The Ricochet Podcast - Free Speech, Rightly Handled

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Steve Hayward is back with James and Charles after a few weeks away, and the trio sits down with Josh Hammer, senior editor-at-large of Newsweek, to talk about his murdered friend, Charlie Kirk. The gang discusses the Turning Point enterprise, the mission of its founder, and the ugly attempts by clickbait peddlers to contort the late-Kirk's message.Plus, the hosts break down everything right and wrong with Jimmy Kimmel's suspension, Pam Bondi's comments, the proposed investigation into Antifa, and the latest on the TikTok deal. Sound from this week's open: Trump and Jimmy Kimmel's latest public comments about each other.

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Rikishay Podcast. I'm James Lylex with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Hayward. Today we talk to Josh Hammer about rising anti-Semitism on the right. So let's have ourselves a podcast. This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody called a friend.

This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish, okay? Jimmy Kimmel is not a talented person. He had very bad ratings, and they should have fired him a long time ago. So, you know, you can call that free speech or not. He was fired for lack of talent. Welcome, everybody. It's the Rickrache podcast number 758. I'm James Lylex in Minneapolis.

Overcast, Atumnal, beautiful Charles C.W. Cook in Florida, Stephen Hayward, we presume in California. And gentlemen, the days of Joan Embry showing up and bringing a marmoset who appeased on Johnny Carson. coat is, those days are gone. The talk show is gone. And frankly, I don't care what Kevin Stolbert or Kimmy Jiml say because they're babbling to the bubble. And if the market wants to take care of them, then the market will. But what we have now is something that sort of has the taint, the faint width of a government leaning, shall we say. And you could say, no, simply a business proposition. But the prospect of a merger concentrates a man's

mind wonderfully, as Samuel Johnson said. And so it may not. have been a strictly business decision after all. So I'm sort of quasi uncomfortable about a lot of this, but what say you? Well, it seems to me the Trump administration made two enforced errors this week, probably more than two, but on these particular issues, you had first Pam Bondi coming out saying, we're going to prosecute hate speech. And, you know, this was idiotic. And she tried to walk it back a little and say she only meant incitement, but that's not new. And although part of me thinks that this is their genius move to make the left come out and say, no, no, hate speech is protected under the First Amendment, which, you know, it's sort of like

when Trump made the Democrats come out against policing crime here a few weeks ago with the National Guard in Washington. But then the other one that is more worrying. And I think here Charlie and I, Charlie Cook and I are in heated agreement, or certainly the National Review editors I read, that it was a mistake for the FCC to throw its weight around. Yeah. And so I think the marketplace would have dictated this decision anyway. I think the Sinclair and what's it, the other independent stations that said, we're going to dump the show, would have reached that same point. And I'll bet ABC was looking for its own reason to pull the plug on Kimball, because his ratings were worse, Colbert's and has to be losing an equal amount of money. And the right remedy, of course, is to abolish the FCC. And who knows, you know, you might just get enough Democrats to vote for doing that. if it was proposed by Republicans, if they have the wit to do it. Charlie?

Well, as I joked on the editors podcast, I'm very pleased that we are as a country now all in violent agreement, that there's no such thing as hate speech, that it's fine for private companies to refuse service if they don't want to be implicated by the speech of their customers, and that the FCC should at no point interfere in the free marketplace of ideas. These are three propositions that I've been writing about for 15 years, and usually the critiques that I get come from the left.

Now, that doesn't in any way excuse what Pam Bondi said last Monday, and it doesn't in any way excuse what Brendan Carr said. I disagree profoundly with both of those claims, but I am a little bit perplexed to see the left jumping around and screaming in support of the proposition that there is something intrinsically corrupt or a liberal about the FCC making demands in return for issuing licenses. Is this a new position? I hope it is. I hope we'll get out of Congress a bipartisan law that abolishes the FCC, which, by the way, is possible. I've seen some people try to actually this one, but it is

possible. It was possible in 1934 when the Communications Act was written. It was possible in the 1960s when the Kennedy administration was going after conservatives on the radio. And it's definitely possible now in an age in which the internet and satellite and cable predominate, and in which the only reason the FCC has any control over ABC whatsoever is that a very small part of ABC is delivered via the airwaves. And this is the weird thing, isn't it? Most people do not consume ABC over the airwaves, but because some do, it has full control in the areas over which it has control over ABC, whereas it has no control whatsoever over, say, Netflix, because nobody gets Netflix over the air.

The fact this wasn't revisited already is bizarre to me. Now I think it should be. That's not to excuse Brendan Carr, who has done a complete 180 on everything he ever said until about eight months ago. It's not to say it isn't worrying to see what he said. I'm slightly skeptical. That's actually what did this,

but it still matters that he said it. But this is the moment. We have unity on the core question. We have the left feeling aggrieved because they may have been targeted by the right. We have the right that has for years said the FCC is too powerful. let's do something about it. Well, the good thing is, of course, is that,

wait, that now that we're all agreement on these bedrock principles, this is an agreement that will last forever. There is a fundamental realization. The lightning has flashed and engraved in the minds of both these true principles from which they will never stray, the idea that the other side would get in power and instantly abandoned those things that made them angry a few years ago. It was preposterous to me, but anyway, Stephen, you were going to say.

Well, if I was in the mode of dialogue like Charlie Kirk, I would like to have a line of liberals to whom I would ask, what does the FCC actually do? And why is it important to keep it? And I'll bet they couldn't give you answers to either one of those questions. But I'm sure there will be a residual of them at least to say, oh, we can't get rid of a great New Deal agency. It's from the new or something like that, right? I mean, when I first got into radio, the fairness doctrine was still an effect. And that resulted in some of the most boring programming you'll ever hear in your life. you know, at 1 o'clock in the morning when they have to slap something on, to be fair.

