Weekly Roundup: The Death and Afterlife of Charlie Kirk

Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. Today we talk about the life, death and afterlife of Charlie Kirk. This has been a story that has, of course, dominated the mediascape this week. And so I'm Brad Onishi, author of Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, founder of Axis Mundi Media. Here today with my co-host.

Dan Miller: I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Good to be with you, Brad as always.

Brad: Good to be with you, Dan. And this is one of those weeks where I think we're gonna have about seven hours of things to say in one hour, because the death of Charlie Kirk is a big event for many, many, many, many reasons. And many of those reasons touch on the heart of what we do with this show, which is cover Christian nationalism, the religious right and rising authoritarianism in the United States. So we'll talk about the reactions from Trump and other members of the American right. We'll talk about the facts of what we know about Charlie Kirk and the man who has been arrested in relationship to his killing and is the alleged shooter. We'll talk about reactions from online provocateurs who are using this as a reason for civil war, and we'll talk about the media reverence, the mainstream media reverence for Kirk and what that means about the current state of American politics. I'm Brad Onishi. This is Straight White American Jesus. Lots to cover. Let's go.

Dan, this morning, Tyler Robinson was arrested, and we now know is the one who is in custody as the suspected shooter of Charlie Kirk. Here's what we know right now. It's Friday morning, 10 o'clock, West Coast time, September 12. We know that Tyler Robinson is 22 years old. He spent about a semester at Utah Valley University, which is where Charlie Kirk was shot. He is a white man. He is from a conservative family. His father is in law enforcement, and it seems that he was extremely online. Now, we have seen pictures of him dressed as Donald Trump for Halloween, in a way that was not making fun, but seemed to be sort of like in a "this is a guy I look up to" kind of costume. He also was dressed up as Pepe the Frog, and so that's another thing. His mom seemed to think that was just an online meme when he did it.

Now, one of the things that's going to be widely discussed today, and we're going to do our best to cover right now, but this story is going to develop in ways that we'll just have to keep up with—there were things that law enforcement officials are saying were inscribed on the bullets found in Tyler Robinson's gun, his rifle. Now earlier reports yesterday, and these were conflicting and backtracked, and all kinds of things. The Wall Street Journal came out yesterday morning and said that there was transgender ideology on the bullet casings. They then retracted that. The New York Times almost immediately said that's not accurate, and they had another report.

So what we now know is that the things that were on the bullet casings were some of the following: "Hey, fascist, catch" with some arrow symbols. And those seem to be pretty straightforward, like references to Charlie Kirk as a fascist. "Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao Ciao Ciao," which is a song that was used by resisters in Mussolini's Italy. And so that seems to be a pretty clear reference of Charlie Kirk as a fascist.

However, there's some other things here that really kind of are straight up internet meme deep dives. So it also says, "If you read this, you are gay, LMAO, laugh my ass off." There's another one that says, "Notices bulges OwO what's this?" Now, 99% of people have no idea what that means. Tina Wynn and Mia Salto wrote this at The Verge today. It says the full sequence, the arrow sequence, was recognized as a combo from Helldivers 2 for calling the Eagle 500 kg bomb stratagem. The world of Helldivers, which evokes Robert Heinlein's book Starship Troopers and the subsequent movie, concerns fascism thematically. Arrowhead is the developer of that game, and they characterize it as a satire where players fight for a fascist state.

Here's my comment right now, Dan, and I'm curious what you think: this is like an extremely online 22-year-old brain. That's what I see reflected in this, somebody who's writing memes, who's writing video game references that most people—I say all people—that almost all people will not understand. What you're gonna see, and we have already seen, and I can show you all the receipts right now, are people saying, well, look at this. He was calling Charlie Kirk a fascist, therefore he was a leftist who calls all people on the American right a fascist. So Matt Walsh has already said that this is undoubtedly a sign of leftist violence against Charlie Kirk, okay, that's already what you've seen come out.

And you're going to see that rhetoric, I think, develop. What I think is here is what you see with a lot of young white male shooters is a kind of incoherent online ideology that is not straightforwardly like—this is not somebody who's like, "I'm really into democratic socialism," or "I'm really into Zohran Mamdani and AOC and Bernie Sanders," or "I'm really into Antifa." But you're gonna see that, and I've already seen mainstream outlets sort of talk about, oh, he must be Antifa. He must be Antifa.

Everything we know about this guy is that he is from a deeply conservative family. He's been holding guns since he was like before puberty. His parents are registered Republicans. He's registered unaffiliated. He's reportedly from the Latter-day Saints religious tradition. He grew up in a very conservative part of Utah. There's nothing here. We have no other evidence outside of the bullet casings that this is a guy that was like, somehow super into leftist ideology, leftist politics, Marxism, democratic socialism, Zohran Mamdani, AOC, like, it's just not there. But that is what is going to develop on the American right. So quick thoughts on this before we just jump into the myriad of other things that we need to get to as it relates to what's going on with Charlie Kirk.

Dan: So I would say, to your point about this, I think what it reflects is most Americans, and certainly young Americans, they don't have an organized political ideology. They do not have a sophisticated set of political ideologies. They don't have a sophisticated set of beliefs. And I say that, and I struggle with sort of accepting this as a fact. I remember people would talk in, you know, say, 2016 and then 2020 like, you get an Obama voter, and then they voted for Trump, and then they voted for Biden, and then this time they voted for Trump again. And people will say, how in the world can they do that? These are radically different political ideologies.

