00:06:46.900And I think that this is another fundamental problem is that these pundits are not using the internet. And so they only sort of know who these characters are in this sort of like vague, like deeply sanitized sense. I mean, we'll get into so much, but like everything that you read is inaccurate.
00:07:06.060The way that Charlie Kirk is portrayed in this piece, and also by a lot of people and pundits in the mainstream more broadly, is incomprehensible compared to the content he actually made and what he would actually do when he went onto these college campuses.
00:07:22.420Also, let's back up before that, Kat, and I totally agree with you.
00:07:26.300This is a man who, as a teenager, received a massive amount of funding from two far-right conservative billionaires.0.91
00:07:33.280The idea that he, with just his like moxie, was able to influence a generation of college students is so deeply delusional. This was a astroturf campaign by far right reactionary billionaires. And they just found a willing millennial to go along with it, just the way that a lot of people today are finding willing Gen Z's to go along with their next political project, like censorship.0.84
00:07:57.540damn i you know i prize this podcast on nuance and we went in swinging i mean this this uh this0.69
00:08:03.980piece really quite deserves deserves the lashings but i also i really want to speak to in this0.98
00:08:09.620episode people who read honestly ezra klein's piece or any of the like cat mentioned many of
00:08:16.020the pieces from both liberal and conservative pundits alike i actually think it's one of the
00:08:21.000most common themes in his memorializing right now is like well you might not have agreed with him
00:08:26.420but you gotta hand it to him and I'm like well we're gonna really dissect all of the claims that
00:08:31.980Ezra Klein made in this article but I really want to first mention like the elite political
00:08:39.480pundit class that Ezra Klein belongs to and that a lot of the people who are deciding right now
00:08:45.200what Charlie Kirk's legacy is belong to because I agree with a lot of what Ezra Klein says about0.64
00:08:51.000the genocide that Israel is committing, for example. But he is also an extraordinarily0.59
00:08:57.080wealthy white man who works for the New York Times. And what I find with so many of these
00:09:04.320political intellectuals, and I'm curious what you guys think about this, for them, it's so often
00:09:09.680it comes across as if politics is just like an intellectual exercise. And it is that before
00:09:17.280it's something that like affects people who have way less privilege and wealth and access than the
00:09:23.460pundits creating these think pieces and who are currently determining what Charlie's legacy is.
00:09:28.280And it's just like, I read something like this. And I think about all of the people who have dealt
00:09:35.240in the last couple years since Roe was overturned with an unplanned pregnancy, and they live in a
00:09:39.460state where they can't get abortion, and maybe they don't have money to go to a place where
00:09:42.560they can get an abortion. Or I think about the black professors and the queer professors who0.99
00:09:48.680have had their livelihoods threatened by Charlie Kirk's doxing movement, which we're going to get0.72
00:09:53.460into. And I think about trans kids and the families who support them, who have, maybe they
00:09:59.980live in Florida or any of a number of places where their livelihoods are threatened as children.
00:10:05.400And, you know, deciding where to move if they can move, how to deal with life if they can't move.
00:10:11.100what do they think about the way that Charlie Kirk supposedly practiced his politics
00:10:16.160it's really quite infuriating to me and I think that oftentimes like again someone like Ezra
00:10:23.680Klein means well and I think he genuinely is like about the spirit of debate and the spirit of free
00:10:29.240speech but it's like can we talk about the lives that were destroyed by this person and and the
00:10:36.200fact that like maybe that matters more than like the way that he like had conversations i just the
00:10:41.660free speech thing really gets to me because charlie kirk was not an ally of the free speech
00:10:47.000movement in any like at all literally one of the first things that turning point did was start
00:10:51.860doxing and trying to drive teachers out of their job he was lives of tiktok before lives of tiktok
00:10:56.200yeah so please spare me this is not this is a man that shut down debates like and he wasn't
00:11:03.400actually debate like most of those college sort of debates it was clickbait it was setting up this
00:11:09.340sort of positioning himself in a certain way to get a certain sound by uh so that he could make
00:11:14.140like triggered sjw clips on youtube shorts like it wasn't any sort of earnest meaningful debate
00:11:19.820that recognized that like basic humanity i mean i think he just fundamentally he dehumanized so
00:11:24.960many groups and i don't think you can even have a debate when somebody is dehumanizing you because
00:11:29.820dehumanization is not something that's like a debatable thing you're affecting other people's
00:11:35.480rights you're taking away people's choices you are hurting people um what what what rights am
00:11:44.020i taking away exactly you're trying to take away gender affirming care for individuals you are
00:11:48.320affecting abortion rights you are hurting people got it so what is a woman it really bothers me
00:11:54.380the way that Charlie Kirk keeps being characterized as if this is a fact, that he was a
00:12:00.580debater, that he persuaded people, that he relied on the rhetoric of debate on college
00:12:06.940campuses to convince young students, because that's actually not what he was doing at all.