And that was abolished, and everybody said that that was the absolute death of everything, and it wasn't. It was sort of the net neutrality of its day. But I wouldn't doubt that actually there would be some attempt to codify and regulate, you know, to bring, the left has been wanting to bring back the fairness doctrine since forever, mainly because of Rush Limbaugh. Now that AM radio doesn't have the power in reach that it did, they don't seem to be so many cries for it.

But yes, so we're in a tit-for-tat war, and the idea that there's, here's what I find interesting. Nobody is calling for a truce here. Nobody's saying, wait a minute, this is getting out of hand. Let's all step back. Let's all lower the temperature because there's just so much built-up resentment about cancel culture that nobody, everybody simply wants to give the horses their reign. Nobody wishes to go back because it would be self-defeating. It would give the other side of win.

And frankly, there are a lot of scores to settle. That is not a good political environment. But it's what we were warning about. It's what we got because norms, precious norms, were shredded and fed to the wind. Right? Or do you think that there's eventually going to be some, you know, some tiring on the rights? You know what? We've gone too far.

We've got a kindergarten teacher fired in Montana for saying that Charlie Kirk was a Nazi. I think that's, we've gone too far. I don't think so. I don't see any desire for abatement on the right at all. Well, no. And I also think that, look, the left likes every instrument of power it can grab. You know, Charlie mentioned that back in the Kennedy years, the FCC was leveraged to squeeze out conservative radio programming.

The other thing the FCC has done over the years is press the diversity racket, right? Going back to the 90s, they were pressuring radio stations to add minorities to their board of directors and so forth. They're going to be very low, thinking of those kinds of ways of leveraging all the federal agencies, but especially in the broadcast area. But I'm one thing about the fairness doctrine, right, James. I always have to patiently instruct people who say,

you know, Fox News couldn't get away with what they do if we had the Fairness Doctrine, and I remind them that it only applied to broadcast media, and that even if you brought back a Fairness Doctrine, it would not apply to Fox News or any other cable channel, CNN, MSNBC, and moreover, I'll bet even the existing Supreme Court that upheld the Fairness Doctrine, I think, in 1968 or 1969, would not do so today because it was very circumstantial on the scarcity of the airwaves. That was really the nub of the decision.

And that today is rendered completely obsolete for all the obvious reasons already mentioned. Well, Charles, are you worried that this administration might have set up something called, oh, I don't know, the disinformation governance board? Look, because they did. Not this one, but they did. But they did, and it lasted about six months or so. But it's funshunders. We had two Supreme Court cases in the last term that dealt with this question of jawboning. The first one went nowhere for lack of standing.

Justice Alito wrote a really good dissent. The second one was 9-0. there is no doubt that the federal government is unable to do via pressure on private organizations what it could not do directly Brendan Carr crossed that line whether or not he actually did anything he crossed that line by suggesting that he wanted to but if you read the first decision which was conveniently swept aside by the standing holding and thereby taken out of the left's peripheral vision. The details are absolutely chilling.

It runs through years and years worth of Biden administration pressure on private social media entities. And the fact that the court concluded that the connection between the speech and the harms was too tenuous to yield a ruling doesn't make what is in there as facts that all members of the court acknowledge any different. So I'm with you on this.

It's why I started by joking that we're now united. The notion that this is a conservative invention is preposterous. That doesn't mean we should do it. It doesn't make it okay. But I'm a little annoyed. And it's why although I've said I'm bothered by it, I'm not going to go to the mats on this one and write 12. pieces on it because I'm a little annoyed to watch the, what's the word, opportunism.

I mean, we've had people in the last 24 hours saying that this is the worst thing that has ever happened to American free speech. We've had people saying, I think Eric Swalwell, that this is exactly what the Nazis did in 1934. We've had people suggesting that this represents a wholesale betrayal of principle that is essentially reverse the positions of the two parties on free speech. And I'm sorry. I will happily condemn Brendan Carr for his words. I will happily say the FCC shouldn't do this and I'll happily say it shouldn't exist. But I'm just not indulging that nonsense. You guys can go to hell with that. No, I mean, J6 overshadowed in its terrible impact on the nation, any of the riots that

burned down sections of American cities. And in this case, the deplatforming, if you will, of Jimmy Kimmel is worse than anything that happened on the Twitter files. or kicking Trump off Twitter or firing actors for beliefs. You know, when was the last time he saw James Wood movie? He ought to be in about three movies every year. None of that stuff actually really happened. And if it did, it was good. And that's part of it.

The amnesia is part of it. Now, it's interesting some people have pointed out that the FCC regulations actually do give them power because they prohibit, quote, broadcast hoaxes in the intentional distortion of news. And you think, well, Obviously, that's not being applied very often. There are conditions that have to be met, knowledge of falsity,

foreseeable public harm, and direct public harm. So one can make the point that somebody could listen to what Kimmel said, and you say, yeah, it was a right-wing Nick Fuentes-Groper-type who did it. I'm going to go out and shoot one of those. In which case, you could make the point that the FCC might have a rationale for dabbling. But I agree with you, Charlie. I agree the statement was made. The chilling effect is there.

But again, where have these people been? when what was done to Twitter, what was done to Twitter, what was done to Facebook. You've got Zuckberg saying, no, they came to us and said, you've got to shut this down. That's, to me, in the face of a much greater problem, the efficacy of the viruses, the origins of them, the impact that it was having on the lockdowns and the economy. I mean, we were, the idea that you could have a full and frank discussion about those things. Forget about it. Forget about it.

