Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Revisions

Can't say anything bad about Charlie because he just died, and that would hurt mama's feelings.

Like, no, we don't know these people, these are public figures who are impactful and consequential, and we don't have to treat them with kid gloves, especially journalists and people who are in this role of writing the first draft of history.

You need to put all of that emotional stuff aside and do your job.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity,

the show where

I'm tired.

I'm tired.

How are you guys doing?

I'm also tired.

I'm so tired.

It's been such a weird week.

It's all happening.

This is not going to be a podcast episode where I tell you if it is or isn't morally correct to make jokes about Charlie Kirk's death.

Because to be honest, I don't really care.

If you want to read funny jokes about Charlie Kirk, go on Twitter.

And if you want to read essays about why you're a bad person for laughing at those jokes, go to newyorktimes.com.

I feel like while conservatives and liberals and the right and the left are all arguing over how we should feel about Charlie Kirk's death, his legacy is being rewritten in real time by a lot of people.

some of whom are using that rewritten legacy to justify an extremely unpopular and dangerous authoritarian crackdown.

The far right is celebrating this, of course, and the left is terrified.

And the majority of people sitting closer to the middle, I'm thinking like my parents and honestly, just most people who aren't as online as I am, are watching this play out, watching politicians seize on this moment very fucking quickly.

and not knowing what the correct thing to feel or say is without sounding insensitive about Charlie Kirk's death.

God forbid, they lose their job or visa or driver's license.

Yes, that is a real threat made by Representative Clay Higgins.

If you talk bad about Charlie Kirk right now, you lose your driver's license.

Ezra Klein, a liberal writer at the New York Times, published an essay one day after Kirk's death called, Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.

where he argued that Charlie Kirk's commitment to free speech and debate represented the best of American democratic ideals, no matter how much you disagreed with the guy, and that his death represents a new era in the erosion of American democracy.

I think Ezra Klein is wrong.

I think Charlie Kirk was like a professional eroder of democracy.

And I also think that rewriting his legacy this way is contributing to a movement that is very rapidly threatening our civil liberties in exactly the way that Charlie Kirk wanted, by the way.

And so I want to talk about that today.

Not my most uplifting intro.

Fuck.

I was originally planning on doing a Jeffree Star political arc episode this week, which I am still planning to do with Kat and Allura Nati.

I'm really excited to do that, but this just felt more pressing.

Like, we can always talk about Jeffree Star, and we will.

To parse all of this out with me today are two people who are regulars on this podcast, two people whose work I admire a lot, and two people who have been...

chronicling this authoritarian crackdown on free speech on the left on minorities generally in the wake of charlie kirk's death we have cat Tenbarge from Spitfire News and Taylor Lorenz from User Mag.

Welcome back to the show.

I don't even know what day it is right now because the past week has been such a like, I've been in like a fugue state.

Yeah.

It's especially surreal because when I found out about Charlie Kirk, I was also filming a podcast with Matt.

So it's like, is time real or am I just constantly filming a podcast with Matt?

Kat and I were, we were like three hours into recording our Patreon episode about Eugenia Cooney

when Charlie Kirk was shot.

Are you looking at the Charlie Kirk was shot thing?

The what?

Did you see Charlie Kirk was just shot?

Oh,

really?

And if you'd like to hear that episode, that is over on Patreon right now.

Should we get into this one, though?

Yes.

Let's go full circle.

Like I said, on September 11th, one day after Charlie Kirk's assassination, Ezra Klein publishes an article in the New York Times called, Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.

I clipped together some excerpts from that article that really hone in on the full point of it.

I'm going to read that right now.

And I'll do it in my best Ezra Klein voice.

I feel like he has a very like breathy sort of self-serious tone, which I also sometimes have, so I can't knock him for that.

You can dislike much of what Kirk believed, and the following statement is is still true.

Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.

He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him.

He was one of the era's most effective practitioners of persuasion.

When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was near absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it.

Slowly, then all at once, he did.

College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election.

I did not know Kirk, and I am not the right person to eulogize him.

But I envied what he built.

A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy.

Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness.

In the inaugural episode of his podcast, Governor Gavin Newsom of California hosted Kirk, admitting that his son was a huge fan.

What a testament to Kirk's project.

Kirk and I were on different sides of most political arguments.

We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics.

It is supposed to be an argument, not a war.

It is supposed to be won with words, not ended with bullets.

I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine and for the sake of our larger shared project.

This article was my 9-11.

It's worse than I thought, and I like Ezra.

What the hell is he talking about?

Also, I don't think he actually knows anything about Charlie Kirk with all this.

But that's the thing.

I thought it was one of the worst columns I've ever read in my entire life.

Like every single word with each passing sentence, I'm like, wrong, wrong, like just completely backwards.

I genuinely don't think he knew who this man was.

You know, he's not that online.

And I think that this is another fundamental problem:

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.

The 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.

Also, let's back up before that, Kat, and I totally agree with you.

This is a man who, as a teenager, received a massive amount of funding from two far-right conservative billionaires.

The idea that he, with just his like moxie, was able to influence a generation of college students is so deeply delusional.

This was a astro-turfed 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.

Damn, I, you know, I prized this podcast on nuance and we went in swinging.

I mean, this, this, uh, this piece really quite deserves, deserves the lashings, but I also, I really want to speak to in this episode, people who read, honestly, Ezra Klein's piece or any of the, like Kat mentioned, many of the pieces from both liberal and conservative pundits alike.

I actually think it's one of the most common themes in his memorializing right now.

It's like, well, you might not have agreed with him, but you got to hand it to him.

And I'm like, well, we're going really dissect all of the claims that Ezra Klein made in this article.

But I really want to first mention like the elite political pundit class that Ezra Klein belongs to, and that a lot of the people who are deciding right now what Charlie Kirk's legacy is belong to.

Because I agree with a lot of what Ezra Klein says about the genocide that Israel is committing, for example.

But he is also an extraordinarily wealthy white man who works for the New York Times.

And what I find with so many of these like political intellectuals, and I'm curious what you guys think about this, for them, it's so often it comes across as if politics is just like an intellectual exercise.

And it is that before it's something that like affects.

people who have way less privilege and wealth and access than the pundits creating these think pieces and who are currently determining what Charlie's legacy is.

And it's just like,

I read something like this, and I think about all of the people who have dealt in the last couple of years since Roe was overturned with an unplanned pregnancy, and they live in a state where they can't get abortion, and maybe they don't have money to go to a place where they can get an abortion.