00:12:12.280And these words have meanings. A debate has a specific meaning. And even if you go and watch,
00:12:19.640which again, I do not think these pundits are going to youtube.com and sitting down and watching
00:12:26.200the viral Charlie Kirk YouTube videos, because it's very clearly not a debate. And if you go and
00:12:32.660even watch the most watched video on his YouTube channel, the young woman on campus who he's
00:12:38.040speaking to is like, that is her argument. It's, is that like what he's doing is ridiculous and0.95
00:12:43.520it's not actually a debate at all do you feel uh proud of yourself for debating college kids0.91
00:12:49.940um who are unprepared to speak in front of an audience like yourself forget the personal attacks
00:12:55.820or the stylistic attacks focus on substance the more we debate that the stronger we're going to
00:12:59.820be as a country thank you for coming thank you i don't think you're focusing on substance though
00:13:04.020that's the issue hold on look he intentionally tried to provoke substance out of you
00:13:11.560and you said, well, I'm worried about some laws Congress should pass.
00:13:15.320I have to ask, what laws are you talking about?
00:14:40.860I also think, though, it's important to recognize that Charlie Kirk was not just an influencer himself.
00:14:45.820He ran one of the most powerful right wing propaganda networks, a powerful dark money group, literally.
00:14:52.260That was like this shady nonprofit that like, you know, basically like astroturfed influencers across America.
00:14:59.180They produced, they poured thousands and thousands of dollars into, you know, people building up people like Alex Clark, who hosted Poplitics, right?
00:15:07.460And then now she's doing cultural apothecary, this like right-wing pseudoscience, RFK Jr., terrible, dangerous podcast that just promotes like the most, some of the most dangerous health misinformation, anti-birth control, you know, right-wing reactionary messaging.
00:15:20.320Why should every church have a fitness ministry?
00:23:08.100I think what you need first and foremost is just a diagnosis, just someone that is going to listen to what you've gone through, listen to what else is going on.
00:23:16.900My prayer for you, and again, very few people will say this, I actually want to see you be comfortable in how you were born.
00:23:24.000And that's where I really run into a problem, too, with this framing of like, well, free speech is free speech.
00:23:29.960And he was just engaging in free speech, maybe. But how much of like a good faith debate can be had between, you know, a trans person who's saying I'm trans and Charlie Kirk saying trans people don't exist?
00:23:45.740a lot of his debates end there and then it's just and then it's just like you said kat it's like a
00:23:52.400sort of an ongoing humiliation ritual where then this person gets taunted by all of charlie kirk's
00:23:57.380fans who are standing around them in maga hats and do you know what i mean well i was just gonna
00:24:01.920say too that like while some of his most viral content are these debate moments and while that's
00:24:07.140like especially since 2019 like you know he's been i mean even before that like he he has really been
00:24:12.100like a road warrior on these college campuses. That's the goal of Turning Point is to radicalize
00:24:16.760these young people. He had a podcast. He had this massive platform. He had social media content,
00:24:23.960like kind of cat what you were saying before, like the game is rigged for him. Like he uses these
00:24:28.480like debate SJW owned type clips to amass an audience, feed them down the funnel of Charlie
00:24:36.020Kirk content and Turning Point USA content. And then you're sort of on this radicalized path,
00:24:40.120exposed to more and more extreme ideas. And you're not you don't ever get a chance to question it
00:24:44.700because the other sort of side or whatever is never presented in any sort of like nuanced or
00:24:49.400thoughtful way. It's sort of just like, he he's always the triumphant victor, kind of like you
00:24:55.240said, I do think people like Ezra Klein and this article fail to understand that this stuff isn't
00:25:03.160just like good old fashioned debate. This was a very, very small piece in a larger chess game
00:25:09.060that Charlie Kirk has been playing with the help of authoritarian billionaires for many, many years.
00:25:14.740This whole conversation reminds me a lot of all of the times that I have talked about Jubilee,
00:25:20.180the quote-unquote debate YouTube channel that just platforms the most extreme, far-right,
00:25:25.900Nazi-adjacent, eugenics, flat-earthers, anyone you can think of that will get them views based on
00:25:31.540outrage. And then they frame it as just like a good old-fashioned debate, but the premise of
00:25:37.280these debates is always absurd flat earthers versus round earthers fat people versus fit people
00:25:45.120these are real videos you know not that charlie kirk was necessarily replicating that exact
00:25:49.820content though he was himself a jubilee star which in my opinion was a match made in heaven
00:25:54.960but it's like and this is why it reminds this is why charlie kirk reminds me of jubilee
00:25:58.820is because people are watching this and they're thinking that they're watching something pure
00:26:03.380Yeah. And I think like so much of what this kind of rhetoric is, is it's not intellectually rigorous. So much of what Charlie Kirk said was straight up misinformation, disinformation and just bigotry.
00:26:17.640So it's not that he is able to persuade or convince anyone on the merits of an actual argument. His style of politics that Ezra Klein is applauding is literally politics by force, where one side isn't allowed to be fully represented because they've been harassed and shut out of the conversation entirely.
00:26:38.100You saw that with obviously 20 Point USA's Professor Watchlist, which harassed academics out of their jobs and livelihoods because they taught subjects that Charlie Kirk and, you know, the conservative ideology finds disagreeable.