As long as we're talking about things in the past, let's talk about. about an organization that was formed by the Communist Party in Germany during the 30s in the Weimar Republic, the anti-fascist, the Antifa. Well, they got the same flag. Now we're going to declare Antifa to be a terrorist organization. And of course, many people have said that Antifa is an idea. You can't stop an idea. I actually think they're kind of a loosely organized organization with lots of little local cells and a general overriding set of principles. Hell, if they got a logo, they're an organization. Well, look, I was on campus at Berkeley on February 5, 2017 for the Milo

Unopoulos riot, and I was up on a grassy knoll, I want to say, a conspiracy, right by Sprow Plaza. And one of the reasons was quite obvious to me is you could see the Antifa folks infiltrating from every direction, dressed in black, carrying pipes, backpacks, masked up with walkie-talkies. so they were in communication with one another, right? There was already a whole student protest and people yelling, no hate speech on Berkeley, you know, from bullhorns and stuff. But the people came in and immediately started, you know, tipping over the generator for the lights, starting a fire and things of that kind.

And then it spilled out into a riot into the streets, among which, you know, a lot of students eagerly participated. But the point is that that was an organized effort coordinated. And I'm sure they're using all of the various Internet tools for, you know, the message, it was a Snapchat where the messages disappear after 10 seconds or something like that. And, you know, we have a history of this. You know, the FBI rolled up a lot of the weather underground and the militant chapters of the SDS 50 years ago, made some mistakes. Of course, they always do. But we have, and of course, you know, Hoover infiltrated the Communist Party,

what, 70, 80 years ago to make sure that, well, make sure, you know, suppress conspiratorial and violent designs and so forth. So, you know, there's precedent for this, and I'm completely down with it myself. Well, Charlie, the difference may be here, whereas the student, you know, the weather underground and SDS were self-formed and had their own tight little ideologies and robbed banks to get along. What we have here are organizations that may or may not, they may be funded by NGOs themselves backed by secretive, you know, cat-stroking bond villain billionaire somewhere.

and that the intent here is to go after the organizations that give them money. Now, there's a variety of cutouts through which it flows, but we saw that they were investigating, I think it's armed queers of Salt Lake City, and the person in charge of that is pictures of her on stage with Elizabeth Warren, ties to Utah NGOs that get awards from the U.N., which, again, it always makes you sound like a conspiracy nutcase. She's tied to the U.N., you know,

I regard the UN as a generally inificatious, wordless organization, with an exception of a few things. But still, there it is. There's the whole NGO thing. There's the whole little red lines of yarn between thumbtacks on the big board. And if they go after the donors for this, it may be hard to prove, but it's a new tack. This is all going to be in the execution. Oh, I'm not saying you shoot them.

No. No, but I think it's an important distinction because I agree with you, and I've seen a lot of people say, but what if this happened, wouldn't that be bad? And the answer is yes. If the government started going after people for political donations or speech, that would be bad. If the government started going after people who were assembling and petitioning the government, that would be bad. But all that has been announced thus far is that there will be an investigation. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

And in fact, if you look back to the last time we had widespread political violence in the United States, which was especially the period between the late 60s and early 70s, we had 3,000 bombings in three years. We did stop that by going after the people who did it and their networks. I'm not saying they're identical networks. Perhaps there's nothing. As you know, it can be a real squish on this stuff, but I don't have a problem with investigating it.

So we will see. And now we bring to the podcast, Josh Hammer, political commentator, attorney, columnist, senior editor at large for Newsweek. Hosted the Josh Hammer show, and he serves as senior counsel for the Article III project. It's the author of Israel and Civilization published earlier this year. Josh, welcome. It's a pleasure.

Thanks for having me. Well, the last week and a half or so, oh, boy, it's had a deep effect on all conservatives. And it doesn't always have to do with how much they knew Charlie. I think before his assassination, I think there were two groups. There were people sort of knew him out there as a planet in the firmament, a star. And there were others who were deeply immersed in what he was doing. what he was saying. And since his murder, a lot of us have been going back to what he said

and reacquainting ourselves with him or getting a look for the first time at the nature of his debate and the nature of his arguments. But you were there a lot earlier than that. If you could tell us how you got to know, the late Charlie Kirk. Sure. So I first got to know Charlie when I was the opinion editor in Newsweek. I still work in Newsweek, but I'm a slightly different capacity, but I ran on the op-ed page there for about three years. When I took over, Charlie was one of our conservative columnists. So he, that's kind of how I got to know him. I got to know his executive producer on the Charlie Kirk show, Andrew Colvitt, as well, because Andrew was my main intermediary for the columns that Charlie was writing there. And, you know, we kind of

struck up a natural affinity for one another. I spoke at a handful of Turning Point USA conferences over the years, not a ton. I wasn't a regular at every conference, but, But, you know, I did a handful. It was really only over the past year, year and a half, I'd say that we started to get considerably closer. Charlie was very concerned about growing anti-Semitism in pockets of the American, right. He was very concerned about rising anti-Israel, zealtery, for lack of bare description there. Charlie was very concerned also about maintaining an ecumenical Jewish-Christian alliance. And he formed this group chat for me and a couple others.

there. He called us his brain trust for essentially for these issues, for for for Israel, for Jewish Christian relations, for for nothing less than trying to kind of forge a battle plan for trying to keep this coalition together for saving America by extension Western civilization. So we ended up chatting essentially every day in this chat and elsewhere over the past year, year and a half. We ended up chatting on a Zoom call less than 24 hours before his tragic assassination. We're talking about strategizing for all the anti-Asual questions that he anticipated on his upcoming campus tour. And we're kind of just going issue by issue. How do you explain it there? So we did become pretty close, especially as I became more religious in my Jewish

observance. He is a Charlie's Christianity. He was a very Hebrew Bible-centric Christianity. It was very much a Christianity of the American founding. He was kind of like a John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Christian, let's say it. So he, I mean, he literally kept his version of the Jewish Shabbat, actually, turning his phone off Friday to Saturday night. So he had a natural affinity, I think, for authentic, you know, Torah-based Judaism, for people like me who are coming to embrace that. And we kind of struck up a natural court with one another. And we've lost a true titan.