Or I think about the black professors and the queer professors who have had their livelihoods threatened by Charlie Kirk's doxing movement, which we're going to get into.

And I think about trans kids and the families who support them who have maybe they live in Florida or any of a number of places where their livelihoods are threatened as children and you know deciding where to move if they can move how to deal with life if they can't move What do they think about the way that Charlie Kirk supposedly practiced his politics?

It's really quite infuriating to me and I think that oftentimes like Again, someone like Ezra Klein means well and I think he genuinely is like about the spirit of debate and the spirit of free speech.

But like, can we talk about the lives that were destroyed by this person?

And the fact that like maybe that matters more than like the way that he had conversations?

I just, the free speech thing really gets to me because Charlie Kirk was not an ally of the free speech movement in any like at all.

Literally, one of the first things that Turning Point did was start doxing and trying to drive teachers out of their job.

He was libs of TikTok before libs of TikTok.

Yeah.

So please spare me.

This is not, this is a man that shut down debates.

Like, and he wasn't actually debate, like most of those college sort of debates, it was clickbait.

It was setting up this sort of positioning himself in a certain way to get a certain sound bite so that he could make like triggered SJW clips on YouTube shorts.

Like it wasn't any sort of earnest, meaningful debate that recognized the like basic humanity.

I mean, I think he just fundamentally he dehumanized so many groups.

And I don't think you can even have a debate when somebody is dehumanizing you because dehumanization is not something that's like a debatable thing.

You're affecting other people's rights.

You're taking away people's choices.

You are hurting people.

What rights am I taking away exactly?

You're trying to take away gender affirming care for individuals.

You are affecting abortion rights.

You are hurting people.

Got it.

So what is a woman?

It really bothers me the way that Charlie Kirk keeps being characterized as if this is a fact, that he was a debater, that he persuaded people, that he relied on like the rhetoric of debate on college campuses to convince young students, because that's actually not what he was doing at all.

And these words have meanings.

Like a debate has a specific meaning.

And even if you go and watch, which again, I do not think these pundits are going to youtube.com and sitting down and watching the viral Charlie Kirk YouTube videos because it's very clearly not a debate.

And if you go and even watch the most watched video on his YouTube channel, the young woman on campus who he's speaking to is like, that is her argument.

It's that like what he's doing is ridiculous and it's not actually a debate at all.

Do you feel

proud of yourself for debating college kids who are unprepared to speak in front of an audience like yourself?

Forget the personal attacks or the stylistic attacks.

Focus on substance.

The more we debate that, the stronger we're going to be as a country thank you for coming thank you i don't think you're focusing on substance though that's the issue

hold on

what

he intentionally tried to provoke substance out of you

and you said well i'm worried about some laws congress should pass i have to ask what laws are you talking about

can you be specific

i'm sorry i'm very nervous but uh this is what you do this is what you do you take people and you put them under the spotlight and you well hold on i didn't i didn't ask or you to come up here you voluntarily came to the front of the line you didn't have to do that you're purposely antagonizing people on campus asking people to come up by spreading your weird agenda how

what what agenda is I'm confused though and it is just a way to like create viral content and it is so alarming to me that we've allowed the meaning of debate and by we I mean like these institutions that have the power to reflect how things are seen in the world have capitulated to this definition of debate and just to the right wing in general.

When you say things like Charlie Kirk was doing politics the right way, you are capitulating to Charlie Kirk's vision of politics, which is that most people don't even get a seat at the table at all.

You are capitulating to white supremacy.

You are capitulating to patriarchy.

And it's honestly just like, to me, this is the eventual outcome that you get to to through this type of centrist politics where like both sides are bad.

You just eventually are advocating for the right wing.

And to me, that's what this column is.

Really well said.

I also think, though, it's important to recognize that Charlie Kirk was not just an influencer himself.

He ran one of the most powerful right-wing propaganda networks, a powerful dark money group, literally, that was like this shady nonprofit that like, you know, basically like Astro turfed influencers across America.

They produced, they poured thousands and thousands of dollars into you know people building up people like alex clark who hosted poplitics right and then now she's doing cultural apothecary this like right-wing pseudoscience uh rfk jr terrible dangerous podcast that just promotes like the most some of the most dangerous health misinformation and anti-birth control you know right-wing reactionary messaging like why should every church have a fitness ministry what is your like diaper rash hack oh we don't get diaper rashes my child is seven months old and i don't know if he's ever been introduced to a wet wipe.

How much old poop is hiding in the average colon right now?

I would say decades.

You can hold 32 pounds of poop in your colon.

Colonic saved my life.

Why is it sometimes so easy for like some woman on meth in the street to get pregnant and not this woman who's living this non-toxic, organic lifestyle?

That lady on meth is not stressed.

She's actually in her feminine.

Look at everyone who came out of turning point.

For Ezra Kine to be like, I'm jealous of what he built.

It's like, okay, an AstroTurfed movement funded by reactionary billionaires.

He didn't even generate his audience on his own.

It was all like, they were doing so much paid media.

They were doing so, like, it just, it just goes back to this fundamental issue of like, if you're willing to say right-wing things, you will have endless money poured onto you.

You will have an endless audience brought to you.

They'll pay for your speaking tour.

They'll pay, you know.

But if you challenge power, you're going to lose your driver's license.

I want to talk a little bit about the debates that he held because I do think that at the time that Charlie Kirk died, most people were learning about him for the first time.

And I also think, like you said, Kat, there has been this like normalization of the idea that like something like what Charlie Kirk was doing, something like what happens on the Jubilee YouTube channel is debate.

is just like good old fashioned getting people into a room, setting up your foldable chair and your tent and debating whoever wants to listen.

And it's all in good faith.

And we're all just learning from each other.

And it's a good old American exchange of ideas.

Sorry, I kind of sunk into the Dr.

Phil voice with that one.

It hasn't quite left me yet.

Can you guys describe a little bit of like what exactly Charlie Kirk did when he went to college campuses, this thing that he's being, you know, lauded for across the political spectrum right now?

Well, it's interesting because it's like going back to the video that's the most viewed video on his YouTube channel.

Like you said, Taylor, first of all, it's clickbait.

The title of the video implies that a woman is going to be flashing the camera at some point in the video, and that's why it's the most viewed one.

But the setup of what Charlie Kirk was doing is it was like more so performance art than what you think of when you think of a debate.

Because typically a debate, whether you're doing a debate club, a debate organization, or like debates that happen in halls of governance, like there is some sort of judgment process where like you're debating ideas and there's a purpose to that.