00:26:54.580And then in terms of like what he is doing that's similar to Jubilee is it's like the titles of his YouTube videos would be things like, oh, Karen Meltdown or 20 Libs take on Charlie Kirk.
00:27:07.140So it's like this style of content is biased from the outset and that like shifts the power
00:27:14.840dynamic completely. And I also think like the other two things in the Ezra Klein piece that
00:27:19.800really stick out to me are he lists all these examples of political acts of violence at the
00:27:25.180beginning of the piece. He details like major incidents of political violence, mostly against
00:27:30.860left-wing politicians over the past few years. And I'm like, do you know what Charlie Kirk has
00:27:37.340said about this stuff? Do you know what Charlie Kirk has said about January 6th? Do you know
00:27:42.640what Charlie Kirk said about the guy who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer? Because this is
00:27:48.200actually the way that Charlie Kirk insinuates advocacy for in terms of how he thinks that
00:27:53.640politics should happen. He's the one who's like, don't give the other side the opportunity to speak,
00:27:59.660just like stamp them out of existence. The idea that his style of politics is attributed to
00:28:06.880fearlessness, he has nothing to fear. He's a white conservative man. His style is inducing fear in
00:28:14.000others and like chilling their speech and participation. Speaking of violence, Kat,
00:28:18.880I think you just made a good point about like, this is a man that espoused deeply violent rhetoric
00:28:23.420regularly, not to mention the sort of more broad forms of political violence, which I think against
00:28:30.040poor people, LGBTQ people, again, like I think dehumanization of trans people, for instance,
00:28:34.680is itself a form of violence. And that is something he regularly espoused and advocated for.
00:28:40.480But this is a man also who was a staunch defender of Israel's genocide in Gaza. He got up on stage
00:28:46.160and he made a joke saying, oh, I used to tell, you know, LGBTQ people go to Gaza and, you know,1.00
00:28:51.260they'll throw you off a tall building. Now there's no more tall buildings there. Ha ha ha. And he
00:28:54.840laughs at the audience. I used to say that, hey, if you as a gay person would go to Gaza,0.99
00:29:00.860they'd throw you off of tall buildings, right? Now they don't have any tall buildings left.0.92
00:29:05.380So I don't. You know, it was just disgusting, like that he was constantly advocating for violence
00:29:15.180and defending violence, like the most extreme forms of violence. And so this idea that like,
00:29:21.500oh, he was this anti-violent good faith debater. It's just, as you said, it's not in line with any
00:29:27.400of what he said. And it's also very revealing what Ezra Klein considers political violence.
00:29:31.860I mean, I talked about this on my channel, but like he, you know, political violence and the
00:29:36.060way that we view political violence already in this country is so skewed. And there's just this
00:29:40.780complete dismissal of all of these systemically violent systems that frankly charlie kirk upheld
00:29:47.100yeah and people in the discourse are also very much leaning into like well he was just a calm0.52
00:29:54.220cool and collected guy you know watch his videos he's so calm and it's just like if you're a gay
00:30:01.240person or a trans person or any sort of other minority that charlie kirk had a vendetta against0.97
00:30:06.840yeah it is going to be more emotional to be told that like your existence is like mental illness
00:30:13.660or something yeah I can't imagine why like you'd be the emotional one in that situation where
00:30:18.320Charlie Kirk is just sitting there Charlie Kirk isn't threatened by his own rhetoric he's
00:30:23.800threatening your life with his rhetoric you know it's it's it's so absurd and and I think yeah
00:30:29.800just leaning into like what does it mean to be politically violent you know so many people are
00:30:34.180like, well, he couldn't have been politically violent because all he did was talk. And I'm
00:30:37.940like, well, we're going to get into more reasons why that is not all he was doing. But also I hate
00:30:42.480to sound like early 2000s, like SJW type that someone like Charlie Kirk would make, you know,1.00
00:30:46.680a video compilation about how stupid I am. But like Charlie Kirk was violent in his words and0.99
00:30:52.980not just his words, but because those words were attached to a close relationship with
00:30:56.880the president of the United States. It's also like people do not consider
00:31:02.400online harassment to be a form of violence, even though it is a form of violence and it
00:31:07.960has, it is a real world action that has real world consequences.
00:31:12.220So like, obviously we're going to get into more stuff around like the professor watch
00:31:16.580list, but even in the way that he does the title and thumbnail of these YouTube videos
00:31:21.020or the way that he includes this misinformation in his podcast about specific individuals,
00:33:30.820And neither of us have changed our minds by the end of that quote unquote debate.
00:33:34.160But it made for a great YouTube video whose viewers also did not change their minds.0.96
00:33:38.200And you return home and you do force your daughter to give birth to her rapist child
00:33:43.160Because you live in a state where abortion is banned, again, thanks to your movement. Is that practicing politics the right way? And if it is, don't you think what it means to practice politics in the right way has to change?
00:33:55.380Yeah, Charlie Kirk won the debate. Charlie Kirk also cashed the YouTube AdSense check. But who loses the most vulnerable people in society in this specific case, which is a very real case playing out across America, is a girl, a child girl who cannot speak for herself in this situation or vote on laws that affect her own body. Like this is a hypothetical, but it's not.