We've lost a genuine five-star general in our, in our civilizational clash between, as I call it the forces of civilizational, sanity and the forces of civilizational arson. And it is an irreplaceable void that will not be filled anytime soon. I agree. I was listening to a little back and forth he did on campus with somebody who wanted to question his Christian nationalism. Charlie was making a distinction between bringing a Christian and a nationalist, and they got into this heavy conversation that involved a lot of Greek and scripture quoting, which came very naturally to him, very easy. And it was fascinating conversation, and it was not a yelling, screaming argument, and the intellectual tenor of it was above what you expect on 99% of your campus interactions. When I first encountered him years ago, I thought that basically what I was getting from the guy was a genial, standard, facile recitation of basic Christian or basic conservative ideas.

And I've watched, as the man matured intellectually, into something quite different and quite impressive. And the fact that we've lost somebody who wanted to build and not to build the bridge, but to reinforce it and make sure that it can withstand the strains of the bad people tromping over it, the loss of that is key. Keene, and that goes to something that you wrote in Newsweek this week, but I'm going to back off for a second and let Stephen and Charlie ask you a question. Well, yeah, John, is Steve Hayward out in California, and I did, in fact, want to turn to your Newsweek column out today, which raises a broad question in a particular form, and then there's a second related question that's contained in your headline about worrying about grifters, perhaps undermining turning point as it goes forward. By the way, I'm with James. I wasn't much impressed with Charlie when he first burst on the scene, but is a teenager still? And it's been one of the thrilling things to see his increasing capaciousness and capacity and confidence. And you realize that he is turning point.

I mean, he made this thing. And I'll come back to that. But something that's been bothering me for quite a while now is at the center of your column today. And it's the sort of rising, startling, alarming anti-Semitism among a precinct of young people on the right. I picked up this for a while, and it's very disturbing. and you notice that in particular, even before Charlie's killing, you had people trying to influence him, spreading what I think is disinformation. Your account of how what Candace O was saying about, you know,

Israel trying to bribe him or something is just preposterous. And I think you'd deduct that well. But what do we make of this? I'm sure you're tracking this too. And, you know, what needs to be done about this? It's pretty bad. I'm not going to sugarcoat. Steve. It's not good. And Charlie was very much of the opinion that it is not good either. He has all these viral clips that people can find easily on YouTube or social media of him calling it a mind virus, the notion that this tiny population is somehow responsible for your personal woes or societal woes. And he was a, I mean, it's kind of crazy, but no one, Steve, did more than this young evangelical Christian to defend the Jewish people and really defend Jewish scripture. I mean, he was asked about like the tone.

I mean, it's, I mean, we literally message about this. He was asking questions about, like, the Talmud. I'm not that I'm a Talmudic expert. I'm not even an ordained rabbi. I mean like it, but, but the notion that Charlie Kirk was put in this position of being, like, the number one on-campus defender of the Jewish people and the Talmud is, is patently insane, frankly. And, and it says a lot about where we are. Now, no, sorry, go ahead. And he, he really cares.

about pushing back against this. Now, part of the way that he did so, I think people can disagree with some of these specific ways that he did so. For instance, I disagree with Turning Point's decision to continue to platform Tucker Carlson at these two National Summit Conference in July, the one where I debated Dave Smith on the Israel issue that Charlie moderate that debate. I don't like that Tucker Carlson is still platforms at Turning Point USA. I don't work for Turning Point USA. I'm just a friend of Charlie's and a friend of Andrews and a friend of the organizations. But you don't have to agree with everything that they did. But I think what Charlie was fundamentally trying to do, Steve,

because he saw himself properly, properly, as kind of the conservative voice for younger millennials and really Gen Z above all, which he was. He absolutely unequivocally was that. And he was trying the best he could to not kind of throw a blunt object and like not over the head and say, you're wrong, this is the right answer. He was trying to kind of gently lead young people to the right.

answer. For instance, if you look at a lot of his political rhetoric over the past year and a half, he started talking a lot about Islam and the threat of radical Islam, talking a lot about Dearborn Michigan, Islamic immigration to America. He made this like a really, really recurring late motif. He had this great YouTuber named Appostate Prophet, a former guest in my show. He had him speak at the conference in July that I spoke at. And I think to be clear, he was doing this partially as an intrinsic manner. I think strategically he also saw radical Islam. as one of the issues that could make young Republicans, you know, naturally sympathize more with Jewish people, a Jewish age. So he kind of did have this tragedy there. He knew that he, that if he kind of, you know, went full Mark Levine, and Mark's a friend, be clear, I am not disparaging him at all, at all.

In the slightest, Mark's a legend. But I think Charlie knew that if he went full Mark Levine, so to speak, then he would lose credibility with these people. So he was trying to kind of finagle. And again, people can disagree with how he went about it there. But fundamentally, his heart really was in the right place. And I know that because his Christian theology was in the right place. As his pastor, Rob McCoy, has now been publicly saying, Charlie, again, as I said, was kind of the American founder's version of a Protestant Christian. He was genuinely of the belief that, per the book of Genesis, the land of Israel, was given to the Jewish people.