Like you're going to vote on something or or someone will win.

What Charlie Kirk was doing was he was just creating content like he was always going to win.

It's the version of like a casino, the house always wins because even if you do beat Charlie Kirk in debate, which is a setup that's intentionally made to be impossible, everyone loses to Charlie Kirk.

He decides what the thumbnails are.

He decides what the titles are.

He decides the framing of each and every video.

And it's always Charlie Kirk wins.

So there's no actual debate happening at all.

It is just Charlie Kirk doing doing this gag over and over and over again.

But also like, because he did become such a viral figure, if you look at the stuff he's doing in more recent years, like all of these fans of his channel will show up.

And so like this video with a young woman, she's standing there surrounded by men in MAGA hats.

It's like a really toxic environment and they're all filming her.

They're all like filming what's in front of them.

So she's surrounded by dozens of cameras.

And she says this herself, like she's like, no one here is prepared to debate you you're like a 30 year old man doing this professional gag we're college students obviously no one is informed of the topic no one's doing any research no one's doing any preparations they're just riffing off of each other and on top of that half of the video more than half of the video has no substance at all it's just her saying things like i don't i don't agree with the way you edit your videos and charlie kirk's like all my videos are unedited.

And it's like, literally, no, because he's obviously picking which clips to show, but that isn't even a political debate.

Now it's just like, you're arguing about YouTube.

Then the point that she's trying to raise is like, I don't agree with how you feel about abortion.

I don't agree with how you feel about LGBTQ people.

And there's no substance happening here.

Like I would argue that that young woman won the debate because she called him out, but that's not the point of this project.

It's not persuasive, like as Rickline thinks it is.

It's not about just like having conversations.

It's really not even about politics at all.

They're talking about political issues, but I think that the ultimate goal is just engagement.

And the side effect of that is that conservative ideology, just like the texture of it is reaching people.

But you're not really persuading them based on the merits of conservative ideology.

You're just showing them like, this is what gets you money.

This is what makes you viral.

This is macho.

This is manly.

This is like what people should aspire to.

And it's like, it's a conservatism by vibes alone,

is how I would describe like what Charlie Kirk is doing.

Damn, Kat, you've been like holding this in.

I've been thinking about this a lot this week.

If you have listened to this podcast a lot, you probably know that I make this show myself.

I conceive of the ideas myself.

I do all the research and outlining myself.

I edit myself.

I do all the production myself.

And I love doing that, mostly because I'm a control freak and the idea of giving up any amount of creative freedom gives me anxiety.

The downside though is that all of that takes a lot of time and sometimes there just aren't enough hours in the day to do other things that one has to do to live.

And for me, one of those things is cooking.

So I like to pass off the responsibility.

Not to a chef, but to Factor.

Factor is a meal delivery service with chef-made gourmet meals that make eating well easy.

There are so many different exciting and varied meal options and the best part is they are all ready to heat and eat in two minutes.

I've always said that I go for the protein plus menu, which if you work out a lot or generally just want a lot of protein in your diet, they have so many great options there that are way better than just meal prepping unseasoned chicken for two weeks at a time.

And I know some gym rats are going to be in the comments like, hey, I make chicken better than that.

I'm sure you do.

I just don't have the time or patience to.

I love preemptively defending myself from criticism like inside of an ad.

I love the internet.

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Now, let's get back to the episode.

I also just want to like throw in this idea that it's like all of the things that we're talking about here are debatable.

Like I watched a lot of Charlie Kirk in the last week.

A lot of what you see in his quote-unquote debates is it's like two people debating whether or not trans people exist.

I just want to say I'm a transgender male.

I've known that since like third grade

and I'm currently 19, almost 20.

I just don't know like with the

whole medical stuff, like what's true, what's not, what's helpful, because I've heard so many different opinions.

First of all, thank you so much for that.

I 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.

My prayer for you, and again, very few people will say this, I actually want to see you be comfortable in how you were born.

And that's where I really run into a problem too, with this framing of like, well, free speech is free speech.

And

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.

A lot of his debates end there.

And then it's just, and then it's just like you said, Kat, it's like a sort of an ongoing humiliation ritual where then this person gets taunted by all of Charlie Kirk's fans who are standing around them in MAGA hats.

And do you know what I mean?

Well, I was just going to say too that like, while some of his most viral content are these debate moments, and while that's like, especially since 2019, like, you know, he's been, I mean, even before that, like, he, he has really been like a road warrior on these college campuses.

That's the goal of Turning Point is to radicalize these young people.

He had a podcast.

He had this massive platform.

He had social media content.

Like, kind of cat, what you were saying before, like, the game is rigged for him.

Like, he uses these like debate, SJW-owned type clips to amass an audience, feed them down the funnel of Charlie Kirk content and turning point USA content.

And then you're sort of on this radicalized path, exposed to more and more extreme ideas.

And you're not, you don't ever get a chance to question it because the other sort of side or whatever is never presented in any sort of like nuanced or thoughtful way.

It's sort of just like he, he's always the triumphant victor, kind of like you said.

I do think people like Ezra Klein in this article fail to understand that this stuff isn't just like good old-fashioned debate.

This was a very, very small piece in a larger chess game that Charlie Kirk has been playing with the help of authoritarian billionaires for many, many years.

This whole conversation reminds me a lot of all of the times that I have talked about Jubilee, the quote-unquote debate YouTube channel that just platforms the most extreme far-right, Nazi adjacent, eugenics, flat earthers, anyone you can think of that will get them views based on outrage.

And then they frame it as just like a good old-fashioned debate, but the premise of these debates is always absurd.

Flat earthers versus round earthers, fat people versus fit people.

These are real videos.

You know, not that Charlie Kirk was necessarily replicating that exact content, though he was himself a Jubilee star, which...

in my opinion was a match made in heaven.

But it's like, and this is why it reminds, this is why Charlie Kirk reminds me of Jubilee, is because people are watching this and they're thinking that they're watching something pure.

Yeah.

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.

So 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.

You saw that with obviously 20 Point USA's professor watch list, which harassed academics out of their jobs and livelihoods because they taught subjects that Charlie Kirk and, you know, with a conservative ideology finds disagreeable.

And 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.

So it's like this style of content is biased from the outset.

And that like shifts the power dynamic completely.

And I also think like.

The other two things in the Ezra Klein piece that really stick out to me are he lists all these examples of political acts of violence at the beginning of the piece.

He details like major incidents of political violence, mostly against left-wing politicians over the past few years.