But it reflects the fact that for lots of people, they don't have or live their life according to a well thought out, organized set of political principles or values or whatever. And you take somebody who's young—I think that just sort of blows all that up. If I look at my own life, when can I say that I had a quote-unquote political ideology that I could articulate in some way? Mid-20s and forward, I think so. I think it reflects that. I think it reflects we saw the same thing with the Trump shooter, that people don't fit into the nice narrative of just left and just right.

People decry the political polarization of America all the time for good reason. We live in that world and participate in that discourse and engage in that and we engage with people who are firmly on one side or the other. And I think most people don't have trouble situating us on one side or the other of that. But you get these people who, in real life, they show the complexity of this, and the fact that these people don't slot neatly into one position or another. And I think that that's what all the preliminary evidence shows, right? As you say, what we know about who he was as a person and so forth, together with the casings—yeah, it's a mixed picture. But that's how a lot of people are politically. They are a mixed picture. And I think that that's ultimately, so far, that's what we see, and it won't be surprising if that's what we continue to see moving forward.

Brad: Well, and especially if your political participation is mainly online, as a young person who's never participated in civic communities or political parties or rallies—if you're just somebody who's learned all of this online, then there's a greater chance that it's going to be a mash up of various ideologies. And I will say that when we have seen clear, coherent ideologies expressed by shooters, and especially mass shooters, they have been right wing. I mean, whether it's the church in Charleston, whether it's in Buffalo, whether it's UCSB—I mean, we can go down the road here, all of the right wing manifestos that have been inspired by Timothy McVeigh and Anders Breivik and others. And so we have seen those. But the ones that are in recent memory and clear cut are right wing ideologies that come from incel communities or male supremacist communities and so on, white supremacist communities.

In this case, you don't have that. And I think, unfortunately, though, you're going to see it develop as "well, he was somehow radicalized." So I will say, Dinesh D'Souza, as soon as we learned about this, got on Twitter and said he was clearly radicalized by academia in the one semester, Dan, that he spent at Utah Valley University. So it was like the spin was, well, he was clearly radicalized by some professor who taught him something and changed his good conservative values of that good conservative Mormon law enforcement family he grew up in. That was already—that's been...

Dan: So first, a rather frivolous point, but I'll make it anyway, because it's a real thing about academia. We've talked about it before. I wish as academics we wielded the power over young, impressionable minds that the right seems to think we do. I can't get my students to read. I can't get them to complete quizzes. I finished my second week of the semester. I've still got students who don't have the book. "Do we have a book?" I'm like, yeah, we have a book. We're 13% of the way through the semester already, two weeks in, let alone carving them into the hard left wing activists that they think are bred in academia. So anyway, that's a side thing.

The other thing I'm gonna say—this is gonna make me sound old. I'm sorry. I'm going to rope you in as being kind of old with me, right? But seriously, you talk about the mixed ideology and all that online. People for whom all the politics for them is memes. You and I are old enough and we're academic enough that you find memes and what do we do? We go find the context of them. How do they fit? Where do they originate? What does this mean? We situate them in a broader context. Lots of people, generations of people now don't. The meme is this standalone packet of information that conveys meaning and value, and outside of that context, you get memes and little pieces that, yes, you contextualize them, they're coming from different places. They might even be radically divergent ideologies, or even competing ideologies, but if you're not doing all of that, the memes become the message.

And I think that's what we find as well. And so you get people like us, and I'll speak for myself, people who are both a little bit older in a time before memes, but also trained to look at context and to trace things down and to find out where they originate. And we do that work, and I think journalists do that work, and other people do that work. And so it appears mysterious, but if you're somebody whose first language is memes, and 30-minute social media posts, and 15-second TikTok videos, and these little snippets of information, and you're kind of constructing your worldview by just stitching those together—this is the kind of phenomenon that I think is familiar to a lot of people, and I think that that's something that people are missing, perhaps, in trying to trace out a well wrought ideology.

And I think also, just to go there, in a country where it's not hard to get guns and it's not hard to have access to them, it's this notion that you have to be strongly politically motivated and all these things to do something so heinous and horrendous—it's easy to do in America, I'm sorry. It's easy to do, and I think that makes it, frankly, more casual in the sense of, you don't have to have somebody who has a strong ideological bent and has spent decades plotting something to be able to undertake this kind of act of violence. I think all of that is there and complicates the easy narratives.

Brad: All right, I'll be back Monday to talk about this, and I'll update on what we have then. And this will be a story that has no doubt grown legs and gone different places. So more from us soon on this front.

Let's talk about Charlie Kirk. Dan, I think you and I were talking offline about the fact that there's a lot of people that before last week may not have known who Charlie Kirk was in any real depth. I've had many experiences speaking around the country—I'll reference Charlie Kirk, and I'll kind of look at the audience like, all right here, who knows who that is? And maybe 10% of the audience raises their hand. They're maybe 30, 45, 55 years old. They're not politically conservative, so they're just not dug into Charlie Kirk, and I would always kind of be surprised, but I'd have to remind myself—not everyone is doing what you do every day. Not everyone is a nerd. But they don't know.

And so I think this week, for those of us who did know what Charlie Kirk stood for and the kind of politics he engaged in, seeing what people were saying about his legacy and who he was was kind of jarring, because it didn't match up with what we had been talking about for a long time. So let's just do this first and we just need to say it. We do not condone political violence in any way. I do not. I never, in any moment since I learned about what happened to Charlie Kirk, did I think anything other than we do not want political violence like this in our country. We do not want someone like him to be sitting at an event and to be shot, period.