00:34:19.820It's not a hypothetical because these are the real situations that marginalized people in this country find themselves in.
00:35:16.860I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.
00:35:26.940He was able to advocate for that stuff because he believed that he was insulated from it.
00:35:31.160And that's, by the way, true of so many of these conservative political figures.
00:35:34.700Like, they know, and frankly, people like Ezra Klein know, that they will be insulated from the worst of these fascist policies.
00:35:42.100And so, yeah, they're totally free to advocate for it and be like, why are you so triggered?
00:35:45.420you know, like, oh, you don't want this, whatever. It's like, well, because these policies don't
00:35:48.880affect you, you know, taking away women's rights doesn't really affect you. It just sort of gives
00:35:54.240you men more power, you know, hating on LGBTQ people. Like you're just sort of like amassing0.99
00:35:58.560more power concentrated among cisgender privileged white men like yourself. Everyone else is
00:36:04.740suffering. And I think that like with the example that has been like so widely circulated this week
00:36:12.040of charlie kirk responding to the hypothetical of his daughter having to give birth to her rapist
00:36:18.940baby he literally responded to that question with like that's like a horrifying thought or like what
00:36:24.400a grotesque thought and you can tell that in that and in the way he responded to that he is speaking
00:36:30.540on this as if it will only ever be a hypothetical to him because he does feel as though the
00:36:36.320consequences of his ideology will be felt by other people and that for the most part is true
00:36:42.080and like his daughter absolutely could be a victim of sexual violence and that happens to
00:36:47.300conservative girls and women all the time but even that doesn't really matter to charlie kirk at the
00:36:52.180end of the day because he's a man so as you said taylor like patriarchy is only going to help him
00:36:59.040help him accomplish his goals and he also like is operating from the position of someone who's
00:37:04.200essentially already won, which is another reason why I think it makes no sense to refer to him as
00:37:09.420fearless because he's not risking anything. He has not lost anything. He was handed this entire
00:37:14.960operation on a silver platter. He didn't have to work hard for it. He is at risk of so little and
00:37:21.560only has so much to gain. And so that is like what his politics are a product of. And that's
00:37:27.940also what Ezra Klein's politics are a product of because Ezra Klein also does not have nearly as
00:37:34.520much to lose, not even in the same ballpark or universe as people who are directly impacted by
00:37:41.140Charlie Kirk's direct and indirect rhetoric. Like Ezra Klein doesn't have as much to lose
00:37:46.740as the professors who were forced out of their jobs. Who knows? Like we don't necessarily know
00:37:51.820what happened to those people. People have probably lost their health insurance. People
00:37:55.720could have like died as a result of like these harassment campaigns. And so that clearly doesn't
00:38:01.680matter to this punditry class. And I think that when they write stuff like this, we already knew
00:38:07.680this, but it just reveals how little solidarity they have with anyone who is affected by their
00:38:12.700work. Well, like seriously on fire. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about this sort
00:38:22.240free speech crisis and crackdown against minorities that's now happening in Charlie
00:38:28.120Kirk's name. And I want to start with, in 2007, Naomi Klein, the better Klein, published a book
00:38:35.180called The Shock Doctrine, which I've been thinking about a lot this week. It is a book
00:38:39.760about how people in power exploit times of crisis and confusion to push through broadly unpopular
00:38:46.420legislation that would be difficult to pass during times when people are more prepared to push back.
00:38:51.400In the book, she calls this disaster capitalism. It's mostly about economic policy. For example, she talks about the rapid descent of private for-profit companies onto New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and how they breezily took over public schools and public housing that had been destroyed.
00:39:09.540But I feel like the basic ideas within the shock doctrine are playing out in front of us right now in ways that go beyond economics.
00:39:19.100Like I said up top, his murder is being used by MAGA politicians to ram through draconian crackdowns on free speech, on minorities, on the left.
00:39:29.220Can you guys talk about what is going on there?
00:39:32.060Because I know you've been following it really, really closely.
00:39:34.340Well, what's happening is exactly what you described, which is that they're now leveraging this opportunity to censor speech in a way that we've never seen before. And not only are they doing it through trying to ram through federal legislation and state legislation, they're, you know, hauling the CEOs of Discord and Twitch, even though Twitch has nothing to do with any of this.
00:39:53.660they just want to de-platform Hassan Piker in front of Congress. So they're doing that.
