Inside Charlie Kirk's Memorial: A Deep Dive into Christian Nationalism and Political Polarization

Brad Onishi: All right, y'all, so we're here to talk about Charlie Kirk's Memorial and what happened there. We witnessed, I think, the most Christian nationalist event that is possible. And I'm not even sure it's close. I started studying this stuff a decade ago. I've kind of spent time in every corner of this universe with people, and yesterday was something where you feel like 10 years ago, you never thought people would arrive where they did, but we did.

Sam Perry and Andrew Whitehead define Christian nationalism as a cultural identity and a cultural identity that fuses American belonging with Christian practice and Christian identity. And I think one of the things that we saw yesterday was exactly that. We saw the cabinet of our President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, DNI and many others, basically, over and over again fuse American identity with Christian identity, and they did so in a way that was full of vengeance and retribution. And I think if you've seen any of the clips from what happened yesterday, you know that's true.

I think one of the things that I want to talk about first here is the fact that they began yesterday with what I would call a hagiography of Charlie Kirk. And some of you are like, what does that mean? So let me play a clip in order to explain what that is. Here's Cardinal Dolan of the Catholic Church talking about Charlie Kirk.

Cardinal Dolan (clip): I thought I got to learn about this guy. And the more I learned about him, I thought this guy is a modern day St. Paul. He was a missionary. He is an evangelist. He is a hero. He is one I think that knew what Jesus meant when he said, "The truth will set you free" and to do it. Now I understand he was pretty blunt and he was pretty direct. He didn't try to avoid any controversy. He didn't even try to avoid confrontation. The difference is the way, the mode, the style that he did it—always with respect. And not only was that a gracious, kind of virtuous thing to do, it's effective. Because when your opponents see this guy kind of respects me, we kind of disagree here, but he kind of enjoys me, and he's thanking me for being here, and he's telling me he appreciates the trust I have in him and sharing my views. I thought this guy can teach us something.

Brad: All right. So I'm not sure that I would describe Charlie Kirk in that way, in terms of the way he would debate people, but Dolan says something here that I think is just unmistakably strange and surprising to me. He says this guy was like a modern day Saint Paul. This is somebody coming from the Catholic Church who takes saints very seriously. There's a very rigorous process to become a saint in the Catholic Church. But he was not the only one.

If you look at what was happening yesterday, I put this on Instagram, but there were just so many people who talked about Charlie Kirk as a kind of miracle worker. Let me explain that. Here, you can see on my document here that Charlie Kirk is a man of steel because his body stopped a bullet that would typically just go through everything, and was an absolute miracle. Nobody else was killed. That's what a surgeon told TPUSA, okay, and to me, that's just insane. This is just insane that we're talking about a miracle and Charlie Kirk's body.

There was a congressperson who said that he thought that Kirk would be the 13th disciple if he were living in the time of Christ. Now there's so much wrong with that, because there were 12 Apostles—there were more. It doesn't matter. I'm not going to do it today. Here's the point: Before we got to the memorial service yesterday, we were already in the place of hagiography, and not history.

And what that means is this—hagiography is a mode where you are entering a biography of a person in a way that is a full on veneration. There's no concern for history when you do hagiography. Now, where do we do hagiography? It's usually in relationship to saints. If you read the hagiographies of Catholic saints from the medieval period, it's basically telling you all about how St. Francis and others were just miracle workers. They were people who were so wonderful, moral, virtuous that it was like they were not a part of the human species.

Before we even got there yesterday, Kirk was compared to St. Paul by a cardinal, and people were saying he was a miracle worker, that his body had stopped a bullet. This was on Fox News, and others were saying he would have been one of the disciples, the apostles—the person talking didn't know what they were saying. Nonetheless, you get the point.

We have reached that place with Charlie Kirk. Now, Charlie Kirk is now a saint of certain strands of Christianity in the country. He's now a saint of MAGA. I've said for a long time that MAGA has its own martyrs, its own rituals, its own memorials and remembrances and symbols. Well, Charlie Kirk is now the number one martyr and saint of MAGA nation, period.