And that's for a lot of reasons. One of the reasons is that we just, I just don't condone violence in that way. But another one is there's no possibility of having a democratic society where we share power and ideas and persuasion are what we swim in as a public currency, if we are having the threat that if you appear in public as an elected official, a public official, a public figure, you might be the subject of violence, and thus you need to live in fear in that way. So I'm sure you feel the same way. I just want to make sure we say it and everybody hears.

Dan: Only thing I'll add to that is that that's, in my view, that's the point of a democratic polity—to defuse that kind of violence, to turn political enemies into political opponents, people that you argue with, you disagree with, you engage with, but that's why we talk about things like peaceful transitions of power and free and fair elections and all of these kinds of things. That is the aim of a democratic society. So I affirm everything that you said. And just to say that political violence, in my view, is fundamentally anti-democratic. And as somebody who works in democratic political theory, yeah, I affirm very clearly that as we talk about this, and if we're critical of Kirk's ideas or views or the positions he espoused, I'm all for critiquing those in a democratic society, not for taking out your political opponent for holding those views.

Brad: Yeah. And you know, the overwhelming sentiment has been that this week, it's been one in which Democratic elected officials, popular and influential voices on the American left, have said exactly that. And so we'll get to what the right thinks is being said. We'll get to what people are saying on Twitter and other places about the reaction to Charlie Kirk's death. But as somebody who spent an inordinate amount of time on Bluesky this week and other social media sites, there was no consistent message, and I cannot think of one prominent figure who came out and said anything but what we just said, so I just want to leave that there.

All right, who was Charlie Kirk? Charlie Kirk, Dan, was—I've always described Charlie Kirk as one of the top 10 most influential conservatives in the country, and people might think that was overblowing the case, but I'm not sure it was. His organization TPUSA was on college campuses everywhere. He had a commanding effect over young college age people, especially young men, that whole manosphere, the "men won the election" thing. We can talk about the various podcasts that people went on. We can talk about Theo Von and all that stuff. Charlie Kirk was at the very forefront of that. I think he was the one showing up at college campus and saying, "Yes you can." He essentially basically became the ground game of Trump's 2024 re-election campaign.

He also, though, and this is the most important part for our show, just because of what we cover, he became a thoroughgoing Christian figure, and dare I say, Christian nationalist figure. Charlie Kirk did not start out as an explicitly Christian person. Dan, in fact, in 2018 according to a profile by Mara Richards at Baptist News Global, he told Dave Rubin that separation of church and state should be respected and all these kinds of things. But from the pandemic forward, Kirk became a much more outgoing and explicit Christian figure. He talked about his faith all the time. He was discipled by Rob McCoy at Godspeak in Ventura and also Jack Hibbs in Southern California. And these were the pastors—and they are both vehemently Christian nationalist pastors who've been involved in the school board fights and the curriculum fights and the book ban fights.

He eventually said in 2022 there is no separation of church and state. It's a fabrication. It's a fiction. It's not in the Constitution. Okay, in 2021 TP USA redefined its mission, and this was just after J6, okay? And instead of being focused on fiscal responsibility and free markets, it became invested in "guiding citizens through development of knowledge, skills, values and motivation so they can engage in their communities and restore traditional American values like liberty and family." Dan, if you read between the lines there, that is, "hey, we're not libertarian anymore. We're traditionalist."

Dan: It becomes the Heritage Foundation. It's Heritage Foundation for young men, and very effective.

Brad: That is exactly that. That's the best way to put it. And he also, and I'll just stop here. He also became incredibly embedded with the New Apostolic Reformation. I covered this. I talked about it extensively on the show, but it was the New Apostolic Reformation plus Charlie Kirk as a kind of ground game for Trump, and they toured the country.

Now there was also TPUSA Faith, right? And this was a wing of his organization that invited pastors to conferences, and they would pay for them. And there was just a systematic approach to getting MAGA Christian nationalism into churches, okay? And they did this very, very effectively. Ending in June 2023—excuse me, the end of the fiscal year in 2023—more than $13 million TP USA Faith claimed as expenses as they coordinated with 2,400 churches and 6,000 pastors.

So Dan, Charlie Kirk is a guy that was influencing, dare I say, millions of college students, 6,000 pastors, 2,400 churches in one year. How many people does that translate into, in terms of, if you add up all the podcasting, the conference appearances, the radio, etc? This is one of the most influential conservatives in the nation. I want to talk about some of the things he said over the years. But do you want to add anything to that?

Dan: The only other thing I want to add—I mean, you're talking about really the ground game on one hand, and the infrastructure that he built, the move toward Christian nationalism that was becoming increasingly popular. And some people will debate, did he really believe it? I don't care. He identified that way, used the language, all of that. But I think the other piece to recognize is he was a very, very effective speaker, right? And I just—I don't know if there's anything that Charlie Kirk probably ever said that I agreed with, but from analyzing the way that he would debate, the way that he would speak, the way that he would bait people into responses and so forth—very, very effective communicator, very effective communicator in a digital age that's into sound bites and short quips. He was very good at that, you know, the one sentence answer, the feeling of assurance that he would have, right?