He thought that anti-Semitism was a horrific mind virus, that it was incompatible, not just with human decency, but with Christianity properly construed as well. And he was very concerned about this. Now, it's a real problem we have it on hands. I don't pretend to have all the answers. I think we first have to kind of just call a spade. A spay, I mean, in a sane, rational country, Candace Owens would be in a mental asylum at this point.

That is my, that's my actual unfiltered belief. The stuff she's saying is so unhinged that she would have been probably involuntarily committed a while ago. The most dangerous of them all is Tucker Carlson, because Tucker is smarter than Candid. and says a lot of the same stuff in a slightly toned down manner, but it's pretty easy to see what he's trying to ultimately do here. It's like Pat Buchanan that way. Yeah, I would argue even more insidious, frankly, than Pat Buchanan. My now publicly stated stance is that Tucker Carlson is the most dangerous anti-Semite in the history of America. I think that he makes Father Kaufflin and Henry Ford look like Child's play, frankly. So it's a real problem, and I don't pretend

exactly what's to know what to do about it there. I guess the final thing I will say, because I don't want to kind of filibuster here, the polling on younger conservatives, younger Republicans is not as black pill dire as some people make it out to be. So for instance, even at the Turning Point USA conference that I debated Dave Smith at a few months ago in July, that actually ends up being Charlie's final turning point conference event on stage, was the moderate debate that I did with Smith, which is pretty crazy to think about. But they did a push poll of all the conference attendees. And the poll showed that still 73% of attendees called themselves pro-Israel. Now, we can quibble and say maybe that would have been 90% 10 years

ago. And perhaps it would have been, but that's still something that can be worked with, right? And, you know, the polling does show overall that Gen Z Republicans are less sympathetic towards, towards Israel, maybe a little less gung-ho about Jewish-Christian relations than 65. Not Republicans there, but they're considerably better on those issues than Gen C, leftist, and liberal. So there's something to work with still, and Charlie understood that. Yeah. So, no, I mean, my restatement of what you and James just said is that Charlie was an Old Testament Christian, which is a compliment, by the way. So shift gears up for a moment. Another worry I have, and then I'm going to turn you over to Charlie Cook, is I'm old enough to

remember, well, not firsthand, but I remember Yaff in the 60s, young American for freedom. M. Stanton Evans who wrote the sharing statements was one of my mentors. And one big, and at first I thought, well, TPSA, it reminds me a little bit of the second coming of Yaff. With this difference, Yaff fell into a lot of infighting and factionalism fairly early on in the 60s, in part because it never had a singular leader of the kind of charisma and personality and organizational capacity as Charlie Kirk. So you can see where I'm going with this. The worry is, is that in the absence of someone of Charlie's compelling and capacious abilities and personality, I just worry about the future of the organization.

And quite aside from the anti-Semitism problem, which is very, you know, very important. There's just the basic organizational difficulties of succession. And I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is this on the mind of you and other friends of the place? Sure. So first of all, you know, YAS still exists, obviously. And, you know, I still do speeches for them, actually.

I spoke at the at the at the at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara this past March when my book came out for you know that's what yeah it's been very good to me as well I and they're they're very much still alive and kicking but you know turning point did really change the game fundamentally in a way for young campus activists in a way that I'm not sure any prior organization did and that's all that's all the Charlie's credit by the way I mean he formed this thing when he was literally in high school it's a it's absolutely tremendous it's truly extraordinary what he was. was able to build. And you're asking the right questions. I don't pretend to have all the answers. They've, they've, they've already named his his grieving widow, Erica, as the CEO and chairman. And look, I don't know Erica personally super well. I do know that she is extraordinarily strong, as I think the whole world saw last Friday in her incredible, incredible eulogy. I mean, one of the most impressive oratory performances I've seen maybe in my entire life, frankly. So she's definitely very strong. She definitely shares, as far as I can tell, and as far as I'm aware, virtually all the political convictions and so forth that Charlie Kirk

held dear. And there's really no one better to carry on the torch than her. That's actually what Charlie wanted. I mean, to the extent that he talked about his successor, which I don't think was a whole lot because he was such a young man, but to the extent that he ever talked about it, that is certainly what he, what he wanted to happen. I think the one thing to bear in mind, is that, you know, Charlie was kind of like, in some ways, he wore a lot of half, but in some ways he was kind of a younger man's Jordan Peterson, right? Jordan Peterson has this whole kind of kind of make your bed, you know, fix your own life. Well, Charlie started turning point as kind of like an anti-socialism, anti-big government organization. But as he got older, as he married as a kid, he started to be clear, he cared about economic issues still.

But he started to focus on different issues. He started to really focus on kind of this more social, cultural outreach. I mean, looking at like these young, disaffected men in the millennial and Gen Z. Croft and saying, here's how you can make your life better. You know, that girl that you have your eye on, ask her out on a date, maybe ask for her hands in marriage, maybe try to start a family, maybe go to church on Sunday. I mean, he really started taking up those issues, really come appealing to young men. So that's kind of one natural thought is, will his wife be able to do the same for young men?