And what that means is it's going to be very difficult in any real way to talk about Charlie Kirk that is not full of praise and eulogy. If you say something negative, you're going to hear, "I can't believe that you wanted that man to die." Because he's now entered the realm of hagiography. He's a saint. Now it's like showing up and trying to say to people in a church that you're just not so sure about St. Peter, he just wasn't as good as we thought. It's just not the place people are going to hear that. But now what is happening is our administration is turning our public square into a place like that.

Now I want to make an example of someone who's in a similar category, and it's going to surprise some of you, and I hope that you'll get what I'm saying here. This is what happened to Martin Luther King Jr. And you're like, "Well, isn't that a good thing?" Hear me out. Martin Luther King Jr., when we got to have a Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the 1980s, became an American saint, and we entered this realm of celebrating him. And what that did, and hear me out, is it whitewashed Martin Luther King's work and his message.

If you read Martin Luther King Jr., it is very clear that he was a radical. He was a radical when it came to income inequality, his stance for the poor. When you read Martin Luther King Jr., he was a deep and incisive critic of capitalism. But what happened as he became somebody with a federal holiday is that people just remembered "I Have a Dream," okay? And when you tried to talk about the radical King, it kind of became impossible, because he just became somebody that was used over and over again by folks who wanted him to be this safe, federal, national saint.

Now the problem is, I actually think what Martin Luther King Jr. said in his radical, incisive criticism of capitalism, the way the United States treats the poor, racism—was actually something we need. It's coming from the exact opposite side with Charlie Kirk. They're going to make him a saint in a way that all of that other stuff—the stuff that all of you already know he said, the things you've seen on Instagram and Facebook and wherever else you've seen over the last two weeks, the things he said about Black people, the things he said about trans people, Muslims, it doesn't matter—those things are going to get pushed aside. And if you say anything different about Charlie Kirk, you're going to be the one who is now criticizing a saint in the Church of the American Christian nationalist public square.

That happened yesterday. That's how it went. Yesterday, and I think that's something we have to accept happened before we even got to the memorial.

Now, the second thing that I think a ton of people are talking about today is the fact that Erika Kirk said, "I forgive the shooter," okay? So let me play that clip for you right now.

Erika Kirk (clip): That man, that young man, I forgive him. I forgive him, because it was what Christ did and is what Charlie would do.

Brad: All right. So she says, "I forgive him." And you know, this was a big deal, and I've seen a lot of people who are not necessarily supporters of Charlie Kirk, people who are not singing his praises saying, "Well, at least this was a good thing that came out of yesterday. At least we got her saying, 'I forgive him.'"

And then Donald Trump showed up right a couple hours later and said, "Well, I'm not sure that I'm the kind of guy who forgives people."

Donald Trump (clip): A missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose. He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don't want the best for them. I'm sorry. I am sorry, Erika, but now Erika can talk to me and the whole group, and maybe they can convince me that that's not right, but I can't stand my opponent.

Brad: All right, so you might be thinking, "All right, so how do those two go together? What is the reaction to that? I mean, she said, 'I forgive him,' and Trump says, 'I actually do hate my opponent.' How can those be squared? Can MAGA nation square that?"

And I will say that, yes, they have, and they did so way before yesterday happened. So I was on right-wing Twitter yesterday, and I was just seeing all the reactions to this stuff. And what I will tell you is they reacted exactly how I thought they would.

I was watching Joe Rigney, who's the author of the book The Sin of Empathy that we've talked about on this show. I was watching people like Andrew Isker, CJay Engel, William Wolfe, Joel Webbon—a lot of these guys come out of the Doug Wilson kind of universe.

And for them, this is exactly how they want politics to go. What they say is that the private person, the person who has been wronged by their neighbor, their friend, their colleague, their parent, they should forgive. But the leader of the country, the magistrate, the Christian prince, should not.

Okay, so let me show you some tweets from yesterday. Here's C.J. Engel: "It is good for those privately harmed or affronted to forgive their enemy. It is what Christ commands, and forgiveness is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of God's kingdom. It is also good for the public sovereign, the state, the magistrate, a sword bearer, to exercise wrath in pursuit of justice and to act with an iron fist against enemies of the civil order, even against those forgiven by the privately harmed."