We've talked about this before when he would give a quick response, set down the mic and stand back. All of those things that debate coaches or speech coaches or others would look at—that was tied in with this as well. So a very, very effective motivational speaker, even though, and I think this was part of his key, right, couching that motivational directional aspect of his speech, that adversarial nature of what he was saying as debate. "We are debating. We're just discussing." When in fact, it was much more than that. And that's not an easy skill to master, and very, very effective. And I think it's one of the reasons why now, as we're talking about, you start getting the mainstream media sort of talking about him in particular ways and so forth, is because he was a very, very good speaker in terms of just the actual effect it would have on his audiences and listeners.

Brad: We'll come back to this too. The way he debated was not debate.

Dan: It was very effectively cloaked. That's the key. Yes, yep.

Brad: And all of—I have spent an inordinate amount of time on TikTok this week, and all of the right wing talking points, and people responding to this have said he was just a guy that showed up and wanted to debate you. It was an open debate, bro. What's the big deal? That was and that was always the line. So all right, let's take a break. We'll come back and get into more of what Charlie Kirk said over the years. Be right back.

Brad: Okay, Dan, here are some things that Charlie Kirk talked about in his life. He did advocate ending separation of church and state, which I mentioned a bit ago. He did mobilize Republican candidates, and he did participate with Lance Wallnau in various endeavors, and that includes spiritual warfare. Lance Wallnau is one of the country's leading spiritual warfare activists, and both of them were pretty key in getting people mobilized to January 6, okay? Charlie Kirk said that God's perfect law says that gay people should be stoned to death, and so that was kind of part of what he liked to talk about. He said that somebody should break Paul Pelosi's attacker out of jail, because if they did so, they would be a patriot.

He often—well, he said that Black women like Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris and Ketanji Brown Jackson, they got to where they were because they were affirmative action hires. They did not have the brain power to get to where they should be or wanted to be on their own. And so that's how they got to their positions of power and elevation. He said that Martin Luther King Jr. was a bad guy. And that's, I mean, you're free to say that, but it is something that he said. I've talked about that extensively in my writing and on this show, so that's just part of what he said.

You know, he consistently said that trans people are mentally ill and there should be really no recognition of their identity. I could go on and on and on about the ways that he talked about people. I have more to say here. Do you want to add anything on this front?

Dan: No, just to tie together some points that I think you've made, that you're making here—the number of people who weren't familiar with Kirk together with what they're hearing now is, "oh, he just wanted to have open debate. He was a debater. He just wanted to talk. He just wanted to discuss. He was a free speech advocate," you know, all that sort of stuff, until you look at the content of what he said, which is part of the story of Charlie Kirk. Let's say he wanted a debate and so forth. Fine. His views were reprehensible, in my view. To be clear, that doesn't mean that I think it's right for somebody to have shot him, okay, but his views were reprehensible and they were intentionally provocative. That's the other piece of this.

We talk about the effective communication that he had—part of that was cloaking a very increasingly right wing ideology and culture war stuff, whatever, as debate, as discussion, and so forth. But the other one was provoking responses, provoking anger in his opponents. He wanted people who disagreed with him to lose their cool, and he wanted them to verbally attack him or to lash out in debate, whatever. He wanted to sort of break their cool and composure so that he could say, "See, we on the right, we're the reasonable ones. We're the ones having the discussion. You're the ones who are angry all the time, or crazy or whatever."

And that was another piece of this. So often, these positions were stated in very provocative ways. Things were very provocative and stated just matter-of-factly, as if it's just a matter of fact, and just a matter of observation and so forth, to provoke those responses, so that he and those who supported him could say, "See, we told you you're the ones who are really mean or angry or whatever." And that was really effective. And we're still seeing the dynamics of that in the aftermath of this event.

Brad: Couple of other things he said over the years. He said that we need to have Nuremberg-style trials for every gender-affirming clinic doctor, and we need it immediately. He said that it's happening all the time in urban America—prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people. "If you're a WNBA pot-smoking Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States Marine? If I see a Black pilot, I'm going to be like, boy, I hope he's qualified. If I'm dealing with someone in customer service who's a moronic Black woman, I wonder, is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?" I could go on and on. This stuff is everywhere.

The reason we bring this up, and Dan, I think you just said this, but I think the reason we bring this up is to say there is no reason that somebody should have murdered Charlie Kirk. We are not advocating for that in any way. But what we are noticing, at least what I've noticed, Dan, is that what's happening in the mainstream media is that people who don't know who Charlie Kirk was, at least for what he stood for, are now valorizing him as kind of a proponent of free speech, a proponent of open debate, and a hero to the right in the kind of vein of Ronald Reagan or something—not that Ronald Reagan didn't have things that he said that weren't truly offensive, but Charlie Kirk was not—there's this kind of movement now to make Charlie Kirk center-right, I think. And there's really no way to do that if you examine what he was saying.

This is not John McCain, Mitt Romney. This is not—this is somebody who said consistently to trust Donald Trump no matter what. And I'll just mention one more thing that I think we have to get in here, which is that TP USA had a Professor Watchlist. And what they would do is, if you got on the Professor Watchlist—this started after Trump was elected the first time—they would basically send your information out to their people and say, "Oh, here's our Professor Watchlist. We think this person is someone who's teaching things that are woke, communist, socialist, gender, sex, whatever."

And Beverly Vaughn—excuse me, Stacey Patton shared this on Facebook. This is a Black professor, a woman who says, "I'm on Charlie Kirk's hit list. His so-called Professor Watchlists run under the umbrella of Turning Point USA is a digital hit list for academics who dare to speak truth to power. I landed there in 2024 after writing commentary that inflamed the MAGA faithful, and once my name went up, the harassment machine roared to life. For weeks, my inbox and voicemail were deluged. Mostly white men spat venom through the phone, calling me words that I'm not going to say here, including the N-word and the C-word. They overwhelmed the university's PR lines and the president's office with calls demanding that I be fired. The flood was so relentless that the head of campus security reached out to offer me an escort because they feared one of these keyboard soldiers might step out of his basement and come do me harm."