00:39:59.460But then also on a state level, you have these governors getting kids expelled from school,
00:40:04.360getting everyone fired from their job. I mean, we had the Charlie's Verderers database where
00:40:08.660they had something like 40,000 people listed, none of which seemed to be verified. I spoke to
00:40:14.220one guy, this guy Ali, who I wrote about in my newsletter this week, who was a 30-year-old
00:40:18.660worker at Walmart who somebody just used his name and said the claim that he said something that he
00:40:24.540you know about Charlie Kirk that he didn't obviously very didn't like didn't say anything
00:40:28.160about Charlie Kirk on any of his social media channels actually but it doesn't matter because
00:40:32.020you can just implicate someone and put their name on this list and get them doxxed and harassed and
00:40:37.280his family his parents are Afghan immigrants his mother had to flee his sisters in hiding you know
00:40:43.220because they're being targeted that's censorship yeah i wanted to talk about charliesmurderers.com
00:40:49.560it's a website that was set up by people who want to basically get anyone fired from their job who
00:40:57.900said anything even remotely critical or even like not even remotely critical of charlie kirk in the
00:41:04.080wake of his death anything that the people running this website deem as like celebration of murder
00:41:08.200you do not have to be a public figure and in fact none of the people featured on the website
00:41:12.760are you are put up on essentially this like jumbotron and your information is put up where
00:41:19.240you live is put up your employer is put up and a lot of people have been getting fired as a result
00:41:23.980of being featured on this website i became aware of this website initially because a lot of people
00:41:29.780who follow me on instagram started sending it to me saying people who are sharing what you've
00:41:34.420written in the wake of charlie kirk's death are being put on that website for the crime of sharing0.62
00:41:40.460my post and i thought first of all that this was fucking crazy because a post that i made on0.56
00:41:47.440instagram initially after charlie kirk's death was very widely shared and it explicitly condemned0.73
00:41:54.000gun violence in all situations including this one which i continued to do by the way but it didn't
00:41:59.900matter like it wasn't celebratory and it wasn't joking and it wasn't even anything it was i think
00:42:05.720that my takes so far i mean of course some people would disagree with this i think my analysis of
00:42:10.880this entire situation has been relatively tepid and and i try to keep everything nuanced and yet
00:42:17.220so many people have had their personal information put on charliesmurderers.com
00:42:22.180for sharing it and i went through the website which at this time is down but it keeps going
00:42:27.020up and down and they're trying to find people to host it uh and my own stuff was littered all over
00:42:32.900it. And that's, you know, terrifying to me. The first thing that I thought when I saw this
00:42:38.420website was I thought about Canary Mission. And I thought about how it's such a hallmark of like
00:42:44.180right-wing harassment and censorship campaigns, especially ones linked to genocide, especially
00:42:50.840ones linked to bigotry, like political violence. This is such a common fixture.
00:42:57.380Talk about Canary Mission, because I was actually just trying to explain to my mother what Canary
00:43:01.400Mission is. I would describe Canary Mission as it is a website with all of these profiles of
00:43:08.680primarily college students of color, Palestinian college students, Black college students,
00:43:14.640Arab and Muslim students. A lot of Jewish students too. Yeah. The whole premise is that
00:43:20.080it's supposed to be like this database of anti-Semites on college campuses. But what it
00:43:24.560really is, is a list of teenagers and college students, most of them non-white, that have
00:43:29.980basically said anything even remotely positive about Palestine.
00:43:33.720On Canary Mission, they frame it obviously as like, these people are violent, anti-Semitic,0.97
00:43:39.940like terrorists. And then you look at what they're saying and it's just like supporting
00:43:43.440Palestinians and the fact that you shouldn't commit genocide. And in this case, it's like,
00:43:48.840these are violent people glorifying the death of Charlie Kirk, calling for political violence.
00:43:53.660And then it's like journalists who have accurately reported on him. And that's just a tiny slice of
00:43:59.060it. It's mostly just everyday people who have shared Matt's Instagram post. Like it is just so
00:44:04.520ridiculous. And it's obviously intended and has the effect of punishing and chilling speech,0.97
00:44:12.580which just goes back to how ridiculous it is that any of this is being framed as part of a fight
00:44:16.800for free speech. Because what this is, is like an intense pressure campaign to chill as much
00:44:23.120speech as possible. In addition to all of these very explicit government attacks on free speech
00:44:28.940that we are seeing as a result of this. Do either of you want to speak to some people who have been
00:44:35.200fired and what they've been fired for? Because I know there have been some high profile ones. There
00:44:39.500was a reporter at the Washington Post, I believe, who was fired for quoting Charlie Kirk. Yeah,
00:44:45.480Karen Atiyah. I used to work with her. She was also a columnist at the Washington Post. And she1.00
00:44:51.860had posted actually just Charlie Kirk's own words on her Twitter feed. And she was fired in the note0.65
00:44:59.920that Oliver Darcy got and published for criticizing white men. Literally those words were in her
00:45:06.780termination letter. And here's the reality that's so frustrating that really pisses me off because
00:45:11.580I keep seeing these tweets that are like, oh, she's going to sue them. She's going to take them
00:45:15.940for all she's got. This wrongful termination suit is in the bag. And same thing with Ali,
00:45:20.840like the people I wrote about or some of these other people like that have been fired right like
00:45:24.100there's been a lot of high profile like teacher firings like a nasdaq worker like you know just