Here's Joel Webbon: "The wife of a murdered husband can forgive her husband's killer if she desires. The wife must forgive if the killer truly repents and asks for forgiveness. The civil magistrate must not forgive. He is God's vessel for vengeance. He must execute."

They saw the forgiveness of Erika Kirk and the hatred of Donald Trump as the perfect theological summation of the reaction to how a Christian should respond to Charlie Kirk's death. The response is this: Yes, she should forgive, but the leader should execute.

C.Jay Engel, who's one of the people I just showed you, his podcast partner and partner in ministry is a guy named Andrew Isker, who wrote a book called The Boniface Option. And in that book, he says one of the things that American Christians need to learn how to do is to hate. In his book, he says, "I want you to learn how to hate." And the idea there is that American Christians need to stop being nice and to love God by hating God's enemies.

And they will tell you—I write about this in the book that's coming out in a year, I can show you all the receipts for this, I won't go through all of them today—you read Andrew Isker's book, if you read C.Jay Engel's book, if you read Joel Webbon in any detail, they will use John Calvin and the reformers. They will use St. Augustine. And they will say that you should approach the personal relationship according to the Sermon on the Mount—turn the other cheek, forgiveness and so on. But the political realm is something else. The political realm is a realm where the appointed ruler, God's chosen ruler, has to take vengeance, and if they don't, then they are not carrying out their role as God's chosen leader and magistrate.

They see the political realm as a civic realm that is different from the kingdom of God. And if you want me to get a little bit kind of theological on this, I can—they call this the two kingdoms theology. And if you come from a reformed background, if you come from a Calvinist background, you know where I'm coming from right now. They come from a two kingdoms theology. And what that means is that they believe there's a kingdom of God. And in that kingdom of God, you are going to see God who operates according to peace and justice and love. But there's also the civil kingdom. And the civil kingdom and the kingdom of God are not the same, and on earth, they really don't overlap—the only place the kingdom of God comes into play on earth is in the church. But when it comes to the political realm, the civic realm, it's really about a friend-enemy distinction.

If you read these guys, if you follow them on Twitter, they are talking about the friend and the enemy all the time, and some of you out there already know where this is going. That distinction comes from a Nazi jurist named Carl Schmitt. And Carl Schmitt basically said human beings have values and fundamental priorities, and those often are in conflict, and you cannot reason your way out of this. You cannot get to a place where they want to have dialogue and discussion and pluralism. It's either you or them. It's either dominate or be dominated.

So what these guys were saying yesterday online as Erika Kirk said, "I forgive" and Donald Trump said, "I hate my enemies," was "This is exactly what we want when it comes to the friend-enemy distinction and when it comes to the two kingdoms theology. We want a woman who forgives the man that murdered her husband, and we want a president who's going to hate him enough to execute him."

They want a Christianity based on hatred. They want a Christianity based on strife and conflict. They say openly that hate is a way to love God. And know that you may think I'm exaggerating—I am not. I can show you the receipts. I write about this in my book and so on and so forth.

All right, I want to move on to some of the content from yesterday, and I want to talk about how yesterday was Christian nationalism distilled into an event, and how that is different than what the guys I just talked about and what so many people in MAGA Trumpism say they call "Big Eva." And you're like, "What the heck is that? Big Eva?" What that means is big evangelicalism.

So for a long time, there have been Christian nationalist pastors coming from the Doug Wilson sector, the Mark Driscoll sector, the Jack Hibbs who spoke at the memorial yesterday—or I'm sorry, Rob McCoy, who spoke at the memorial yesterday and did an altar call—Jack Hibbs and so on. They would say, "Look, we cannot live in a world anymore that is marked by the evangelicalism that is willing to be a kind of missionary to a fallen world, right? That if you are an evangelical who's going to see the United States as a mission field, and you're going to swim upstream and try and convert your neighbors through love and compassion and dialogue and outreach events and a seeker-sensitive church, all that, then you're not fit, you're lukewarm, and God's gonna spit you out of his mouth."

Big Eva to them is David French. It is the Gospel Coalition. It's Tim Keller, who's no longer alive. It's George W. Bush. It is Rick Warren and A Purpose Driven Life. They see those people as sitting on the sidelines, not political, not committed to revival, not committed to the United States as a Christian nation. Those are people who would rather sit on the sidelines politically, or at least close to the sidelines, and collect checks, have megachurches and just not be too controversial.