Not necessarily, but hopefully you can have an effect when it comes to young women who are about the most of those. demographic in America, right? So, you know, that would be pretty something. That would be something as well. I don't really know, see who she will actually be able to do these kind of campus by campus events. I mean, after all, she's now a single mother. They have two young children. So, you know, a lot of logistical details to figure out there. But they've, they've now gotten somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 new chapter applications for college and high school, which is just astonishing. I think, I think there were fewer than 5,000 when Charlie was assassinated. So, you know, they've gotten, what, 12 times?

as many as they already had more than that, potentially. So the organization is going to go on without question, but there are definitely some major details to film. Hey, Josh, Charles Cook here. I have a much broader question for you. I don't understand why this rise in anti-Semitism has happened. I've been astonished and appalled by it. I often tell people that I first learned about the Holocaust when

I was about seven. I had a friend at my school, Daniel Goldhill, who told me about it. And I didn't believe him. And the reason I didn't believe him was not because I thought he was lying, but because why would anyone do that? Right? It's such an insane thing that happened. And it was my friend. I mean, you just think, well, what are you talking about? And you learn that it happened. And when October 7th happened, it had just not occurred to me for a single second that the response would be in America how it has been. Like, I, I watch. what happened in the year after and subsequently, and I just was surprised by it. I thought, I suppose that we were maybe immune from that. So what Charlie Kirk was dealing with and

what we're seeing from the likes of Tucker and Kandes Owens is surprising to me. And I just wonder if you have any insight into how this has come back in 2025. Yeah, it's a very good question. and it's one that I've been thinking a lot about over the past couple of years. There's a few things going on here that I can try to connect the dots for. So on a simpler kind of level of politics and foreign policy, Charles, I think you've seen an entire generation of younger conservatives who have kind of grown up in the milieu where they have seen and they've been told they've experienced a lot of the failures of the post-9-11 American foreign policy. And I share many of those concerns, many of those criticisms, not all of them, but I definitely share a lot of them.

And it's kind of become something of accepted truth, even though I don't think it's particularly true, to be honest with you. But a lot of people have accepted this notion that the only reason that America has gone involved in the sands of Iraq or the mountains of Afghanistan is due to our alliance with Israel, which in some ways kind of is the old Pap Buchanan argument back from the 1990s, right? Right. Whatever merit that argument, by the way, may or may not have had, what I've been arguing is that the Abraham Accords singularly just proved it because it singularly shows that if you strengthen your alliance with Israel there, you actually get better alliances with other Arab countries, and namely the non-Islamist Arab countries. But that's not either here nor there. That narrative is really kind of set foot. I hear that when I debate people like Dave Smith there, that the only reason that America is involved in these wars is because of Israel's, you know, folks like Steve Ben have been kind of resuscitating that sentiment in recent months. and so forth and so forth as well. I think the more interesting sociological question, getting out of the realm of strict foreign policy, is what I see happening is just a complete sustained breakdown in the American people's ability to trust basically anything,

but especially trust institutions and elites and accepted narratives, more generally speaking. I would probably start this going back with Russia Gates, which I think is a legitimate scandal, everything that happened with Russia Gate back in 2016 and 2017, you can kind of take that through the two plus years of the Mueller probe through the 2020 election with the near post-Hunter Biden story and the collusion between Big Tech and the intelligence community there, all the way through the COVID lockdowns, which caused a precipitous decline trust in public authority and medical authority in particular there, all the way to the fact that Democrats essentially ran a mental patient for president after the world saw that he was clearly out to, you know, the nursing home at the that point, to the fact that the regime in power prosecuted the foreign president. So a lot of things happen in a fairly short interval. And the public polling bears this out that really caused the American people to genuinely lose kind of the ability to trust anything. And when you

lose the ability to trust anything whatsoever, you're going to start falling down the rabbit hole of being unable to distinguish between fact and fiction between truth and lies. And typically speaking, when I kind of survey the history of the Jewish people, the Jewish people are generally off when people are able to discern truth from lies, fact from fiction, when people are able to kind of have a society based on skill and merit and things like this, the kind of things that built America. When societies fall down these rabbit holes, of being unable to distinguish false narratives from facts, truth, from lies there, is typically the Jewish people that bear the brunt of

that, certainly first, if not exclusively, right? So that's, I think, the sociological element there. And I think that's probably responsible for most of it. The final thing, which is part of the equation, I think Charlie actually was of this opinion as well, if whatever it's worth, was that Gen Z, if you look at the data, have a lot of unique economic issues. They're becoming the age of which Gen Z is, and I think millennials as well, the age to which they become a first-time property owner is notably higher than Gen X and boomers.

the rate of which they get married. Basically, the year at which they achieve all these various life goals is considerably higher. And that's another element here, too, right? Because when you throw economic resentment, economic frustration there, you know, typically, historically speaking, again, there's one group that oftentimes

gets blamed and it's the Jews. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. But, and, these are atmospheric zeitgeisty things. I think there are some other specific things that have caused to this twofold. One, you have so many students who are going through college and come out with a wrote, lazy, unexamined, progressive view of the world that instantly casts about for

oppressor and oppressed, for colonialism and the rest of it, a template into which they can plug these little words that they think they know so much. And they look at Israel and they look at the Palestinians. And of course, their whole worldview tells them to sympathize with the poor Palestinians who have been, you know, so dreadfully abused since 47. And there's no way to shake them about that because it's ideological and it's religious. And the second is that you have empty young men who have in both of these have to do with a post-religious world in which people are no longer operating

with a sort of religious mentality believed or devoutly believed or not so devoutly believed. But in a post-religious society where empty young men are casting about for meaning and fall prey to the seductions of these dark caves where the people who are pushing out this anti-Semitic tripe are either sort of the grim guys who'd sit around and bitch about the liberty

or people who have their own reasons, certainly not based in religion, and just give these guys something to believe in which they can use as their identity because nobody loves it more when you know something that everybody else doesn't. And part of the latter, I think, and this may sound like conspiracy nonsense,

but is bots, is other countries just having their way and sitting back and cackling and laughing because they've released any number of trolls and bots who feed this stuff. And that's what I see in my feet. Recent accounts, blue-checked, strange name, D' Stormer pictures of Jews as their profile picture, and everything is Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew, Jew.