And I'm like, do you know what Charlie Kirk has said about this stuff?

Do you know what Charlie Kirk has said about January 6th?

Do you know what Charlie Kirk said about the guy who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer?

Because this is actually the way that Charlie Kirk insinuates advocacy for in terms of how he thinks that politics should happen.

He's the one who's like, don't give the other side the opportunity to speak.

Just like stamp them out of existence.

The idea that his style of politics is attributed to fearlessness, he has nothing to fear.

He's a white conservative man.

His style is inducing fear in others and like chilling their speech and participation.

Speaking of violence, Kat, I think you just made a good point about like, this is a man that espoused deeply violent rhetoric.

regularly.

Not to mention the sort of more broad forms of political violence, which I think against poor people, LGBTQ people.

Again, like I think dehumanization of trans people, for instance, is itself a form of violence.

And that is something he regularly espoused and advocated for.

But this is a man also who was a staunch defender of Israel's genocide in Gaza.

He got up on stage and he made a joke saying, oh, I used to tell, you know, LGBTQ people, go to Gaza and, you know, they'll throw you off a tall building.

Now there's no more tall buildings there.

Ha ha ha.

And he laughs at the audience.

I used to say that, hey, if you as a gay person would go to Gaza, they'd throw you off of tall buildings, right?

Now they don't have any tall buildings left, so I don't.

You know, it was just disgusting.

Like that he was constantly advocating for violence and defending violence, like the most extreme forms of violence.

And so this idea that like, oh, he was this anti-violent good faith debater, it's just, as you said, it's not in line with any of what he said.

And it's also very revealing what Ezra Klein considers political violence.

I mean, I talked about this on my channel, but like he, you know, political violence and the way that we view political violence already in this country is so skewed.

And there's just this complete dismissal of all of these systemically violent systems that, frankly, Charlie Kirk upheld.

Yeah.

And people in the discourse are also very much leaning into like, well, he was just a calm, cool, and collected guy.

You know, watch his videos.

He's so calm.

And it's just like, if you're a gay person or a trans person or any sort of other minority that Charlie Kirk had a vendetta against, yeah, it is going to be more emotional to be told that like your existence is like mental illness or something.

Yeah, I can't imagine why like you'd be the emotional one in that situation where Charlie Kirk is just sitting there.

Charlie Kirk isn't threatened by his own rhetoric.

He's threatening your life with his rhetoric.

You know, it's, it's, it's so absurd.

And I think, yeah, just leaning into like, what does it mean to be politically violent?

You know, so many people are like, well, he couldn't have been politically violent because all he did was talk.

And I'm like, well, we're going to get into more reasons why that is not all he was doing.

But also, I hate to sound like early 2000s, like SJW type that someone like Charlie Kirk would make, you know, a video compilation about how stupid I am.

But like Charlie Kirk was violent in his words and not just his words, but because those words were attached to a close relationship with the president of the United States.

It's also like people do not consider online harassment to be a form of violence, even though it is a form of violence and it has, it is a real world action that has real world consequences.

So, like, obviously, we're going to get into more stuff around like the professor watch list, but even in the way that he does the title and thumbnail of these YouTube videos, or the way that he includes this misinformation in his podcasts about specific individuals, that itself is a form of violence.

It directs harassment and it directs bigotry against these individuals.

And it is so, it feels like such gaslighting to be told that this is a respectable form of discourse when it is actually a very harmful form of discourse that in itself is part of the problem.

And I just feel like so much of the rhetoric around Charlie Kirk now, it's just like classic victim blaming and classic Darvo and like blame shifting.

It just reminds me of how like when abusers can stay calm, cool, and collected, and then take like video footage of their victims when they're reacting to the abuse.

And then people are like, the victim is clearly the problem.

The abuser is like so calm, cool, and collected, and like, she's freaking out on the floor.

Why would she do that?

She's crazy.

Like, it's the exact same type of rhetoric you see with people who were directly and indirectly harmed by Charlie Kirk's rhetoric.

And then they're blamed as the problem for political violence rather than the people who incite and traffic in political political violence.

A thousand percent.

I was taking note of some of my rants.

I was literally like at the gym yesterday and I was like, I'm so angry.

I'm stewing.

I got to write this down.

But I just wrote, if you come to my college and tell me on a debate stage or under a debate tent filmed for Turning Point USA, of course, that you should be able to force your 10-year-old daughter to carry her rapist baby to term, which was a belief that Charlie Kirk held.

So if you had a daughter and she was 10 and she got rid of birth and she was, no, wait, oh, and she was going to give birth and she was going to live.

Would you want her to go through that and carry her

baby?

That's awfully graphic.

It's no, but it's a real life scenario that happens to many people.

The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.

Oh, okay, great.

So I, that's insane.

And I say, no, you shouldn't be able to do that.

And then you say, yes, I should, and you quote the Bible, which is a book that constitutionally is barred from influencing our national laws, which, of course, that doesn't matter anymore, thanks to Charlie Kirk's own movement.

And neither of us have changed our minds by the end of that quote-unquote debate, but it made for a great YouTube video whose viewers also did not change their minds.

And you return home and you do force your daughter to give birth to her rapist child because 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?

Yeah, 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.

It's not a hypothetical because

these are the real situations that marginalized people in this country find themselves in.

And he has no empathy for that.

He just said the way he has no empathy for the people in Gaza that are suffering through a genocide right now.

He has no empathy for anybody who's actually suffering.

And this is the, it reminds me so much of that quote that keeps going viral: of him saying, Well, some gun deaths are necessary.

So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero.

It will not happen.

You can significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools.

We should have an honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one.

You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death.

That is nonsense.

It's dribble.

But

I 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.

He was able to advocate for that stuff because he believed that he he was insulated from it.

And that's, by the way, true of so many of these conservative political figures.

Like they know, and frankly, people like Ezra Klein know that they will be insulated from the worst of these fascist policies.

And so, yeah, they're totally free to advocate for it and be like, why are you so triggered?

You know, like, oh, you don't want this, whatever.

It's like, well, because these policies don't affect you.

You know, taking away women's rights doesn't really affect you.

It just sort of gives you men more power.

You know, hating on LGBTQ people, like you're just sort of like amassing more power concentrated among cisgender privileged white men like yourself.

Everyone else is suffering.

And I think that, like, with the example that has been like so widely circulated this week of Charlie Kirk responding to the hypothetical of his daughter having to give birth to her rapist baby, he literally responded to that question with like, that's like a horrifying thought or like, what a grotesque thought.