And yet yesterday, that is not the Christianity that we saw. The Christianity we saw was full of vengeance and resentment. And if you don't believe me, let me go ahead and play you a couple of clips. Here we go.

Jack Posobiec (clip): You will endure for Charlie. We will continue the mission for Charlie. We will end the evil disease that split us and took Charlie from us. And for Charlie, Turning Point USA will last forever. And we will come to find, we will come to find that in the final moment, that Western civilization was saved through Charlie's sacrifice in the only way possible—by returning the people to Almighty God.

Brad: All right, so that's Jack Posobiec. He's the one who wrote the book Unhumans, blurbed by J.D. Vance. He's the one who was basically the original gangster of Pizzagate. He is somebody who's a rabid Christian nationalist and has said some of the most despicable things possible. He said at CPAC, "We are here to end democracy. We almost did on J6 and we're going to finish the job."

Now, he's also the one that was called to speak on the news about Charlie Kirk over and over again as his good friend. The phrase there that I really want to hone in on is the idea that "we're going to end the disease." This is a Christianity that sees its enemies and anyone who is against it as a disease. This is very close to speaking like Trump did about immigrants, saying that they're vermin. This is a Christianity that says it's us against them. It's a cosmic battle. It's holy war.

All the right-wing Christian nationalist pastors and leaders on Twitter yesterday were completely consumed by the idea that this event was big evangelicalism's worst nightmare, that if you were a megachurch pastor—Rick Warren, David French, the Gospel Coalition, whoever—that you were being challenged, that the only kind of American Christianity, American Protestantism, that will be alive and well going forward is the kind that is based on revenge, resentment and a holy war based on us against them.

I'll say this, and I think you all know this already, that the shooter is somebody whose ideology is not clear. We don't really know, and that's a whole other discussion, and I'm not going to do that today in terms of a livestream and talk about it very much. But there is just no clear line from the shooter to any kind of leftist organization, leftist funding, leftist university, any of that stuff. There's just not.

And yet they are talking like "we're going to stamp out the disease that led to this death." Well, which disease? What does that mean? To the Christian nationalists yesterday, it didn't matter. They saw this as distilling their Christianity into—the disease he's talking about.

Now it got even worse. And I think most of you know this already. You've probably seen the clips, but let me play you another clip here, and this is Stephen Miller.

Stephen Miller (clip): The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us—what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity.

Brad: I mean, there's a lot—I don't even know what to say. My brain sometimes just explodes. So a lot of people online today have made the comparison that Stephen Miller's speech resembled Joseph Goebbels' speech from 90 years ago, that there's just this deep fascist sense to this speech. And there is, period.

He starts by saying that "the light will defeat the dark." And he talks about his enemies as—it's like he's doing the reverse of First Corinthians 13. It's like, you know, "Love is kind, love is gracious," right? And he's basically saying to everybody who he believes is his enemy, the person who's outside of his team, that they are nothing, that they are literally—they're not human, they're not valuable, they're not worth talking to, they're not worth persuading, they're not worth trying to reach out to, they're not worth trying to save. They're just nothing, and we're going to destroy you.

Now, some of this is going to seem obvious to many of you. You're like, "Well, that's just Stephen Miller," and it is. It's so fascist and gross. I think one thing that we have to say about Stephen Miller that doesn't get said very often is, y'all, Stephen Miller has been around since the very first days of Trump's first term. Like, do you know how many people have come and gone in the Trump orbit since then? Like Rex Tillerson, John Kelly, Kayleigh McEnany, Scaramucci, Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon—Stephen Miller has never had a falling out with Donald Trump. There has never been one iota of like "Stephen Miller, he's on the bad list, not sure." Stephen Miller has been the raging id of Trump for 10 years, and he's now basically the policy chief.

But the Christian nationalists on Twitter, when they heard this, they loved this. This was the apotheosis of everything they wanted, and they're basically saying that there's no other viable form of Christianity than this. Now that Charlie Kirk's death—going forward from this event—means you're either here with Posobiec and Miller, you're either here on this train, or you're not really a Christian and you're not really an American. That you either see the other side as an enemy to be destroyed, or you're just not with us.