That's not organic. I don't think some of it is, but there's a tremendous amount of it, I think, that is outside agitators trying to have their way. And it's working. Yeah, look, I don't know exactly the extent of bots, on X. I will note that if we go back and look at Elon Musk's public statements, it seems to me that, at least I recall, that one of his professed reasons for being interested in purchasing Twitter in the first place was to clean it up from bots. And I'm not entirely sure that he's done that. I think would be a very polite way of saying it. There's been a general kind of lack of transparency in the X algorithms in general, which, you know, I would have, I definitely would have liked to have seen a little bit more in that in that respect. Look, there's definitely an element of foreign money here, right? I mean, we know that Qatar is the number one spender when it comes to American higher education.

They have been since 9-11, like literally more than the UK, France, Russia, China, Saudi, any other actor. It's this tiny, you know, Hamas, Mali-Koddling, you know, Al Jazeera hosting country, Qatar. I think that's only a small part of the equation here, to be honest with you. I mean, higher right corruption in general is definitely a huge problem. Don't get me wrong. But we've had a state of higher ed corruption for many decades, going back at least as far. I mean, when did Buckley, Wright, got a man to yell with 1951, right? So, I mean, it's been going on a very, very long time.

I mean, the rise of the Frankfurt School in the 1960s. And, you know, this kind of cultural rise of anti-Semitism, especially increasingly ascendant on the right, is a fairly recent-ish phenomenon. So I don't think that's necessarily totally, totally explanatory for that there. But, you know, definitely, I would like more transparency when it comes to X. I would like a social media experience

that is free of bots. You know, I would definitely highly much prefer that. But I'm not sure that's kind of the biggest issue going on here, honestly. Going to the funeral? I would very much like to, but the timing is just, a little too difficult. It's, uh, I keep Shabbat and the Jewish Sabbath and Saturday night,

and then the Jewish New Year, Russia Jonah starts Monday night. So it's just, um, I live in Florida, so flying across country. It's a really, it's, it's kind of logistically very difficult, unfortunately. All right. Well, next year in Phoenix. Josh Hammer, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a great conversation. You can read his stuff at Newsweek and elsewhere. And we hope to speak to you soon. And we hope that our reasons for doing so, we'll be happy, joyous and, and, uh, and good for the future of mankind. So thank you. And we'll talk to you later. Thank you guys. I appreciate it. So before we go, a couple more

things. Yeah, Charlie, you're absolutely right. The rise on the right of anti-Semitism is one of those baffling and absolutely nauseating developments. And we need to well, not to go all Barney Fife on you, we need to nip it in the bud, even though it's not budding anymore.

It's actually sprouting branches and nightshade. One of Josh's pieces about how this absolutely, you know, this could crack the MAGA movement, which I think is a bit overstated, but headlines got a headline. I don't think you're going to see Fuentes and Candice Owens picking up huge amounts of support, but there's going to be a noisy griper faction. And we've got to do to it what Buckley did to the birchers, says me.

Elsewhere in the world, Trump announced that he had a chat with Xi about TikTok. And this is the thing that's been grinding its way through the system in the process for, I don't know, how long, with deadlines being put off and the rest of it, but selling TikTok assets to American investors, and I'm very curious if there will be, if so, a change in the code under the hood. Charlie, you're a tech guy.

Do you think that's likely, or do you think they'll say, hey, ain't broke, don't fix it? I don't like this at all. I think it's difficult to interrogate the technical questions without knowing what the plan is. and the plan I've looked into this as far as I can is vague. The law here has not been followed from the start. Trump has delayed this, I believe, four times.

There was room within the statute to delay at once when certain conditions were met. Those conditions weren't met, but there was provision for a delay. The last three are just flagrantly lawless. We're now talking about an 80-20 split and perhaps the maintenance of the existing algorithm in a different form. Or maybe not. I don't know.

What I do know is that although I understand the political worries that the Trump administration has here, this is not a very strong America First policy that I'm seeing on TikTok. The TikTok algorithm is designed to feed information to the Chinese Communist Party and to disrupt the United States. Now, there's not much we can do about the second part within an American-owned company.

If I owned TikTok, the government can't stop me poisoning children's minds, but the Chinese Communist Party is a foreign agent. So I don't know what it means when it is reported that there would be consequences. I don't know what it means when it is said that the algorithm might remain the same but in American hands or that it would I don't know, James. I don't think that anyone knows. And that's why, because I don't trust the Chinese Communist Party, I think that we should. see a full divestment and full American ownership. And then we don't have to worry about whether or not there are pressures behind the scenes.

And I'll finish by saying one of the reasons that underscores this belief for me is that, again, without reference to the statute, the Trump administration has started using the TikTok question in its negotiations with China. We saw this last week. The Trump administration said in effect, well, I hope we have a good meeting. with China, it's become intermingled with issues of foreign policy and of trade and of diplomacy. Now, if that can be the case when its sale is being debated, isn't that likely to be the case going forward? If China retains 20% of TikTok, isn't this always going to be on the table?