And you can tell that in that and in the way he responded to that, he is speaking on this as if it will only ever be a hypothetical to him because he does feel as though the consequences of his ideology will be felt by other people.

And that for the most part is true.

And like his daughter absolutely could be a victim of sexual violence.

And that happens to conservative girls and women all the time.

But even that doesn't really matter to Charlie Kirk at the end of the day because He's a man.

So as you said, Taylor, like patriarchy is only going to help him, help him accomplish his goals.

And he also like is operating from the position of someone who's essentially already won, which is another reason why I think it makes no sense to refer to him as fearless, because he's not risking anything.

He has not lost anything.

He was handed this entire operation on a silver platter.

He didn't have to work hard for it.

He is at risk of so little and only has so much to gain.

And so, that is like what his politics are a product of.

And that's also what Ezra Klein's politics politics are a product of, because Ezra Klein also does not have nearly as much to lose, not even in the same ballpark or universe as people who are directly impacted by Charlie Kirk's direct and indirect rhetoric.

Like Ezra Klein doesn't have as much to lose as the professors who were forced out of their jobs.

Who knows?

Like we don't necessarily know what happened to those people.

People have probably lost their health insurance.

People could have like died as a result of like these harassment campaigns.

And so that clearly doesn't matter to this punditry class.

And I think that when they write stuff like this, we already knew this, but it just reveals how little solidarity they have with anyone who is affected by their work.

Whoa.

Like seriously on fire.

I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about this sort of free speech crisis and crackdown against minorities that's now happening in Charlie Kirk's name.

And I want to start with, in 2007, Naomi Klein, the better Klein, published a book called The Shock Doctrine, which I've been thinking about a lot this week.

It is a book about how people in power exploit times of crisis and confusion to push through broadly unpopular legislation that would be difficult to pass during times when people are more prepared to push back.

In 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.

But 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.

Like 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.

Can you guys talk about what is going on there?

Because I know you've been following it really, really closely.

Well, 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 hauling the CEOs of Discord and Twitch, even though Twitch has nothing to do with any of this.

They just want to de-platform Hassan Piker in front of Congress.

So they're going to, you know, they're doing that.

But then also also on a state level, you have these governors, you know, getting kids expelled from school, getting everyone fired from their job.

I mean, we had the Charlie's murderers database where they had something like 40,000 people listed, none of which seemed to be verified.

You know, I spoke to one guy, this guy, Ali, who I wrote about in my newsletter this week, who's a 30-year-old worker at Walmart who...

Somebody just used his name and said the claim that he said something that he, you know, about Charlie Kirk that he didn't.

Obviously, Very didn't, like, didn't say anything about Charlie Kirk on any of his social media media channels, actually.

But it doesn't matter because you can just implicate someone and put their name on this list and get them doxed and harassed.

And his family, his parents are Afghan immigrants.

His mother had to flee.

His sister's in hiding, you know, because they're being targeted.

That's censorship.

Yeah, I wanted to talk about CharliesMurderers.com.

It's a website that was set up by people who want to basically get anyone fired from their job who said anything even remotely critical or even like not even remotely critical of Charlie Kirk in the wake of his death.

Anything that the people running this website deem as like celebration of murder.

You do not have to be a public figure.

And in fact, none of the people featured on the website are.

You are put up on essentially this like jumbotron and your information is put up, where you live is put up, your employer is put up.

And a lot of people have been getting fired as a result of being featured on this website.

I became aware of this website initially because a lot of people who follow me on Instagram started sending it to me saying, people who are sharing what you've written in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death are being put on that website for the crime of sharing my post.

And I thought, first of all, that this was fucking crazy because a post that I made on Instagram initially after Charlie Kirk's death was very widely shared.

And it explicitly condemned gun violence in all situations, including this one, which I continued to do, by the way.

But it didn't matter.

Like it wasn't celebratory and it wasn't joking and it wasn't even anything.

It was, I think that my takes so far, I mean, of course, some people would disagree with this.

I think my analysis of this entire situation has been relatively tepid.

And I try to keep everything nuanced.

And yet, so many people have had their personal information put on charliesmurderers.com for sharing it.

And I went through the website.

which at this time is down, but it keeps going up and down and they're trying to find people to host it.

And my own stuff was littered all over it.

And that's, you know, terrifying to me.

The first thing that I thought when I saw this website was I thought about Canary Mission.

And I thought about how it's such a hallmark of like right-wing harassment and censorship campaigns, especially ones linked to genocide, especially ones linked to bigotry, like political violence.

This is such a common fixture.

Talk about Canary Mission because I was actually just trying to explain to my mother what Canary Mission is.

I would describe Canary Mission as it is a website with all of these profiles of primarily college students of color, Palestinian college students, black college students, Arab and Muslim students.

A lot of Jewish students, too.

Yeah, yeah.

The whole premise is that it's supposed to be like this database of anti-Semites on college campuses.

But what it really is, is a list of teenagers and college students, most of them non-white, that have have basically said anything even remotely positive about Palestine.

On Canary Mission, they frame it obviously as like, these people are violent, anti-Semitic, like terrorists.

And then you look at what they're saying, and it's just like supporting Palestinians and the fact that you shouldn't commit genocide.

And in this case, it's like, these are violent people glorifying the death of Charlie Kirk, calling for political violence.

And then it's like journalists who have accurately reported on him.

And that's just a tiny slice of it.

It's mostly just everyday people who have shared Matt's Instagram post.

Like, it is just so ridiculous.

And it's obviously intended and has the effect of punishing and chilling speech, which just goes back to how ridiculous it is that any of this is being framed as part of a fight for free speech.

Because what this is, is like...

an intense pressure campaign to chill as much speech as possible.

In addition to all of these very explicit government attacks on free speech that we are seeing as a result of this.

Do either of you want to speak to some people who have been fired and what they've been fired for?

Because I know there have been some high-profile ones.

There was a reporter at the Washington Post, I believe, who was fired for quoting Charlie Kirk.

Yeah, Karen Attia.

I used to work with her.

She was also a columnist at the Washington Post, and she had posted actually just Charlie Kirk's own words on her Twitter feed.

And she was fired in the note that Oliver Darcy got and published for criticizing white men.

Literally, those words were in her termination letter.

And here's the reality that's so frustrating that really pisses me off because I keep seeing these tweets that are like, oh, she's going to sue them.

She's going to take them for all she's got.

This wrongful termination suit is in the bag.

