Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, and Ben Shapiro Remember Charlie Kirk

Hey, everybody, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.

I am Andrew Colvett, executive producer of this show.

I am joined by some very dear friends of Charlie.

And of course, they need no introduction.

That would be in no particular order from my right to left.

Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and Ben Shapiro.

And I want to explain how this even happened.

Obviously, we had the Vice President of the United States

honor Charlie by guest hosting the show from the White House yesterday.

I was just in D.C.

yesterday for that, and it was an amazing experience.

Gotten so much great feedback, and of course, we are so honored that JD wanted to take time from running the country and leading the world to help honor his friend, Charlie Kirk.

And in the moments that

passed right after we got the news,

I was in a state of shock.

And one of the things that gave me some solace and gave me some comfort in those first few hours afterwards was I actually happened to see a tweet from Matt Walsh.

And I could feel the visceral anger that was pouring out of his body onto the post on X.

And it's hard to explain why that gave me so much comfort, but I knew that there was an army rising up with righteous anger at what had just happened to my friend and to the host of this show.

And within minutes of that, I got a call from the CEO of Daily Wire just asking if there was anything he could do.

And I said, yes,

send the team.

I'm going to want them to guest host this show.

And so I asked, and they graciously granted

the request, and here they are on Tuesday.

It was originally going to be Monday, but you guys got slightly outclassed.

We got bumped.

We got bumped.

I can't believe it.

Just terrible.

First of all, thanks for having us.

And

no place we'd rather be, obviously.

But if the idea is that Charlie's friends are going to take turns stopping by and doing the show, then the show is going to go on until about 2052, I think.

Because Charlie had a lot of friends.

You're going to be aged out by then, so you'll be off the list.

But we'll figure something out.

We'll take care of you, Michael.

But, Matt, first to you,

tell me what happened in your heart in those first moments

or however you want to do this, what Charlie meant to you, however you want to take this.

But those first moments meant a lot to me, so I would love to let me into that headspace.

Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for allowing us to do this.

It's obviously a great honor.

as well as, of course, in the midst of this great tragedy.

I think,

you know,

Charlie was a great man.

He was a patriot.

He was, you know, he loved God.

He loved his family.

All that came through.

But the word that keeps coming to my mind when I think about Charlie is: in fact, it's the word that I used after I met Charlie the first time, and I called my wife.

And it's just impressive.

He was an impressive guy.

And that's the thought that I had when I met him.

And I knew he was impressive based on his work, but just meeting him in person, he's just this really impressive guy.

And

he did something that I don't think think anyone else can do, certainly in this business, and that he was this compelling,

incredible, charismatic speaker, but also this force behind the scenes and organizing.

I mean, he built this incredible institution.

Now,

in this business, there are some people who can be personalities and can talk in front of the camera, although I think no one did it as well as Charlie.

And then there are people who are kind of the organizers behind the scenes.

I don't know anyone who was an A-plus talent in both areas.

And yet Charlie was, which is why you kind of hear this conversation now, which is inevitable, about, well, who's going to replace Charlie?

Who's going to be the new Charlie Kirk?

And I am truly sorry to say that the answer is nobody.

There is no new Charlie Kirk.

It's just like when Rush Limbaugh died and there was a conversation about who's the new Rush.

There is no new Rush.

You only get one Rush in your lifetime.

You only get one Charlie Kirk.

We're blessed to have Charlie once, and we're not going to have him again.

Now, all the rest of us can try to pick up the legacy and

live out his legacy and carry it forward, which we will, but we can't be Charlie Kirk.

And I think that's why you mentioned the anger.

That was just like millions of other people.

When I'll never forget where I was when I first

saw and heard about this, I was sitting in my car.

I was about to walk into a coffee shop and just get a cup of coffee.

And I got a text from someone saying, what's going on with Charlie Kirk?

And then I went on Twitter and I'm looking around, and there's all this, you know, at the time it was kind of felt like rumors or something.

And I didn't, I wasn't sure.

I started texting, I was texting Michael and Ben.

And then I heard about a shooting, and in the back of my mind, I kind of was, I was concerned, but I wasn't that concerned because I thought, well, there's no way.

What do they can't kill Charlie Kirk?

It's just like, it can't happen.

That cannot happen.

And then, and I'll never forget,

just kind of frantically scrolling around, texting, what the hell is going on.

And the video of

the video just popped up on

the screen, and I saw it.

And I'll never

unsee it.

And I just put my phone down, and I was filled with

grief, shock,

but

rage, just overwhelming anger.

And I've felt that ever since that moment.

It hasn't gone away.

In fact, my anger has only intensified.

And there's a lot of reasons for it.

It was a horrible atrocity, what was done to him.

Anger for his family, most of all, anger for a lot of people, but also

anger for the country, because

you took someone

from us, from all of us.

That's why I think there's this outpour, this just incredible outpouring of mourning and grief, is because we all feel it, whether you knew them or not, whether you were friends or not, we all feel

that you took something from us.

You took someone from us that we needed.

And you had no right to do that,

which is why

we could talk about the grief and the mourning and all of that.

And we should.

But we also need to talk about justice.

That we need justice for Charlie.

We need justice for all of us.

Justice for his family.