00:45:28.980all these sorts of people made well made well hasn't tweeted in 24 months and then tweeted to
00:45:33.480like condemn some random ass employees like post about charlie kirk um and people like wow the
00:45:38.220defamation lawsuits are gonna hit so hard please be for real we're not getting any defamation0.86
00:45:43.440lawsuits guys these people will have no recourse there will be no justice this is just gamer gate0.75
00:45:47.480shit, by the way, like if we want to go really back to the sort of the true origin, there is no0.89
00:45:52.360justice. And yeah, the Washington Post was completely wrong to fire her. That's crazy.0.99
00:45:57.260Even a year ago, I don't think that they would have been able to do that. I mean, I know they
00:46:01.440wouldn't have been able to do that because you can't fire a columnist over whatever they're
00:46:05.360saying. Columnists are not even subject to the social media guidelines, as I know very well,
00:46:09.720because I was a columnist there myself. So you can't, you know, for them to just like
00:46:13.960unceremoniously fire her over speech when she's an opinion columnist is insane. But it just goes0.98
00:46:21.820back to show that there is no justice and she'll never get justice. And none of these people will
00:46:26.460get justice because it doesn't exist. And by the way, look at who's in the courts. Look at the
00:46:30.560judges. They're all right-wing anti-speech judges. The whole system's rotten. With Karen specifically
00:46:37.020at WAPO and WAPO's track record specifically, I think about how her work included like broadening
00:46:44.620the opinion desk to feature global writers, people whose voices were silenced by authoritarian
00:46:50.200regimes in other countries. She specifically has been awarded for her work with Jamal Khashoggi,
00:46:55.900who famously was killed by an authoritarian regime. And I just think that it is, it speaks
00:47:01.520to the moment that we are living through politically in this country, that after being
00:47:05.660such a celebrated, decorated journalist for her work to, like, bring truth to power in
00:47:11.500authoritarian regimes. Now we have an authoritarian regime at home in the United States that is
00:47:16.820cracking down. And Karen is one of many people who will who has lost her job because of this.
00:47:21.600And I also want to say, you know, a lot of people are comparing this moment to the 2010s where
00:47:27.460they're saying like, oh, well, liberal cancel culture was out of control then too. But I will
00:47:34.240say something that really separates this moment from like anything you could argue with like what
00:47:40.300was going on with liberals online in the 2010s is that this is now this right-wing cancel culture
00:47:46.380now is it is being integrated into the official right-wing party platform and legislation you know
00:47:52.740we have jd vance who was doing his job as the vice president by filling in for charlie kirk's
00:47:58.700podcast after Charlie Kirk died. And he said, quote, when you see someone celebrating Charlie's
00:48:04.680murder, call them out and hell call their employer. You have Pete Hegseth, who has directed his staff
00:48:12.500to look for posts from service members who had said anything negative about Charlie Kirk. You
00:48:18.680had Clay Higgins. And I teased this one at the top. But do one of you want to read the Clay Higgins
00:50:14.160I do think that they set a lot of these precedents.
00:50:17.000When you look at a lot of the worst censorship bills
00:50:20.180in Congress, COSA, the effort to repeal Section 230, these are co-led by Democrats, co-led by
00:50:26.840very powerful Democrats. Yeah. Like the Democrats completely seeded the issue of free speech and
00:50:32.160they allowed that language of free speech to be weaponized by the right in service of their
00:50:37.620censorship campaign, because ultimately the Democrats are pretty on board with this mass
00:50:41.600censorship campaign. They just want the Democrats to be the ones censoring instead of the Republicans.
00:50:45.980And they think if we can get these restrictive laws in place, we'll be able to ban who we want on social media once we're in power.
00:50:54.120I wanted to take a quick break from this episode to thank Blueland for sponsoring today's show.
00:51:03.300If you're only listening to the audio version of this episode, that is me doing some nail ASMR on my Blueland Forever bottle.
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00:52:39.260at blueland.com slash fruity. That is blueland.com slash fruity. Thank you so much to Blueland for
00:52:47.740sponsoring the show. And now let's get back to it. People are watching this all play out and
00:52:56.020saying things like Charlie Kirk's legacy of free speech is being used to obliterate free speech.
00:53:00.720And I just want to note that like, what is happening now by all these people like J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth and Clay Higgins, this is exactly what Charlie Kirk was also doing while he was alive, which I think is another important thing to note and that we've kind of circled around a little bit when talking about how Charlie Kirk, quote unquote, practiced politics.
00:53:23.280We've hinted at this, but Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA had built ProfessorWatchlist.org, which was an online database of professors who even vaguely dared to acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ people or teach about racism, schools that had gender neutral bathrooms, which he called dangerous, in an effort to get said teachers fired and schools investigated and defunded.
00:53:46.100And he was very successful in this effort. I mean, we are living in the wake of his successful efforts right now. And I'm just like, is was that practicing politics the right way? And while we're discussing the anti-democratic principles nested within Charlie Kirk's aesthetic of the free speech guy, Ezra Klein wrote,
00:54:08.140The foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of
00:54:14.540violence. To lose that is to risk losing everything. Charlie Kirk and his family
00:54:20.300just lost everything. As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything too.