And same thing with Ali, like the people I wrote about are some of these other people like that have been fired, right?

Like there's been a lot of high-profile like teacher firings, like a NASDAQ worker, like, you know, just all these sorts of people.

Made well.

Made well hasn't tweeted in 24 months and then tweeted to like condemn some random ass employees like Postman Charlie Kirk.

And people are like, wow, the defamation lawsuits are going to hit so hard.

Please be for real.

We're not getting any defamation lawsuits, guys.

These people will have no recourse.

There will be no justice.

This is just Gamergate shit, by the way.

Like if we want to go really back to the sort of the true origin.

There is no justice.

And yeah, the Washington Post was completely wrong to fire her.

That's crazy.

Even a year ago, I don't think that they would have been able to do that.

I mean, I know they wouldn't have been able to do that because you can't fire a columnist over whatever they're saying.

Columnists are not even subject to the social media guidelines, as I know very well because I was a columnist there myself.

So you can't, you know, for them to just like unceremoniously fire her.

over speech when she's an opinion columnist is insane.

But it just goes back to show that there is no justice and she'll never get justice.

And none of these people will get justice because it doesn't exist.

And by the way, look at who's in the courts.

Look at the judges.

They're all right-wing anti-speech judges.

Like, the whole system's rotten.

With Karen specifically at WAPO and WAPO's track record specifically, I think about how her work included like broadening the opinion desk to feature global writers, people whose voices were silenced by authoritarian regimes in other countries.

She specifically has been awarded for her work with Jamal Khashoggi, who famously was killed by an authoritarian regime.

And I just think that it is, it speaks to the moment that we are living through politically in this country, that after being such a celebrated, decorated journalist for her work to like bring truth to power in authoritarian regimes, now we have an authoritarian regime at home in the United States that is cracking down.

And Karen is one of many people who will, who has lost her job because of this.

And I also want to say, you know, a lot of people are comparing this moment to the 2010s where they're saying like, oh, well, liberal cancel culture was out of control then too.

But I will say something that really separates this moment from like anything you could argue with like what was going on with liberals online in the 2010s is that this is now, this right-wing cancel culture now is, it is being integrated into the official right-wing party platform and legislation.

You know, we have J.D.

Vance, who was doing his job as the vice president by filling in for Charlie Kirk's podcast after after Charlie Kirk died.

And he said, quote, when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out and hell, call their employer.

You have Pete Hegseth, who has directed his staff to look for posts from service members who had said anything negative about Charlie Kirk.

You had Clay Higgins, and I teased this one at the top, but do one of you want to read the Clay Higgins tweet?

Clay Higgins said, I'm going to use congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

If they ran their mouth with their smart-ass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man who dedicated his whole life to delivering respectful conservative truth into the hearts of liberal enclave universities, armed only with a Bible and a microphone and a constitution, those profiles must come down.

I'm I'm going to lean forward in this fight, demanding that big tech have zero tolerance for violent political hate content, the user to be banned from all platforms forever.

I'm also going after their business licenses and permitting.

Their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively.

They should be kicked from every school and their driver's licenses should be revoked.

I'm basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk's assassination.

I'm starting that today.

That is all.

This is a sitting U.S.

Congressperson.

This reminds me of when people would crash out on MySpace in 2006.

I'm going to investigate the servers and get you shut off the internet forever.

Like,

I want to push back on the idea that Democrats didn't push censorship because I think actually they have.

Joe Biden banned TikTok, arguably the biggest act of censorship that we've seen online in our entire entire lifetime.

He opened the door for complete and total government censorship of the app store, something that we don't, we're never supposed to.

The app stores are always supposed to be independent businesses.

We're not a country like China or Russia where their government controls the app store.

Now we're becoming one.

I do think that they set a lot of these precedents.

When you look at a lot of the worst censorship bills in Congress, COSA, the effort to repeal Section 230, These are co-led by Democrats, co-led by very powerful Democrats.

Yeah.

Like the Democrats Democrats completely seated the issue of free speech and they allowed that language of free speech to be weaponized by the right in service of their censorship campaign because ultimately the Democrats are pretty on board with this mass censorship campaign.

They just want the Democrats to be the ones censoring instead of the Republicans.

And they think if we can get these restrictive laws in place, we'll be able to ban who, you know, ban who we want on social media once we're in power.

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And now let's get back to it.

People are watching this all play out and saying things like, Charlie Kirk's legacy of free speech is being used to obliterate free speech.

And I just want to note that like what is happening now by all these people like J.D.

Vance and Pete Hagseth 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.

We'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.

And 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, 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, the foundation of a free society is the ability to participate in politics without fear of violence.

To lose that is to risk losing everything.

Charlie Kirk and his family just lost everything.

As a country, we came a step closer to losing everything too.

We've been edging closer for some time now.

In 2020, a plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, was foiled by the FBI.

In 2021, a mob stormed the Capitol in an effort to overturn the result of an election and pipe bombs were found at the Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters.

Do you guys know what Charlie Kirk was doing on January 6th?

Podcasting?

No.

He sent buses of students

to the January 6th rally that turned into January 6th.

He sent kids there.

I mean, of course he did.

Of course he did.

This whole idea, it's so appalling to hear Ezra frame things this way because

women, people of color, LGBTQ people have not had the right to practice politics without fear of violence.

I don't think ever.

We have never.

been able to practice it.

So it's very egregious to frame things that way.

And even his examples that he's choosing, you know, of like violence.

Oh, look at this escalating political violence.

Like, I mean, we've talked about this before, but like their entire concept of political violence excludes the biggest form of political violence, which is state political violence against marginalized people.

Exactly.

The only type of violence that he really cares about is violence against politicians.

Ironically, Charlie Kirk was not a politician.

And also, a way to rephrase what he is saying here is that like what Ezra Klein is afraid of is political violence that actually threatens the ability for white men like Charlie Kirk to participate in politics.

Because, as you said, Taylor, women have never been able to participate in politics without fear.

Women are punished for participating in politics.

People of color are punished for participating in politics.

Queer people are punished.

Like every other demographic of people cannot practice politics without losing something.

You are, you make sacrifices to be in politics as a politician or just to be vocally active in any way if you are a marginalized person.

So, the entire, this entire column is just predicated on the idea that it only matters now that it's affecting men like Charlie Kirk.

And Ezra Klein very transparently sees himself as a man like Charlie Kirk.

He admires him.

Gavin Newsom also did this when he interviewed Charlie on his podcast.

These Democrat men admire Charlie Kirk.

