anything. So, fun fact, the words, mom, I get death threats all the time, do not calm mothers down at all. Yeah, I was going to say. I was not thinking that one through. I did get her successfully off the subject of her own safety and onto mine. But, like, I remember in 2012, the first time I got a picture of my house emailed to me with a gun site superimposed on it. It was really freaky. And then over time, you're just like, well, no one's shown up at my house. I guess it's like, I guess they're probably not going to. And if they do, they're probably not going to email me about it first. They're just going to show up. And now, you know,

the Washington Post has a security team and they're lovely people, but they're always sending me, like, we've found this. And it's like some random person on blue sky. who was like, someone should kill Megan McArdle. And I was like, man, not even on like my list of top 100 threats to my physical safety. But thank you, guys. I really appreciate the effort. Kevin, I didn't know you were on blue sky. But it is true.

Now, I think about this as more when I do public appearances. Because if someone wanted to shoot me, they could show up with a gun and shoot me. And there are people who have definitely expressed an interest in doing so over the years. We're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. Jonah, I personally know more than a handful of elected officials who have left public office because, at least in part, because they are afraid for their own safety and their family's safety. Very few of them want to talk about it in public, which I think helps the public fail to appreciate just how widespread this is, just how concerned people really are.

Lisa McCausky was talking about this just within the past couple of months and said something to the effect of we're all afraid. Mike Johnson, Speaker Mike Johnson, after this shooting yesterday, said there was a, quote, deluge of requests from lawmakers for added security. David is right that this is, I think this is dramatically distorting our political debate, you know, whether it's elected officials, whether it's, you know, people who do what we do for a living. You know, we've all had the kinds of threats that Megan describes. It's the kind of thing where, you know,

if you see a pickup truck parked down the street that you wouldn't have thought twice about years ago, today you see it and you're like I think I saw that there a few weeks ago what's that guy doing and on the one hand you don't want to be paranoid and you don't want to live your life like that on the other hand

if there are these threats it certainly shapes the way that you behave and act are we speaking specifically of elected officials what does it say about the class of elected officials if good people are leaving office because

they're worried about this who's taking their place people who are just less concerned about this, people who prioritize things other than their own family's safety? Yeah, so very quickly, I have a story. I gave a speech at UMass Amherst. This is towards the end of the Bush years. Maybe there's beginning of the Obama years.

I can't remember. Anyway, around 2008, right before my first book came out. And I come down, the school has like its own hotel kind of thing, sort of like Cornell. And I come down the elevator to meet the head. of the college Republicans, and he says, Mr. Goldberg, we have good news and we have bad news. And I was like, oh, okay, what's the good news?

He says, well, the good news is we got approval for four plainclosed Massachusetts State Police to guard you at all times. Two will be with you everywhere you go and two will be in disguise in the audience in case they need to swarm somebody. And I was like, okay, so that's the good news. What's the bad news?

And he says, we didn't get permission for the metal detectors at the entry to the venue. And I said to him, am I in danger? And he said, he had sort of like Megan's mom, I get death threats all the time thing.

He had one of the least reassuring answers that I've ever heard. He says, well, we certainly hope not. Well, that makes me so much more comfortable. Look, I think what it says about the quality of the kind of politicians we have, I think you can speak at a very, very high level of generality about this, but you have to have a lot of caveats about exceptions to the rule. You know, there are a bunch of guys who are military

vets who stayed in, you know, have a more even keel risk assessment kind of, or threat assessment kind of vibe. And they're sticking it out. I don't think we want to say that anybody who sticks around or people who are so desirous of being in the public spotlight that they don't care about the safety of their families or anything like that. That said, there's a lot of people, I mean, I've had these conversations. I know some of the politicians that you're talking about, Steve, who are just like, look, I can make a lot more money in the private sector. I don't have to be on planes all the time. And, you know, if you're trying to do a checklist of reasons to get out of public life, if you then add to the pros and cons list, the con of your family is in physical

danger or you're in physical danger. It's like, yeah, maybe I'll just be chief counsel at that company instead. And we've seen that happen a lot. I think, though, that another way to think about this is there's a lot of interesting sort of psychological and social science stuff about the way humans react to other humans when they're deeply stressed and when they are deeply suspicious that the other person might be a threat. We're one of the only animals that has to think about preemption. When dogs fight, when bears fight, when cats fight, they go up to a line and then they back off because there's no concern that they have an extra weapon behind their back that they can bring out. But humans, because of tools, have developed this fear

that, like, I have to kill them before they can kill me. And it creates a certain part of of a paranoia thing that is more present in human beings than others. And one of the things that triggers your paranoia is being around other paranoid people. And we've seen this so much in our politics in the last 10 years of people imagining conspiracies everywhere they go, of feeling like they're in danger. And so therefore, they have to act first. And I got to say, I think we have been heroic here and not talking about what I think is one of the more important issues here, which is the rhetoric, I mean, Megan made a veiled reference