00:54:26.260We've been edging closer for some time now. In 2020, a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer,
00:54:31.620the governor of michigan was foiled by the fbi in 2021 a mob stormed the capitol in an effort
00:54:39.260to overturn the result of an election and pipe bombs were found at the democratic and republican
00:54:43.940national committee headquarters do you guys know what charlie kirk was doing on january 6th
00:54:49.780podcasting no he sent buses of students to the january 6th rally that turned into
00:54:57.740january 6th he sent kids there i mean of course he did of course he did i this whole idea i it's
00:55:05.220so appalling to hear ezra frame things this way because women people of color lgbtq people have
00:55:13.160not had the right to practice politics without fear of violence i don't think ever we have never
00:55:19.240been able to practice so it's very egregious to frame things that way and even his examples that
00:55:24.720is choosing, you know, of like violence. Oh, look at this escalating political violence. Like, I
00:55:29.560mean, we've talked about this before, but like their entire concept of political violence excludes
00:55:34.020the biggest form of political violence, which is state political violence against marginalized
00:55:38.560people. Exactly. The only type of violence that he really cares about is violence against
00:55:43.700politicians. Ironically, Charlie Kirk was not a politician. And also a way to rephrase what he
00:55:50.380is saying here is that like what Ezra Klein is afraid of is political violence that actually
00:55:56.040threatens the ability for white men like Charlie Kirk to participate in politics. Because as you
00:56:02.980said, Taylor, women have never been able to participate in politics without fear. Women0.91
00:56:08.080are punished for participating in politics. People of color are punished for participating in0.97
00:56:12.540politics. Queer people are punished. Like every other demographic of people cannot practice1.00
00:56:18.660politics without losing something. You make sacrifices to be in politics as a politician
00:56:25.640or just to be vocally active in any way if you are a marginalized person. So this entire column
00:56:33.060is just predicated on the idea that it only matters now that it's affecting men like Charlie
00:56:37.960Kirk. And Ezra Klein very transparently sees himself as a man like Charlie Kirk. He admires
00:56:45.340him. Gavin Newsom also did this when he interviewed Charlie on his podcast. These Democrat men
00:56:50.920admire Charlie Kirk. They make that very, very, very clear. And they put them in a completely
00:56:57.080different class of people than like the rest of us, because none of us can practice or engage
00:57:02.580fully in politics without great risk and causing harm to ourselves. And when we do, we're emotional
00:57:08.600and triggered and, you know, like all these other things, again, because the consequences are not
00:57:13.280an abstract political thought experiment for us did you guys see how donald trump reacted when
00:57:19.420a reporter asked him how he was holding up over the loss of his good friend charlie kirk yes he0.99
00:57:25.940didn't give a fuck he didn't give a fuck i'm gonna play that video right now0.97
00:57:32.620this obviously garnered a lot of headlines really quickly for being a funny like very0.99
00:57:59.860hallmark trump moment but i think that it's also somehow so representative of how anti-human this
00:58:07.660entire political movement is and how we're dignifying it way too much when we refuse to
00:58:14.900recognize how anti-human this entire political movement is like i genuinely i'm not just saying0.96
00:58:20.840this to be funny like i genuinely don't think trump gives a shit that charlie kirk died this0.96
00:58:25.120like comrade and best friend in recent years i genuinely don't think trump cares because0.96
00:58:30.780to donald trump and to frankly all of the people at the head of this movement that we're refusing
00:58:37.240in my opinion to criticize properly when we are writing these like teary-eyed eulogies of charlie
00:58:43.060kirk they don't care about human life and for donald trump charlie kirk was like a means to
00:58:50.200grow the movement. And he did that very successfully. And he was shot in service of
00:58:54.120it. Maybe actually, we don't even necessarily know why Charlie Kirk was shot yet. And Trump
00:58:59.860is moving on. Trump wants to talk about his new ballroom. You know, people made jokes about like
00:59:05.000Ezra Klein's reaction to Charlie Kirk's death versus Donald Trump's reaction to Charlie Kirk's
00:59:10.880death, you know? Yes. And I really do feel like with stuff like this, we're so far into the years
00:59:18.040of Trump that I think a lot of people have forgotten just how like ridiculous this all is
00:59:25.000and like the pretense of what we're supposed to believe here is so outlandish. And you see this0.82
00:59:30.840like growing gap of like cognitive dissonance where a lot of even New York Times readers
00:59:37.080found the whole Ezra Klein piece to be just unbelievable on its face because we know that
00:59:44.360people like Trump do not care. And we know that Trumpism and MAGA is obviously not about the
00:59:51.060dignity of human life. It is gaslighting to expect us to believe that because we've been here this
00:59:57.360whole time. We know what these people stand for. It is not at all what they are trying to revise
01:00:03.900in death. The expectation that we have to take all of this seriously is too much for most people
01:00:11.980because these are not serious people and they did not actually believe in any of this stuff.
01:00:16.000I think it's so scary just the way that like his legacy is just being so whitewashed where like,
01:00:22.220I mean, I was just talking to my dad who picked me up from the airport today when I came home and
01:00:26.940like he had never heard of Charlie Kirk before any of this, you know, like a lot of people in
01:00:32.240America like don't know who this guy is. And their first introduction to him is going to be through
01:00:37.440an Ezra Klein column, somebody that they really trust and rely on and who is really great on some
01:00:42.540other issues, you know, like, but like, it just shows how inadequate that the media is. And not
01:00:48.400just that, but it's like all over cable news, too. You know, they're just like sort of tearfully
01:00:52.220eulogizing him and completely whitewashing his legacy. In a way that his own movement doesn't.