I don't know how many times I've seen on TikTok and Twitter and Instagram and everywhere else throughout the last couple of weeks that said, "Y'all have no idea what you did. You messed up. Now there's an army who is rising up to defend Charlie's death." And once again, it's like the guy that is the alleged shooter is not part of any group that you can identify or target or anything—there just is not there, and yet it does not matter.

And so yesterday was this way that the two things collided, that the Christian identity, holiness, godliness and light is against darkness, and that is completely overlapping with very little remainder with Trumpism and what they call American patriotism.

Yesterday, not only did they celebrate a kind of Christian nationalist spectacle, but it was a day when they saw a kind of George W. Bush era, corporate evangelical megachurch ethos as no longer possible. You're either with us or you're not, period.

And so to me, that was something that I will not forget from yesterday. And I'm always fearful of what Stephen Miller is going to say, because it's always so full of hate and rage. But he was speaking for a Christian nationalist set that ate up every last bit of that yesterday.

Let's go to one more thing, and then I can answer a few questions today. Okay, so one last thing I want to get to is our good friend Tucker Carlson. And Tucker Carlson basically told a story. I'm gonna let you watch it, and then we'll talk about it. Because whatever—let's just do it.

Tucker Carlson (clip): Ultimately, he was a Christian evangelist, and it actually reminds me of my favorite story ever. So it's about 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem, and Jesus shows up, and he starts talking about the people in power, and he starts doing the worst thing that you can do, which is telling the truth about people, and they hate it, and they just go bonkers. They hate it, and they become obsessed with making him stop. "This guy's got to stop talking. We've got to shut this guy up." And I can just sort of picture the scene in a lamp-lit room with a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus, thinking about, "What do we do about this guy telling the truth about us? We must make him stop talking."

And there's always one guy, guy with the bright idea, and I could just hear him say, "I've got an idea. Why don't we just kill him? That'll shut him up. That'll fix the problem."

It doesn't work that way.

Brad: I know you thought the Stephen Miller clip is going to be the worst thing you saw today, but you're welcome. Yes, if you're wondering, that is Tucker Carlson basically saying that Jews killed Jesus—"a bunch of guys sitting in a room eating hummus." That was what that was.

I mean, at least from my seat—Joel Webbon, and I don't have the reference here, I didn't bring it, but Joel Webbon, one of the people I showed you earlier, Christian nationalist pastor, said that Jesus died for all of our sins, and we all kill Jesus because we're all sinful. "And yes, the Jews killed Jesus."

Now, if you've been following Tucker, you've been listening to the show, you know that Tucker Carlson is in the wing of MAGA these days that believes that the United States should be isolationist, and that means not supporting Israel in whatever it's doing, whatever we want to talk about in terms of what's happening in Gaza, but also in terms of the United States giving billions and billions of dollars to Israel. He challenged Matt Walsh. There's a clip of Tucker Carlson telling Matt Walsh he doesn't believe Israel could exist without the support of the United States.

Now there's a lot of us on this call, on this livestream, et cetera, that would be like, "Yeah, I think we need to rethink our relationship with Israel, given what is happening in Gaza." That's a given. Unfortunately, when you dig into the Tucker Carlson sector of this sentiment, and you dig into Marjorie Taylor Greene, and you dig—there's just antisemitism there, right? It veers from "I don't want to support genocide in Gaza" to antisemitism.

And so when he says "guys eating hummus, talking about killing Jesus," he's talking about the millennial-old trope of the Jews as the killers of Jesus, and thus those who are worth sending our ire and our hatred and our everything.

Okay, so all that to say, that happened yesterday as well. Let me show you all one or two more things, and then we'll do questions, and then we'll jump for today.

Okay, I want to show you, I think, a tweet that sums up some of what happened yesterday at the memorial. This is Joe Rigney, and Joe Rigney says, "Three years ago, I wrote this about the desirability and possibility of Christian nationalism."

So who's Joe Rigney? Joe Rigney is Doug Wilson's right-hand man. He's also the guy that wrote the book The Sin of Empathy.