to it earlier. Some of the rhetoric we've seen in the last 24 hours is so wildly irresponsible and dangerous. It has a very Rwanda Tutsi's Hutu's vibe to it to me. You know, you have Jesse Waters on Fox. You have a bunch of other people saying, you have Steve Bannon saying Charlie Kirk is a victim of a war. They're at war with us. We have to receive. We have to respond. It's they as this blanket group, you know, so they can filter out the fact that there are literally, literally as far as I can tell, every leading Democrat and left-wing pundit in America has condemned this forthrightly and pretty responsibly with the exception of Matthew Dowd. And yet the response in social media, the response from a lot of these gibronies is it's they.

They're all in on it. This is a concerted effort to get us. And it's triggering a preemptive reflex in a lot of people that I think is profoundly dangerous. And the ability of people to filter out the fact that there's a body count that litters the landscape across the ideological spectrum is so worrisome to me. It's like they're only coming for us. No, there are, as Megan said, there are crazy people. There are altered people coming for all sorts of people.

and they're also ideologically triggered people coming for all sorts of people. It was less than three months ago we saw these state legislators in Minnesota shot down in their home by a guy dressed up as a cop. And Brett Kavanaugh was almost killed. I mean, one of the things that people need to do

is factor in the assassination attempts that failed because they're just as important in understanding the scope of the problem as the ones that succeed. And living in a society where we have these social media algorithms that are prompted to trigger that fight or flight preemptive sort of attitude and that a whole bunch of people who monetize it so irresponsibly, that's one of the things I think is really dangerous.

I agree with David entirely. Law of Large Numbers says most people won't be driven to violence by this. But if you just keep turning up the gain and widening the exposure to more people, you're going to get more violence, and the more violence begets more violence. Yeah, the members of the hundreds. and second chairborn, warriors who think that they are, like, they're amping up the troops. Like, you're not, you're not a friggin civil warrior. You are a middle-aged person sitting in a chair.

Pipe down. I mean, like, what do you think you're doing? In the real world, it's probably worth pointing out that, you know, Gavin Newsom had Charlie Kirk on his podcast not long ago. Sorry, I recall. If this is a civil war, that's a really weird way. for the person who wants to be the Democratic presidential nominee next time around to to execute said Civil War. One of the things I sometimes try to explain to people who bring up this kind of stuff, this real us and them sort of thing, is that this is theater.

And in the real world, Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow have a lot more in common with one another than either one of them does with the schmucks in their audiences. You know, that's, that's, that is how things actually are. And we're in a situation where people, though, because they live online, because they don't have a lot of real world experience, because they don't, they don't have those green room conversations that people like Jonah have. They don't understand the difference between this kind of performative cable news politics and the way to inform social media as well and how people actually live their lives and how things actually work. You know, and I don't know how we escape. from this right now, because in a nation this big, this polarized, with everyone having instant access to communicating their worst thought instantly and immediately, you're always going to have someone out there doing the worst thing that you say that they are doing.

And so you could have, like we saw yesterday, from every living president, every leading political figure, every person who has any sort of constituency at all of. if any real impact or meaning was united absolutely in condemning this assassination. But there were some people, a professor here or an activist there or just some rando on TikTok, you're always going to have somebody who's going to play into that worst stereotype. And then when that happens, that one person, that two, those two people or those five people on blue sky, get pushed as representative of the whole right back into that media ecosystem so that then people are thinking, oh, the left celebrated Charlie Kirk's death.

Well, no, it didn't. Well, here's five social media posts that proved that they did. And that's where we end up constantly with this conviction that they kill people we like and then they celebrate because somebody did the identity. attack and some few people celebrated, it becomes them. And I'm not sure how we get out of that doom loop. Well, and it's also the case that the people who are expressing condolences across the partisan divide, across the ideological spectrum, you see those things.

They're certainly encouraging, but there's not much that, you know, that people like you or me or others, you don't act on that. I mean, it's great. There was a statement from the young Democrats of Connecticut. the young Republicans of Connecticut put out a joint statement yesterday saying what happened at Utah Valley University this afternoon is unacceptable we reject all forms of political violence and one on in a joint statement these Republicans and Democrats on the other hand as as you've pointed out we had a lot of people who didn't do that and a lot of people on either the left or the right who went through the list of recent political episodes of political violence and including only the ones that fit their narrative the left is the only one that does this. The right is the only one that does this. Unfortunately, one of the people who did that was President Donald Trump gave a statement last night. In some ways, I think, an appropriate

statement remembering Charlie Kirk, who was a big supporter of Donald Trump, remembering his family or talking about the impact on his family. But as the statement went on, President Trump listed a number of incidents of left-wing violence, including the attempted assassination of him in Butler, Pennsylvania, last summer, and vowed to go after the killers and go after everybody who supported them and people who agree with them. We're going to play a clip of that.