01:00:58.580Yes. And look, like, this is not to say that I think we should be like them. To me, like what
01:01:04.840being on the left means is to honor the dignity of human life of other people like that is like
01:01:09.820one of my foremost beliefs it's and it's the same reason why i you know denounce murder when it
01:01:16.480happens to anybody like i can't you know that is something i really have to say like very strongly
01:01:20.960because i know that there's going to be specific comments being like so so so so you're justifying
01:01:26.360and no, no. Do you condemn? Do you, do you condemn hummus? I am specifically attempting
01:01:35.420to get at the way we are choosing to decide what this man represented and what his actual life was
01:01:42.160in service of and what he did until the day that he died so that we don't allow that to be co-opted
01:01:48.000for the building of his movement that is cracking down on human life. And I think there is no better
01:01:55.180example of that then have you guys seen the fundraising texts oh my god yes because somebody
01:02:01.520signed me up for some of these emails oh like someone who hates you yeah i'm getting the
01:02:06.300turning point in erica kirk spam texts or emails rather and you know i i think what's so hilarious
01:02:12.920too is they dropped the merch less than 24 hours after his body was cold like they dropped merch
01:02:19.100turning pointed turning pointed and they're asking for thousands of dollars and this is
01:02:24.480just a huge grift and they're just like shamelessly grifting money. And all these conservative
01:02:30.540influencers are also making money just talking about it nonstop. And that's what Charlie Kirk
01:02:34.800would have wanted because he was a grifter at heart. If you haven't seen these fundraising
01:02:39.660texts that started getting sent out by Turning Point USA, like immediately after Charlie Kirk
01:02:45.260died, they're featuring, you know, quotes and photos from his wife and her eulogy for him and
01:02:52.480photos of the two of them. Erica Kirk says, I refuse to let this movement die. It will only
01:02:57.740grow stronger, bolder, louder. Join me. And then a link where you can donate between $25,000 and
01:03:04.220$100,000. At the top of the page, it's a photo of Erica Kirk. And it says a sort of paraphrased
01:03:11.720quote from her eulogy to him, which was the cries of this widow will echo around the world like a
01:03:17.880battle cry, which just by the way, for an organization that has so much funding, and I
01:03:21.880don't mean to sound insensitive here, but the cries of this widow will sound like a cry.
01:03:27.380Not great. Okay, let me just say something about Erica Kirk. I don't know if you guys ever watched
01:03:31.080one of the episodes when Charlie had her on the podcast back in the day, like a while ago. He had
01:03:36.560her on the podcast and I think it's worth watching that episode. So she's more extreme right wing1.00
01:03:41.500than him. And he talks about how he's a moderate compared to her and how actually she has pulled
01:03:47.520him further to the right on many issues. She is so extreme and so radical and how that's something
01:03:53.720he really admires about her. So I've seen some stuff of like the grieving widow and
01:03:59.080this woman, first of all, married to a fascist, is very much a fascist herself. And that doesn't
01:04:06.960mean that she can't grieve for her husband or whatever. But I mean, I thought like Ta-Nehisi
01:04:12.260Coates put it very well in his article which was phenomenal in Vanity Fair but he was like
01:04:17.240a lot of this like grieving and the obituary it would be like writing Joseph Goebel's obituary
01:04:22.100and starting it as like you know he was a beloved father of six and a talented marketer yes okay
01:04:28.180that's not the point you know and it's similar with this and and I think Erica is now especially
01:04:35.520as she's so emboldened by his death she's dangerous yeah I've seen again liberal pundits0.99
01:04:41.880to say, well, we should not be critical of Erica Kirk and the way that she's leveraging her
01:04:47.020husband's death to fundraise and continue building out this Turning Point USA movement.0.99
01:04:51.140Leave her be right now. She's grieving. I agree she's grieving. And I don't necessarily want to
01:04:56.340police grief, except when that grief is being very immediately and very effectively and very
01:05:01.100blatantly weaponized to raise money for a group that is, it's just hurting people.
01:05:06.840On a very human level, when I first saw the video of Charlie Kirk getting shot, my first thought was, I was like, oh, I wonder if he has kids. I wonder how old his kids are. And my initial thoughts were like, with Erica Kirk, not knowing anything about her. I was just like, that sucks, obviously. Like, that was my human response.
01:05:25.620I quite literally can confirm this because we were recording a podcast at the time. And the first thing Kat asked me was, oh, my God, does he have kids? Oh, my God, they're so young.
01:05:34.100oh my god he literally has two children
01:09:23.440They threatened all manner of violence.1.00
01:09:25.840They overwhelmed the university's PR lines and the president's office, with calls demanding that I be fired.
01:09:31.840The 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.
01:09:45.300Kirk's watch list has terrorized legions of professors across this country.
01:09:50.140Women, black faculty, queer scholars, basically anyone who challenged white supremacy, gun culture, or Christian nationalism suddenly found themselves targets of coordinated abuse.