This is what he wrote: "This is the inescapable question: It's not whether a nation's laws and social order will have a foundation, but which one. Or to put it another way, it's not whether we'll have a religious establishment, but which one. Families, schools, radio stations, and yes, even nations, can confess: 'We believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.' Some may doubt the feasibility of such a Christian confession in the present moment, but such doubts speak more to the limits of our imagination than the limits of God's arm."

So Rigney and so many others yesterday were like, "This is Christian nationalism. This is what I voted for. This is what I wanted. I wanted a president, a Secretary of State, a Secretary of War, a DNI. I wanted Tucker Carlson. I wanted all the people who were on stage yesterday representing the American government, talking about Christ, talking about holy war, talking about destroying our enemies, talking about destroying those who are not Americans and Christians in the ways that we envision those things."

Jason Whitlock, the one-time ESPN analyst, and now MAGA person, a Black man, said, "This is Christian nationalism, and I love it," okay? That was a sentiment across so many different feeds yesterday from folks in this realm.

But there's something that I think sums up what they mean by a Christian nation, and that comes from Dana Loesch, who kind of made her name as an NRA person, Second Amendment person, but who said this: "The left burned down cities and set fire to churches. The right fill stadiums and worship. We are too far apart to be the same anymore."

"The left burned down cities and set fire to churches. We fill stadiums and worship."

Yesterday was a rallying cry. It was a moment of solidification and coherence for people to say, "It's us against them, and we are not alike."

This is not a situation where we can say, "Let's go recruit more people to our cause. Let's go persuade more people to see it our way." This was the solidification, the congealing, of a worldview that says it's us against them. We need to go destroy them. Whoever them is, and we know who them is.

I've talked about it on the show 100 times, 1,000 times. You all know this already. The "them" are the immigrants, the non-Christians, the women who will not obey, the people who don't fit their gender hierarchies and frameworks, the people who don't have the right kind of faith.

And so you say, "Well, what do they want? Like, what is it that they're after?" And I'll just give you one example, and then I'll take questions.

They want something. And if you read Joe Rigney, if you read Andrew Isker, if you read C.J. Engel, if you read so many of these people, what they want is Franco's Spain.

They want a nation that is explicitly Christian in its government. So what did Franco's—what did Francisco Franco's Spain look like? It looked like this: All other religions are outlawed. It looked like in the public square, you had an aggressive and visible Catholicism, memorials and statues, all kinds of public testimonies to the state religion. There was no pluralism. There was no minority voice. There was no democracy. Franco's Spain was an authoritarian regime with a throne and altar Catholicism.

If you were another religion, as long as you kept quiet, you might be okay. But if you tried to practice your religion anywhere outside of your heart, in your bedroom, in your living room, you were in danger. There was no professing that. There was no discussing your viewpoint. There was no telling others about it. There was no going against the church. There was no going against the power of the state as it enforced the teachings of the church.

When they envision what they—and you're like, "Well, how do you know all this, Brad?" I'm like, because I read all what they say. It's not that I'm guessing. This is what they've told us. C.J. Engel says "An American Franco is inevitable."

Okay, so what they want is this: what you saw yesterday, applied everywhere. They want it to be illegal to practice anything but Christianity. They want public officials like Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth talking about "Christ as King" on stage. They want the policies of the United States to be Christian policies. And what those policies mean is the Christianity they envision. And it's a Christianity that you all know about already. I don't have to tell you, right? A Christianity that looks like The Handmaid's Tale, that looks like Jim Crow South, that looks like a place where you have a white, Christian, native-born, straight, reproductive family structure and nothing else.

Talking to Ken this morning—I think Ken is here—and he said, you know, yesterday was basically a 300,000-person worship setting for people who worship a straight, white American Jesus. And that's what it was yesterday.

Over and over again, after the event, you saw people say, "This is going to bring revival." But revival doesn't mean people being saved and accepting Jesus and loving their neighbor. Revival means destroying the enemy and obliterating the curse of those who oppose MAGA. That's what revival means here.

Okay, all right. If you have questions, throw in a couple, and I can try to get to a few of those. Appreciate you all stopping by and hanging out today. It's my first time doing this. I know the tech isn't totally how it should be, but we'll keep working on it and getting it right for next time, and trying to get this going in a way that is without too many difficulties. So if you have any questions, you can throw them in. I'll try to keep up with some of these and answer a few more.