And if it's always going to be on the table, then aren't we likely? legitimately, if you look at the imperatives of foreign policy, to start using it as a bargaining tool. And if we use it as a bargaining tool, aren't we going to give some stuff away? So I have a problem with that because the statute's very clear. The Communist Party of China is not supposed to own the social media network. But I also have a problem with it as an American because I just don't want us to be giving this to China in exchange for other things. I want China out of this business in America. I was afraid for a moment

We weren't going to get the earth-shattering kaboom from Charles that I was expecting But he finally got to that point by the end So I'm happy and satisfied here Can I say one more sort of loose end About Charlie Kirk for a minute With Charles Cook I have had a few people

Say to me from time to time They get you Charles Cook Confused with Charlie Kirk Have you ever had that And have you, okay. Not in the sense that people come up to me and say, are you Charlie Kirk? But from time to time, if I get booked to speak somewhere, someone who wasn't involved in the initial booking will email me and mistake me for Charlie Kirk.

Or I've had people on the phone because of the way I say the word with my accent. And since he was murdered, people have mistakenly said his name instead of mine because they're so similar. I totally understand that, by the way. That's a normal thing to do. used to saying another name, then you say one that's almost identical. So, yeah, that has happened from time to time. But no one has ever mistaken me for the guy. We were very different in other ways. Right. Well, I didn't know if you might be getting some, you know, I don't know threatening messages maybe. I don't know. Thankfully, not yet. Cook, the surname would derive from

cook, right? Chef? That's what I believe. And Kirk is probably from church. So you're the caterer to Charlie's events. That's right. That's right. No, I haven't got any threats, which is a good thing. I can't imagine what he dealt with. It was a hundred times more famous and influential than I am. And I get my fair share of horrible email,

so he must have been really zen to have dealt with it. You know, I got an email the other day from somebody who was upset up in my national review column. It had to do with global warming and some offhand community. the comments that I'd made. And what really bothered him, well, lots of things bothered him. But it was like, this guy, this lilacs, this Jimmy lilacs,

he knows the truth. So he's lying in this piece about these things. And the idea that I shared his baseline assumptions and his predicates and his conclusions and all the rest of it was just a given. Because the very fact that I could put two words together meant that I wasn't stupid. And any intelligent person knows that global warming

is happening because of us. Therefore, I was lying. And I find that to be fascinating, actually, that sort of assumption of bad intention. No, I actually believe that. I actually do, which some people find it hard to take. And I imagine that a lot of your mail, Charlie, probably accuses you in Stephen as well,

as being a grifter and somebody who can't seriously possibly believe this stuff. No, absolutely, and unfortunately, I do. Well, we'll see what happens with this. what happens with TikTok. If there are fewer videos in my Twitter feed that consists of somebody being beaten with a tire iron whilst the lady chirps, nothing beats a jet blue vacation, or a jet two vacation,

what is it? I'll be a happy man. Have you noticed that? By the way, have you noticed how nothing beats a jet two vacation getaway or something like that is being superimposed on like 60% of the videos that come to you from TikTok? It's a nightmare

for the marketing director of that company whatever it is. It is. It is, but it's one of those internet things that you see it, you recognize it, you note the pattern, you file it away, you learn to mute, and your brain has already moved on after three or four days of this, but the vast majority of people out there are completely unaware, if they're not on TikTok themselves, are unaware that this is a thing. And you find that with the stuff that was on the bullets, the guy used to kill Charlie. You find that when you see these arrows that he used which referenced the Hell Diver Game or maybe don't know, maybe they're on TV. There's this whole language

and there's this whole meme culture that is, you know, if you're not steeped in this stuff, you are unaware of the depth and often the depravity of some of these subcatures. And you know what was odd about that? I assume you both read the text messages that were released as part of the charging documents. You mean the touching ones?

My goodness. Why was everyone's reaction to them insane? They're not fake and they're not touching. But there's a line in there where the shooter says to his lover, Hey, do you remember a few weeks ago when I was carving things on bullets? He's like, oh, yeah, that. I mean, what? And it struck me that maybe if you live in a household where one of you is wearing a virtual reality headset

for 111 days a year and the other one is a furry, that carving things on bullets is almost the bourgeois choice. But what an insane thing to say. And then have the other person go, oh, yeah, yeah, that was the day where you just sat at the kitchen table and did the bullet cut. What?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Brief. Mm-hmm. Well, we'll see as the case develops and as more documents are. Yeah, I remember seeing a tweet from some of you who said, I ran those texts through AI,

and AI said it was fake. Well, I certainly would know then going from its vast squableness. scraping of other tender messages from other shooters and the rest of it. Well, gentlemen, grim times and grim subjects, but we've had our moments, and we invite everybody to go to ricochet and sign up. Now, the fantasy football is done, right, Charles? It is done in the sense that you can't sign up for it anymore.

Yes, thank you, John Charles Daly. It is done. And so that's fine. So I just wanted to be clear. It wasn't like a one week, you know, week one fantasy football and then we're out. Lazy fantasy football Right But you could go to Rurkishay

And participate in things like that And sign up for the member feed Which will introduce you to an entirely community And I write there I've written a couple of pieces For the last few weeks And are not for general public consumption Just because I want to give something back

To the Rookashet community That I love so dearly Let's see Oh yes, five-star Apple podcast review If you could get that to us That would be great You may use it as an opportunity to learn the intricacies of IOS 26 on your phone.

Learn how to do a review. You'll feel like you've accomplished something and you'll help people find this show. We thank everybody for listening. We thank Josh Hammer, our guest. We thank Charles and we thank Stewart. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Rikersh. What version is it now, Charlie?

I don't know. I'd had it at my fingertips last week because I just pushed one of the updates, but I've been traveling this week. So it's a series of numbers that begins with four. So it's a point it's a point approaching being an irrational number like pie I was just I was just Stephen what I was going to do was I was going to quote the number of pie and I was going to have them fade me out as I kept going and now that bit is dead thank you that was Rob Long quality joke stepping on and I say that with I say that with love we'll see y'all at ricochet and we'll see you next week bye bye