So that is part of what TPUSA did. And there's testimony after testimony of this. Kevin Kruse, the Princeton historian, talked about this on social media this week, and so on and so forth. So that's all there. And yet, what we're seeing, Dan, in the media this week is him being valorized as a kind of American conservative hero that didn't have this kind of, what I would call at least denigrating rhetoric about so many people who live in the United States.

He also said that it's worth having Second Amendment rights and guns in our country, even if that means a few gun deaths per year. He said it's rational that we should believe that if you want your Second Amendment rights, that you have to accept that people will just be killed by guns in the country, right? And we see that every day when it comes to schools and children and so on.

Dan, let me list some things, and I'll throw it to you. His casket was put on Air Force Two by Vice President JD Vance. Pete Hegseth, the Department of Defense head, the Secretary of Defense, said a military prayer for him with troops. Trump ordered flags to be flown at half-mast. And this is happening at government buildings. It's also happening at your local McDonald's. Governor Shapiro, a Democrat in Pennsylvania, ordered the same thing to be done. Gavin Newsom said that we need to, quote, "carry on the work of Charlie Kirk," and my brain's about to explode. I'm just going to leave that there. The Yankees and Red Sox had a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk. The NFL did too.

And then the worst one, and the one I want to talk about at more length, is CBS invited Jack Posobiec to be on and talk about Charlie Kirk, his friend. But let me throw it to you to get some thoughts on everything we're discussing here.

Dan: Just so, number one, we see this—I don't know what phrase to use—this kind of idealization, conversation, sanctification, whatever, of figures when they die. But there's always that. There's always these controversial figures, and it's kind of just general cultural and social pressure to say good things, or, you know, whatever. So there's a piece of that.

The broader thing for me that is ironic and I think very intentional here is the positioning of him as a soldier of free speech is being used to silence any criticism or recollection of the things that he said. Everything that you're quoting that he said—and we could expand that list, folks—it's not hard. You can trace it all down. Here's the day and the time and the place where he said it. Right. You find episodes like, here's his recorded voice saying it, here is where he—these are not secret things. Advocates of free speech and so forth.

And we're also hearing stories of, say, teachers in red states who in their private, personal social media things say things like, as you said, "we don't advocate political violence, but Charlie Kirk held terrible positions." Oh no, you're fired, or you're threatened that your teaching credentials are going to be pulled. You know, cracking down on people—it's the use of the appeal to free speech to silence any criticism or examination of what he actually said and why he was such a controversial figure, and that's what we're getting. You combine that with, I think, a real lack of familiarity, as you say, among the mainstream media, the both-sideism that mainstream media always falls into. They can't just say this person held views that lots of people think were reprehensible. No, they got to have his friend come and talk about him and memorialize him and so forth.

I think all of that comes together, but what stands out for me is the Orwellian way that appeals to free speech are being used to silence any criticism or discussion of who this person was and the views that he held and the things that he actually said.

Brad: So just a couple quick notes. We covered this on the show extensively, but Representative Hortman and her husband were shot in their home in Minnesota, state rep, a couple of months ago. There was no real response from the President for that. There was no—he did not visit Minnesota. He did not go there. He did not offer condolences in any real form. Flags were not flown at half-mast for an elected official who was assassinated in her home by a Christian extremist, by somebody who was part of the New Apostolic Reformation universe.

Dan, just about a month ago, there was a shooting at the CDC. Somebody who was conspiracy-addled shot up the CDC. It's memory-holed. People don't even remember that. They may not have heard about it. If you worked at the CDC, you have bullet holes in your office now, because somebody fired dozens of rounds at the CDC building. Evergreen High School—the same day Charlie Kirk was shot, there was a shooting at Evergreen High School in Colorado. The day after there was a shooting at UMass Boston, and a shooting yesterday at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.

So there's just a lot of people in the country who are really tired of shootings in general, kids being massacred at schools, and I think what they're feeling is, how can you do things like have a moment of silence at the Yankees-Red Sox game, or fly the flags at half-mast for one person who said so many things about so many Americans that were so hurtful and denigrating, and yet not recognize what happened in Minnesota just a couple of weeks ago, at a Catholic school where two children were murdered while they were praying. And again, we talked about—so that's there.

The biggest one to me, though, is that CBS last night had Jack Posobiec on. So let me just—if you don't know who Jack Posobiec is, you can look him up. If you listen to the show, you know who he is. He's one of the most vitriolic right wing provocateurs online today, and just recently, Dan, I'll just give you two quick examples, and then we can move on. Jack Posobiec wrote a book called Unhumans, talking about political opponents as like they're less than human, they're not worth considering as the same as you. Now, JD Vance blurbed that book, so I guess that gave it legitimacy. Nonetheless, CBS is like, "Hey, who's a friend of Charlie Kirk we can invite on to talk about him and his life in the wake of his death? Oh, I guess we'll invite Jack."