They make that very, very, very clear.

And they put them in a completely different class of people than like the rest of us Because none of us can practice or engage fully in politics without great risk and causing harm to ourselves.

And when we do, we're emotional and triggered, and you know, like all these other things again, because the consequences are not some abstract political thought experiment for us.

Did you guys see how Donald Trump reacted when a reporter asked him how he was holding up over the loss of his good friend Charlie Kirk?

Yes.

He didn't give a fuck.

He didn't give a fuck.

I'm going to play that video right now.

Bing.

This obviously garnered a lot of headlines really quickly for being a funny, like very Hallmark Trump moment.

But I think that it's also somehow so representative of how anti-human this entire political movement is and how we're dignifying it way too much when we refuse to recognize how anti-human this entire political movement is.

Like, I genuinely, I'm not just saying this to be funny, like, I genuinely don't think Trump gives a shit that Charlie Kirk died.

This like comrade and best friend in recent years.

I genuinely don't think Trump cares because to Donald Trump and to, frankly, all of the people at the head of this movement that we're refusing, in my opinion, to criticize properly when we are writing these like teary-eyed eulogies of Charlie Kirk, they don't care about human life.

And for Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk was like a means to grow the movement.

And he did that very successfully.

And he was shot in service of it.

Maybe, actually, we don't even necessarily know why Charlie Kirk was shot yet.

And Trump is moving on.

Trump wants to talk about his new ballroom.

You know, people made jokes about like Ezra Klein's reaction to Charlie Kirk's death versus Donald Trump's reaction to Charlie Kirk's death, you know?

Yes.

And I really do feel like with stuff like this, we're so far into the years of Trump that I think a lot of people have forgotten just how like ridiculous this all is and like the pretense of what we're supposed to believe here is so outlandish and And you see this like growing gap of like cognitive dissonance where a lot of even New York Times readers found the whole Ezra Klein piece to be just unbelievable on its face because we know that people like Trump do not care and we know that like Trumpism and MAGA is obviously not about the dignity of human life.

It is gaslighting to expect us to believe that because we've been here this whole time.

We know what these people stand for.

It is not at all what they are trying to revise in death.

The expectation that we have to take all of this seriously is too much for most people because these are not serious people and they did not actually believe in any of this stuff.

I think it's so scary just the way that like his legacy is just being so whitewashed.

We're like, I mean, I was just talking to my dad who picked me up from the airport today when I came home and like he had never heard of Charlie Kirk before any of this, you know, like a lot of people in America don't know who this guy is, and their first introduction to him is going to be through an Ezra client column, somebody that they really trust and rely on, and who is really great on some other issues, you know.

Like, but like, it just shows how inadequate that the media is.

And not just that, but it's like all over cable news, too.

You know, they're just like sort of tearfully eulogizing him and completely whitewashing his legacy.

In a way that his own movement doesn't.

Yes.

And look, like, this is not to say that I think we should be like them.

To me, like, what being on the left means is to honor the dignity of human life of other people.

Like, that is like one of my foremost beliefs.

It's, and it's the same reason why I, you know, denounce murder when it happens to anybody.

Like, I can't, you know, that is something I really have to say, like, very strongly, because I know that there's going to be specific comments being like, so you, so, so, so, so, so you're justifying.

And no, no.

Do you condemn?

Do you condemn Hummus?

I am specifically attempting to get at the way we are choosing to decide what this man represented and what his actual life was in service of and what he did until the day that he died so that we don't allow that to be co-opted for the building of his movement that is cracking down on human life.

And I think there is no better example of that than have you guys seen the fundraising texts?

Oh my God.

Yes.

Because somebody signed me up for some of these emails.

Oh, like someone who hates you?

Yeah.

I'm getting the turning point in Erica Kirk spam texts or emails rather.

And, you know, I think what's so hilarious too is they dropped the merch less than 24 hours after his body was cold.

Like they dropped merch.

Turning point did.

Turning point did.

And they're asking for thousands of dollars.

And this is just a huge grift.

And they're just like shamelessly grifting money.

And all these conservative influencers are also making money just talking about it nonstop.

And that's what Charlie Kirk would have wanted because he was a grifter at heart.

If you haven't seen these fundraising texts that started getting sent out by Turning Point USA, like immediately after Charlie Kirk died, they're featuring, you know, quotes and photos from his wife and her eulogy for him and photos of the two of them.

Erica Kirk says, I refuse to let this movement die.

It will only grow stronger, bolder, louder.

Join me.

And then a link where you can donate between $25,000 and $100,000.

At the top of the page, it's a photo of Erica Kirk, and it says a sort of paraphrased quote from her eulogy to him, which was, the cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.

Which, just by the way, for an organization that has so much funding, and I don't mean to sound insensitive here, but the cries of this widow will sound like a cry, not great.

Okay, let me just say something about Erica Kirk.

I don't know if you guys ever watched one of the episodes when Charlie had her on the podcast back in the day, like a while ago.

He had her on the podcast, and I think it's worth watching that episode.

So she's more extreme right-wing than him.

And he talks about how he's a moderate compared to her, and how actually she has pulled him further to the right on many issues.

She is so extreme and so radical, and how that's something he really admires about her.

So I've seen some stuff of like the grieving widow and da-da-da-da-da.

This woman, first of all, married to a fascist, is very much a fascist herself.

And that doesn't mean that, you know, she can't grieve for her husband or whatever.

But I, I mean, I thought like Tanahasi Coates put it very well in his article, which was phenomenal in Vanity Fair.

But he was like, a lot of this, like, grieving and the obituary, it would be like writing Joseph Goebbels' obituary and starting it as like, you know, he was a beloved father of six and a talented marketer.

Yes.

Okay, that's not the point, you know.

And it's similar with this.

And I think Erica is now, especially as she's so emboldened by his death, she's dangerous.

Yeah.

I've seen, again, liberal pundits say, well, we should not be critical of Erica Kirk and the way that she's leveraging her husband's death to fundraise and continue building out this turning point USA movement.

Leave her be right now.

She's grieving.

I agree.

She's grieving, and I don't necessarily want to police grief, except when that grief is being very immediately and very effectively and very blatantly weaponized to raise money for a group that is, it's just hurting people.

On 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.

I 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.

Oh my god, he literally has two children.

2022 and 2024, his kids are babies.

So like that was my human instinct.

However, I think people just like are so parasocial and have no media literacy and are just like people are acting kind of dumb about all of this because it does not preclude you to like have a human response to someone dying than to like look at the first draft of history in which we examine someone and the consequences of them.