From the attack on my life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year, which killed a husband and father, to the attacks on ICE agents, to the vicious murder of a health care executive in the streets of New York, to the shooting of House Majority Leader Steve, Scalise, and three others. Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives. Jonah, what did you make of Donald Trump's statement on this? It felt rather ominous to me, and I'm wondering if that's just me,

or was it something that should make us nervous? I feel like it's ominous. I feel like it is tied into this whole they thing, the people who funded these things and these organizations and whatnot. It is the gravitational pull to want to do what aboutism at a moment like this is very, very hard to resist. and the idea that Donald Trump can claim the high road about rhetoric, about radicalization, about forgiving of violence, you know, Mr. Pardon everybody from January 6th,

it can make you feel like you're taking crazy pills, and I can only imagine what, like, hardcore left-wing people think when they hear all of that. And we could go too far afield with this. this at this point in the podcast about Trump, but like in much the same way, I thought his flag burning executive order was intended to get people to burn flags so that he could have a pretext to do what he wanted to do anyway. And I think a lot of his language is he wants it to be self-fulfilling prophecy to a certain extent. Um, and that that worries me. Um, but I think, you know, just to change the topic slightly on this, the fact that this administration basically twice, the head of the FBI, twice said they got the guy.

Or let people believe they got the guy when they didn't. Should be such a wild scandal for law enforcement. And it's the kind of thing that if it happened on Biden's watch, Trump would be, this is outrageous. You know, when the search needed to be most intense, they're telling you they got them and they didn't get the wrong guy and what you know all that kind of stuff and the reason i'm worried about that is that every day this guy isn't caught and i'm assuming it's a guy i don't mean to get too sexist but i don't think

megan will you know uh object don't erase female killers jonah um the the longer this goes without catching this guy the sooner the quicker the conspiracy theories are going to fester um and they're going to get bad and it's going to the absence of catching this guy is going to feed much like the bombing, the pipe bombs at the DNC and RNC, it is going to feed the idea that this was, in fact, a network, that there were conspiracies. There's no way he could have gotten out of there alone, had to be, you know, like a whole web and all of that kind of stuff.

Oh, you're already seeing it. Yeah. It's all over. Yeah. And I think it's going to multiply and multiply. And Trump's rhetoric does not help with that, and the incompetence of Cash Patel does not. help with that. David, did you have thoughts on Donald Trump's remarks? I mean, you know,

the, Joan is exactly right about this memory-holing that's taking place and the nuclear strength what-aboutism. I feel like the Trump remarks, most were mostly, I would put them mostly appropriate, mostly fine, but I'm actually much less worried about the immediate impact to the Trump remarks, then I am worried about the very thing that Jonah was talking about, which is we are watching this conviction, this sense that there was a real deep-seated conspiracy against Charlie Kirk is beginning to metastasize already. In every moment that this, two things you're seeing, two things you're seeing metastasizing already. One is violence is exclusively left-wing. You're seeing that all over sort of the Magaverse.

It's exclusively left wing. And this had to be an op, that this had to be a government op of some kind. I'm seeing the deranged to anti-Semites on the right saying it was Israel already. Already you're saying that Kirk had enemies on the far right. You're getting the deep state conspiracies trotted out. And I'm very worried that every hour that passes, this is going to penetrate deeper and deeper and deeper. This is one of those rare times where I don't think that Donald Trump's words are the central to the conversation at the moment. I think what's central to the conversation in the moment is what we're seeing sort of metastasizing online.

I want to end with a tweet from Charlie Kirk sent on June 17th of this year. When things are moving very fast and people are losing their minds, it's important to stay grounded. Turn off your phone, read scripture, spend time with friends, and remember, Internet Fury is not real life. It's going to be okay. sometimes it turns out internet fury is real life but it's good advice turn off your phone stay grounded spend time with friends thanks for listening please join us again next week on the dispatch podcast if you like what we're doing here there are a few easy ways to support us you can rate review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us and we hope

you'll consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at thedispatch.com slash join, and if you use my promo code, Roundtable, you'll get one month free and help me win the ongoing deeply scientific internal debate over which dispatch podcast is the true flagship. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at Roundtable at the dispatch.com. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in.

And a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Max Miller, Victoria Holmes, and Noah Hickey. We couldn't do it without. Thanks again for listening. Please join us again next week. Thank you.