He also went to a major right wing conference and said, "We're here to end democracy. This is the beginning of the end of democracy." He also said about his political enemies that "you need to be"—he's talking to his community, his followers—"you need to be the prey, and they need to be the hunted." I could go on and on. I mean, if you want me to get real deep, Dan, this was the guy that led the Pizzagate conspiracy, like, a decade ago. Why they couldn't call someone else—they had to call Jack Posobiec and mainstream Jack Posobiec is just a normal conservative American, just a normal guy in the Republican Party. That's—and I guess there's two things to say. I guess that is a normal guy in the Republican Party now, but CBS, you still didn't have to call him and have him on.

There's a larger discussion about what's happening at CBS, etc. But all right, those are some thoughts we need to get to, Trump's reaction and others. But jump in here.

Dan: Just again, I mentioned it earlier, the both-sides logic of the mainstream media that constantly falls into this thing of, if we're going to criticize something, we have to treat it as if there's some parallel on the other side. And I find this as well—lots of critics of Charlie Kirk, and he was controversial, so, but we need to make sure that we get a sympathetic telling. And yeah, they choose maybe the most reprehensible person imaginable to do that.

And I think it just says a lot. It says a lot, as you say, about CBS. It says a lot about the larger media structure. But for me, it is that need in the sort of mainstream or legacy media to constantly be trying to be, quote-unquote, balanced about people who are unbalanced. You know, they represent an extreme. There is no balancing it. And they keep trying to do this, and all it does is mainstream the worst elements of these movements.

Brad: Let's take a break. We'll come back and get to the reactions on the American right to Charlie Kirk's death and the idea that political violence comes from the American left.

Brad: All right, Dan, I want to tee you up here to jump into something that I know you've been thinking about all week. Here's what Trump said after he responded. Let me back up. Here's Trump's response to Charlie Kirk's death. "For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals," and Trump blamed this kind of rhetoric as directly responsible for "the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today." Now this was with no understanding of who shot Charlie Kirk, no understanding of their motives, who they were, why they did it. But this is what he said.

Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation, the guy that said that "we are in the midst of a second American Revolution that will remain bloodless if the left allows it"—that guy, he said that Charlie Kirk is a martyr. Jack Hibbs, one of the most influential and really, really, really Christian nationalist to the extreme pastors in Southern California, also called Charlie Kirk an American martyr. Many are likening him to a modern-day Martin Luther King Jr.

So Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias at the New York Times report that Intercessors for America, a Christian group with ties to the Trump administration, put in an email to their supporters that Charlie Kirk is a modern-day MLK. Sixteen GOP lawmakers sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson the day after the killing, asking him to erect a statue of Kirk to celebrate his legacy. One of them said, "We have a statue of Martin Luther King Jr., so it would make sense to have one of Charlie Kirk."

Now on the American right, the reactions have been to call for an all-out war. So Matt Forney says on X, "Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag Fire. It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO." Representative Clay Higgins said, "I'm going to use congressional authority and every influence with big tech to mandate immediate ban for life of every poster/commenter that belittles the assassination of Charlie Kirk."

I can sort of read you some things from Christian nationalist pastors. Brian Sauvé said, "We cannot peaceably coexist with these demons. The DNC is and must be labeled a terrorist organization." Now this is again before anyone had been arrested. CJay Engel, who is a Christian nationalist pastor, agreed with John Carter when he said, "Declare a state of emergency. Every leftist needs to be purged from every institution, starting with the security services and working systematically and quickly through the civil service, academia, media, corporate sector, right down to the local library."

William Wolfe, who is one of the 15 pastors and faith leaders invited to the White House in March of this year, said on X, "Hey you. Yeah, you. The normie, the grill American, the 'I just want to be left alone' guy, the libertarian, the guy who doesn't care much for politics. Listen up. The vast majority of leftists and Democrats are happy right now, thrilled, even rejoicing." I don't know who that is. I don't know who's rejoicing. Dan, I've looked, I've tried to find it. It's not you and me. It's not anyone else.

I could keep going. I have seen about a hundred TikToks of right wing nobodies saying, "If you want war, you got war. If this is—you started something you can't finish. Today is the day that you have set off the next civil war in America," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that is the reaction from the American right. I will shut up. Tell us about political violence and how it is framed in this country.

Dan: Yes, I think it builds directly from this. So one of the things that we've heard and we see everywhere are concerns about the rising tide of political violence. And I read this in lots of media accounts. I read this on lots of people on the political left who are like, "this is scary. We're devolving into political violence and so forth." And let me be clear, this was an act of political violence—assassinating somebody for their political ideology and views is an act of political violence, absolutely.

But let's listen to the responses on the right. And I'm going to say something: violence begets violence. What is the call? The response being called upon by the right? It's additional violence. It's not an end of political violence. They're decrying what they see as the political violence of the left. As you say, there's no evidence of that historically in America—political violence, especially if it involves guns, is much more of a right wing issue than a left wing issue, all of that. But what they're calling for is not the end of political violence. They are calling for political violence.

But the broader point I want to think about is, fine, I agree political violence—it's a problem, and we've said it, and we don't advocate it—but I think we also have to understand and recognize using violence as politics, because this is all coming from a movement, the MAGA movement, that has systematically used the mechanisms of politics to enact violence as an agenda very explicitly and very clearly. And I think we have to recognize that. And again, that is not to justify an act of assassination, but it is to say, cool, you want to have a conversation about political violence? Let's have a conversation about political violence. Let's have a conversation about an entire political movement that is based on grievance, that is based on vengeance, that is based on enacting violence on those with whom they disagree, those whom they don't think are real Americans or true Americans.