People are basically acting like you either say Charlie Kirk was a good husband and father or you say like I'm glorifying Charlie Kirk's death.

There is a whole world in between, a whole spectrum of ways that you respond to the deaths of public figures.

But this idea that we have to all have this very parasocial relationship where we're acting like Charlie Kirk is our cousin and we're like, can't say anything bad about Charlie because he just died and that would hurt mama's feelings.

Like, no, we don't know these people.

These are public figures who are impactful and consequential.

And we don't have to treat them with kid gloves, especially journalists and people who are in this role of writing the first draft of history.

You need to put all of that emotional stuff aside and do your job.

People on CNN who are like, oh my God, I can't believe this man was shot.

You don't treat victims of terrorist attacks that way.

You don't treat kids in Gaza that way.

You don't treat people who get hit by drunk drivers that way.

Like you need to be professional and adult and talk about who this man actually was instead of just reverting to sentimentality that is very clearly like engineered to make us feel specifically bad for men who are like Charlie Kirk.

These conservatives also keep talking about executing Tyler, who allegedly killed Charlie Kirk with like a public firing squad or like through these other public things.

Charlie Kirk himself advocated for public executions.

These people don't treat death with dignity.

And I think a lot of people who are being targeted in these doxing and harassment campaigns are treating Charlie Kirk's death with dignity.

And as Taylor's reporting showed, some of the people being targeted didn't even say anything at all.

Like it's just, it's all such a false bad faith premise that like people are being uncivil and violent.

The people who are uncivil and violent are Charlie Kirk and his friends.

The people that mock George Floyd.

I saw Stephen Crowder like did an entire video mocking George Floyd's death.

Like Kirk himself mocked George Floyd.

Like all of these people have mocked the deaths of vulnerable people.

They've mocked Palestinians, black people, queer people.

You know, they, a lot of these people online were, you know, celebrating that trans girl's suicide literally just months ago.

You've heard a lot from us this episode, and you've certainly heard a lot from Charlie Kirk and Ezra Klein and all of the people who make jobs out of talking, frankly, just talking.

But who we don't hear from nearly as often are the people who are most frequently victimized by people like Charlie Kirk during his life.

And so I want to read, to finish this off, a Facebook post from a woman named Stacey Patton.

Here's what she said.

I'm on Charlie Kirk's hit list.

His so-called professor watch list, run under the umbrella of Turning Point USA, is nothing more than 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.

Bitch, the C-word, the N-word.

They threatened all manner of violence.

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.

And I am not unique.

Kirk's watch list has terrorized legions of professors across this country.

Women, black faculty, queer scholars, basically anyone who challenged white supremacy, gun culture, or Christian nationalism suddenly found themselves targets of coordinated abuse.

Some received death threats, some had their jobs threatened, some left academia entirely.

Kirk sent the loud message to us, speak the truth and we will unleash the mob.

That is the culture of violence Charlie Kirk built.

He normalized violence, he curated it, monetized it, and sicked it on anyone who dared to puncture his movement's lies.

And now, in the wake of his shooting, there's all this national outpouring of mourning, moments of silence, yellow prayer hands, and tributes painting him as a civil debater.

But the truth is that Kirk and his foot soldiers spent years terrorizing educators, trying to silence us with harassment and fear.

And now the same violence he unleashed on others has come full circle.

But what I find especially jarring is the dissonance in public mourning for a smug white man whose life work was actively hostile to certain groups.

Kirk spent years demonizing LGBTQ people, mocking gun survivors, spewing racism about about black folks, and pushing policies that literally shorten lives.

It is so revolting to watch a bipartisan wave of grief sweep over this hateful racist as if he was a neutral community servant.

And then before we wrap up, I know I say this like six different times at the end of the episode.

At the end of every episode, I'm always like, and we're going to wrap up with this, and we're also going to wrap up with this.

But I just wrote a little note at the end here that this is not simply a matter of, quote, you should mourn human life, no matter how much you disagree with them.

I don't really personally care how much you do or don't mourn Charlie Kirk's life.

And for what it's worth, there are already a thousand other podcasts instructing you on what the morally correct way to feel is.

This is about the legacy of Charlie Kirk's politics and how that legacy is being rewritten in real time right now to aid in authoritarian crackdown on free speech and on minority groups.

Charlie Kirk used the aesthetic of free speech and debate as a window dressing to build an anti-democratic political movement that wealthy elite class pundits at the New York Times aren't feeling the tangible effects of nearly as much as the rest of America.

Queer teachers and black teachers harassed and fired for acknowledging their own histories.

Women below the poverty line whose lives are upended by an unplanned pregnancy.

Green card holders who now risk their life by speaking up for Palestine.

Charlie Kirk was a lead architect in the construction of a world world where white Christian heterosexual men have complete and total power, even more so than they already do.

He didn't practice politics the right way, which is something he and his MAGA colleagues acutely understood and did intentionally, and something Ezra Klein seems not to understand.

Does that mean he deserved to die?

Absolutely not.

Gun violence is always wrong, no matter its target.

But when we as leftists refuse to interrogate the way that these people leverage the aesthetic of democratic ideals in service of blatantly anti-democratic goals.

I think we're doing the legwork for them.

We should be.

And that's my show.

So it's everyone's evening plans.

I'm seeing Dualipa tonight.

I'm so excited.

Oh my God.

I'm so jealous.

It's going to be so fun.

Taylor and Kat, thank you so much for joining me.

And thank you so much for like doing this sort of uphill battle in real time, which is trying to write the legacy of Charlie Kirk accurately.

Thank you.

This is cathartic.

Thank you for having us.

Where can people find and support each of your work?

Subscribe to my YouTube and support my Patreon, please.

I just lost my last advertiser because of Charlie Kirk.

Nice.

Nice.

Part of his legacy.

That is part of his legacy.

Deplatforming another

woman.

Exactly.

Even in death, he's pulling it off.

I'm at spitfirenews.com and I'm also on Blue Sky and Instagram at CatTimbarge.

And all of those links will be in the description.

Please, if you come across a leftist creator whose work you really admire and you have the means, support them in ways bigger than just consuming their work.

Subscribe to their newsletters.

Subscribe to their Patreons because none of us are getting, you know, whatever money Charlie Kirk was receiving from like old white billionaires on the brink of death.

So thank you for supporting me and please support my friends.

And thank you so much for listening to this episode.

It's been

all happening in 2025.

I love you so much.

And until next time, stay fruity.