So one of the people that spoke yesterday was Rob McCoy. And some of you might not know about Rob McCoy. Rob McCoy was the guy that gave the altar call. Rob McCoy was really behind the scenes one of the people that was most influential in Charlie Kirk's Christianity. He's a pastor in Ventura. Ventura is about an hour north of Los Angeles. Historically, Ventura is an overwhelmingly white county, and there's a deep history of white supremacy in Ventura.

Rob McCoy is one of the people who's been at the forefront of Christian nationalism in Southern California for a long time. He's now a national figure, and he was the one who got to basically lead the altar call at Charlie Kirk's memorial. Sam Kestenbaum did just a fantastic feature on Rob McCoy. So if you want to look up Sam Kestenbaum's article on him, he will enlighten you on him.

Jess said he's one of our local boys in Thousand Oaks, and you're exactly right, Jess, and I know that y'all are facing him on a daily basis. And Rob McCoy sends legions of people from his church to school board meetings and city council meetings. He was mayor of the city for a while, and so on and so forth.

"Any thoughts on the theological fissure between Nick Fuentes and the rest of MAGA nation?" Yeah, this is something to talk about. I think Nick Fuentes and the groypers are definitely broken up with the Christian nationalists. Nick Fuentes is just not a fan of Charlie Kirk at all. And he has said that—there does seem to be a breakup here, and it's not one that I think is going to get mended anytime soon.

I'm not sure it matters that much. Nick Fuentes and the groypers are menacing and scary and in some ways pathetic and all kinds of stuff, but they, I don't think, represent a big enough demographic. They certainly don't have enough money for MAGA nation to be threatened in any way, and for this to be something that anyone's going to lose sleep over in the Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Susie Wiles kind of space, much less the pastors that I've been talking about all day.

So I think that's something to think about. I will say that their hero for a long time was, at least in certain moments, Elon Musk. And Elon Musk was there yesterday. He shook hands with Donald Trump. They sat down for a minute. He talked about how Charlie Kirk was killed because he showed the light to a world full of darkness. He didn't talk about Christ. There were a lot of pastors praying for Elon Musk on Twitter yesterday that I saw.

And I think Elon Musk doing that was about Elon—about a lot of things. There's, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Elon Musk didn't want to go to Charlie Kirk's memorial. I don't know. I also think that Elon Musk trying to make up with Donald Trump yesterday has a lot to do with the H-1B visas. Elon Musk said he would go to war on that issue. He said he would go to war in ways you cannot imagine on that issue. And the Trump administration is imposing a $100,000 annual fee for an H-1B visa now.

There is just no way that's going to do anything but destroy so many tech companies and the medical industry and others that rely on those visas for talent from across the globe. When I saw Elon Musk trying to make up with Donald Trump yesterday, I didn't think about two grieving men who wanted to be friends because their other friend died. I thought about Elon Musk wanting to get those H-1B visas back, and him basically saying, "I need to get back with Trump and in his ear, and I need to make this happen."

Because, you know, we could have spent an hour today talking about the visa issue. So I think that's something to think about.

All right, Cindy says, "Why are you falling in line and calling this political violence? All I've seen about motive is that the shooter couldn't take the hate any longer."

I don't know what to say there, Cindy. I think Charlie Kirk's a political figure. If that is why the shooter shot him—and we have to be careful there—I think he shot him because of his politics. The hate you're referencing is a political hate. It's hate towards a certain group. So if he was killed based on that, it seems like he was killed based on hate that came from a political position, and therefore it seems like political violence. So that's what I'll say about that.

All right, y'all, thanks for stopping by today. We're going to do this more regularly. I'll keep you updated on that. And just want to say, appreciate y'all, appreciate you hanging with me. I hope you all are coping and hanging in. If you're not somebody who listens to our show regularly or a subscriber, check out our stuff at straightwhiteamericanjesus.com or Supercast, and just really appreciate y'all. Catch you next time and we'll see you Wednesday. We'll see you Friday for the weekly roundup and all of our normal stuff. Thanks, y'all. Appreciate you. Bye.