Let's look at what has happened in the MAGA movement of targeting every population violently with which they disagree and that they view as a threat. So I think that's what we think of. Let's think about J6. January 6 was a day of political violence, and what happens on the same right that is now decrying this as political violence? They at the time—remember it was like "a tour of the Capitol. It was just people expressing—this was just free speech," all the way up to being pardoned.

We have a party that uses ICE as a private army of Gestapo police tearing apart families, purposely trying to break up families, purposely kidnapping people and taking them away and not telling people—those are acts of violence. That's an act of political violence. If it happened in any other country, we would decry it as an act of political violence. Efforts to literally eradicate trans people. You talked about things that Charlie Kirk said, but we can talk about all the states that ban trans care for minors and so forth. These are acts of violence. This is targeting a population because we don't think that they should exist. We don't think that they are real. We are enacting violence and harm on them. That is the aim of the policy.

More people are going to die from RFK's anti-vax, anti-science standards and changes at the CDC and taking vaccines away from people than are going to die in political assassinations in this country. That is predictable. I view that as an act of violence. The GOP refusal to address gun violence. We've talked about this for years. Everybody's talked about this for years. I read this week about GOP people in Congress, in the Senate, asking for additional security details because they're worried. Kids in schools don't get to do that. People going to concerts who suffer mass shooting events don't get to do that. People going to the CDC to do their job and then having it shot up, they don't get to do that. The same GOP that will not touch the issue of guns enables violence every day as an act of policy.

We talked about the attack on the Venezuelan boat, the US Navy that most observers now say violated international law, that there was no clear reason for doing this, there was no apprehension, there was no due process, none of that—that is an act of violence. The military occupation of blue cities is an act of violence. Cutting and eradicating FEMA and just guaranteeing that when people who are the most marginalized, the most at risk during natural disasters are not going to have recourse or help that they need. The unwavering support for Israel and what it continues to do in Gaza and starvation and genocide and just refusal to step in or condemn that—all of these are acts of violence.

So what I'm trying to say is, yes, let's talk about political violence, but let's talk about a politics of violence. Let's talk about a country that we live in where an entire political party and an entire movement is built on violently targeting those that they don't like, those who voted against Donald Trump, those who they don't think are real and true Americans. And folks, I'm not opposed to people not having my political views. I'm not talking about not allowing people to have different policy positions or tax positions. But that's not what MAGA is about.

And so when we hear now suddenly, on the one hand, the mainstream media saying, "Oh, it's a cycle of political violence"—it is a cycle of political violence. But we need to understand that in the totality of what it is, not to justify it, but to say, if we want to talk about political violence, let's really talk about political violence, and let's talk about just how deep and central it is to our country right now, and certainly on the right. Do not let people call for violent retaliation in the name of somehow cracking down on political violence. This movement has always been violent at its heart. That has come more and more into the open the more they've consolidated power, and this is just a legitimation for them to consider exercising that kind of political violence.

So I think that that's something that is just utterly lost on mainstream accounts of this. Whenever we keep talking about, you know, limiting the talk to acts of shooting and assassination and so forth, no matter who the target is, I think we have to zoom out and say we are part of a much deeper, much bigger maelstrom of political violence in this country. It has defined the politics of this country for four years now, and I think that we have to recognize that and name it for what it is.

Brad: And so we're going to say it again. We don't want there to be political violence. I don't want Charlie Kirk to have been shot. Let's just say it again for everyone who's going to try to gotcha and get us and email us or put us on a list or anything else. We do not want that. This is not a happy week in the United States. There has never been one iota of joy in my body as a result of anything coming from this week. It has been pain and fear. I don't want any children, including Charlie Kirk's children, to grow up without their dad because of violence. I don't want that at all.

I think if you listen to this show, though, you know that one of the things that is so hard in this country right now is that not everyone's considered human. So I heard over and over again that Charlie Kirk is a father, and he was young. He was 31—that's too young. He's a husband. There are people right now whose world is devastated because he's gone. I'm not going to lose sight of that. There's—I have little kids. I'm not going to lose sight that they didn't know their dad as whatever it is that everyone else knew, that they just knew him as their dad. I'm not going to lose sight of that. Period. I won't.

I'm also never going to stop recognizing that so many folks in this country or in Gaza are not considered human, that if you're on a boat headed back to Venezuela, you're not—why would we even lose sleep over you?

Dan: Yeah, how many other fathers are being targeted? How many other fathers are dying? How many other fathers are being deported? How many other kids are growing up without fathers and families because of acts of political violence? For me, that's the point that we're making, right, that that shouldn't happen, and that this isn't the only place that it happened.

Brad: If you're a gay barber in Dallas who's got the pictures of your nieces and nephews on your barbershop stand, and you end up in an El Salvadorian prison—we could go on and on about how, you know, one of the things I want to talk about for Monday, Dan, and we don't have time today, is that before this happened, I was getting ready to do a whole bunch of material about the Supreme Court's decision that said, if you are a brown person speaking Spanish in LA, you can be profiled legally by ICE. And I wanted to get into how that lined up with one of the most vile white nationalist, white Christian nationalist speeches by a sitting senator that we have had in this country in a long time, which happened at NatCon about a week ago.

The point I want to make, and I'll keep trying to make it, because we're going to run out of time today, is that the world we live in right now is one where there is violence against people who are not considered human, and those are not people who—when you say they're a father, they're a mother, they're a brother—people are like, "Well, you shouldn't have come here. You shouldn't have done that. You shouldn't have done this. You made a mistake, you crossed the border, you came out as trans." So now every time we try to humanize you, we try to say you're a husband, a father, you're a human, you're a friend, you're a colleague—it's like, "well, yeah, but you're also this, you're illegal, you're a trans person, you're a—" and so, right.

And so, nothing we're saying today is to overlook Charlie Kirk's humanity or his kids or his family. It's to say we're living in a moment of political violence against so many people who are also those things. And usually what we hear from the American right is they don't count. And why would we even pay attention?

Give you one more thing, Dan, before we go. Mehdi Hasan put this online, and a lot of people have been talking about it, so I'll just go through it. Melissa Hortman was killed a couple months ago by a Trump supporter in Minnesota, a sitting state rep. Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, had the governor's mansion set on fire. Attempted murder by Trump supporter. There were some shootings at homes of four Democratic elected officials in New Mexico in 2022. Trump supporter. Kidnap plot for Nancy Pelosi in 2022, and guess what? Her husband Paul was brutally beaten in that event. Trump supporter. Donald Trump laughed about it. Charlie Kirk said that a patriot should bail that person out because they shouldn't be in jail anymore for that, I guess, for attacking Paul Pelosi. Mike Pence, there were gallows raised for him on January 6, 2021, obviously Trump supporters.

Judge Esther Salas had her son killed. She was an Obama-appointed district judge, and that was by a Trump supporter in 2020. Folks tried to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. Trump supporters. Pipe bombs sent to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton. Trump supporter. The man who killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville in 2017 at the white nationalist rally was a Trump supporter.

Does that mean all Trump supporters do stuff like that? Nope. Does that mean that we think that anyone should be killed? Nope. Does that mean that we think that what happened this week was in any way good? It does not. I don't think it was. I don't think that the killing of Charlie Kirk was anything but terrible and disgusting. I also know that we are going to hear on repeat that the left propagates political violence, and it is time to squash them, because they're nothing but a terrorist organization. They're nothing but demons.

I have seen that on right wing Christian nationalist Twitter and TikTok all weekend—I mean, more times than I can remember—and that is going to be the rallying cry for a new civil war. And I don't know what's going to happen, because the arrest of Tyler Robinson is like hours-old news, so I don't know how they're going to spin it. I don't know if they're going to run with him as an antifa person. I don't know if they're going to run with him as radicalized by professors. I don't know what they're going to do, but we're going to hear about how it is Democrats who are violent extremists, leftists, progressives, liberals, socialists, whoever, that want to do nothing but kill everybody. That's what we're going to hear.

And I bring all the things up, those examples I just gave, to remind folks of the violence of the MAGA movement and the ways that it is pretty ubiquitous in our politics. Final thoughts for today.

Dan: Just again to clarify, if we're going to be critical of political violence, and we should be, we must be critical of all political violence and violent politics. And I think that that's the key for me. Let's have—let's collectively have that discussion, and let's look that in the eye, and let's take that on, and let's be honest about what that is. That's a discussion we can have, but to limit it sort of ahead of time to be like, "Well, only the left can be politically violent. Everything else is just—it's just happenstance, or it's just politics." I think that that's the trap that many in sort of the mainstream analysis world, and many on the left politically, have fallen into.

Brad: All right, I'm going to be talking more about this Monday, friends, so there'll be more from us on this. For now, I'll give you my reason for hope, and that is Bolsonaro convicted in Brazil, 27 years in jail. And it's kind of—you know, there's an impulse in me, Dan, to say we could have had nice things. We could have done what you and I said, and so many others said should have happened after J6, and that is to convict Trump and bring charges against him. It's good news, though, for the world, and it's good news to show that if you try things like this, there will be consequences. And we saw that in South Korea. We see this now in Brazil. So that is good news to me.

Dan: My reason for hope—it comes from California, where lawmakers passed a bill banning ICE and other federal agents from wearing face coverings. They have another bill that they're advancing that would require badges and identification, essentially. Don't know if Newsom is going to sign it. It's unclear sort of the authority of a state to make this kind of demand of federal agents. But I take great hope in that, and we're watching to see what happens. We're watching to see if that advances and what direction it goes.

Brad: Well, another piece of good news is basically, and we could have spent all day talking about this, that JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson in Chicago seem to have scared Trump off. Yeah. I mean, they stood up and said, "We'll prosecute people. We don't want you here." I mean, they did the thing that so many other Democrats were afraid to do, and ICE—there are ICE agents in Chicago, don't get me wrong—but the full-scale deployment did not happen, and now Trump is sending people. He's focused on Memphis. So I'm thinking of all of you in Memphis. I used to live in Memphis. I have a great affection for Memphis. I have family members in Memphis. I'm thinking of all of you, and we'll be reaching out.

But he's set himself there. I just want to note that Memphis is in Tennessee, and Tennessee has a deep, deep, deep, deep red legislature and a Republican governor. They could send all kinds of things to Memphis whenever they wanted, but they want Trump to sort of do a nice grandstand and show off a little bit like he's doing something.

So all right, y'all, we'll be back Monday. I'll be talking more about all of these issues and more. Back Wednesday with It's In The Code. Back Friday with the Weekly Roundup. Want to say just how much we appreciate all of you being with us and listening in when events like this take place. We appreciate all of you. Thanks for supporting us as subscribers, and thanks for just being here throughout the journey we've been on on this show for almost a thousand episodes and going strong. Until next time, have a good weekend. We'll see you soon.

Dan: Thanks, Brad.