You know, we can, which is why I'm not interested in

conversations about unity and togetherness and kumbaya handholding and all that.

I know some people it might comfort them to talk that way.

But we don't have time for that right now.

What we need is justice for this

man who was robbed from us.

And we need it now.

Much was made about J.D.'s closing yesterday when he talked about unity, but he said, first we need truth.

Did you have a chance to hear that?

And what's your take?

Yeah, well, I thought J.D., I thought his,

I thought it was incredible.

I think, in fact, J.D.

Vance's, you know, monologue particularly towards the end of the show yesterday, I thought was tremendous.

And before before that, I also want to say that Erica's speech

was, I honestly believe,

one of the greatest speeches I've ever seen anyone give.

I think it's one of the great speeches ever delivered when you consider the circumstances, but then also just the message.

And look, Erica was under no obligation to give the country what it needs.

You know, Erica could just go out there and say how she feels.

And it's our obligation to comfort her and to be there for her.

And yet she did, in fact, give the country what it needs.

Because

she didn't give us,

she didn't withhold the anger.

Like, we saw that she is angry and she wants justice for her husband.

Righteous, loving anger, anger that's rooted in the love that she has for her children and her husband.

And I think it was so beautiful and important for us to see that.

Yeah, guess what?

She did it right where you're sitting.

That's where the Erica Kirk speech happened.

We put the podium right where your chair is.

Guys, I'm going to look over here.

What do you remember about Charlie?

You know, the first thing you say on the show is,

I want to make sure each of you has your own moment for this, so we'll start with you, Michael.

Well, look, it's hitting everyone.

Obviously, it's hitting millions of people who never met the guy, but who felt very, very close to him because they were with him all day in their pockets and reels.

And for those of us who were friends with him for many years, you know, it hits hits in a personal way in the same way that it hits when any family member or friend dies I realized which is that part of what you're mourning is not just the person but you're mourning this future that you had imagined for the person and with the person and I think that's especially true with Charlie because this is not in any way hyperbolic

everybody who knew Charlie knew this guy was going to be the president.

I think, I don't think I'm being hyperbolic at all.

I knew you just meet the guy, or you just see him from afar, and you say, this guy's going to be president for all the reasons that you were mentioning, Matt, earlier.

Not only did he kill it in front of the camera and on the stage,

but he was this unbelievable operative organizer, extremely effective political figure behind the scenes.

And he just had it.

I just don't know.

He just had greater skill and talent than any other political figure of our generation.

And so you say, well, he's going to be president.

And when it happened,

I was texting my wife, and and she texted me, she said, do you see what happened?

I said, yeah, yeah.

She said, it can't, that can't have happened.

She goes, I know, I saw it, we all saw it.

I actually didn't see the video, thank God.

But she said, we all saw it, and so we know it happened, and yet it couldn't have happened.

And I think that that's the feeling that a lot of us have.

And obviously, Charlie would have known more than anybody.

Nobody has promised tomorrow.

He understood the risks of a public life.

He understood better than most people the condition that the country is in right now.

But I think this is what really drives it home because,

as you know, we don't need to even dignify them with much discussion, but there have been some very hideous responses to Charlie's assassination, not only from fringe lunatics, which you get all the time, but from mainstream voices, from normie voices, from the person you went to third grade with on Facebook and from elite media outlets.

And I think that was

that really shakes a lot of people because Charlie, being the premier political talent of our generation, being so generous, so gracious, so constantly charitable, so totally mainstream,

I think a lot of people see

more, not only this good man, this innocent man who was murdered, but they say, man,

would half the country cheer it if something happened to me too, or to my brother, or to my, would my coworkers do it?

You know, there's this recognition that

people are feeling two things.

One, everyone who's never even met Charlie is feeling this personal loss, but also this political loss.

We feel that something about our political order has gone down with this guy who was the best example of it.

And it's why people are not going to get over it for a long time, nor should they get over it, because it really has to impel action.

We cannot continue in this way.

And the people

who are undermining the very basic foundations of our country and of our society, they need to be punished for it in a just and prudent and lawful way, but they need to be discouraged and suppressed because we cannot tolerate this.

Yeah,

I love what you said there, and I'm just struck.

And we don't have to get into this now,

but

there was news this morning that the charges against Luigi Maggioni had been downgraded,

and he's now

there's no option for life without parole.

So there's a chance that this assassin

could be released at some point.

And he's a young guy, so

in theory, this man might walk the streets free again.

This is so utterly outrageous and infuriating to me.

And that's, you know, I fired off a tweet this morning about it because I was like, you know, do you not understand the moment that we are in?

How dare you not, if you're the judge and you think this is the way you're going to go, at least kick the can a week or two, but to spit in our face.

Yes.

So

I get enraged by that.

And anyway, so candidly, when I first started working with Charlie, I mean, Ben,

you were the campus guy.

And it's interesting how everything evolved, but we looked up to you and what you were doing so much.

And I remember actually meeting with you, with Charlie in, you know, Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles.

And, you know, it's many moons ago, but

we're fondly remembering them now because

it's how this whole community was knit together.

Ben, the floor is finally yours.

I feel bad as 9.33 here.

Not at all.

I mean, it's,

but yeah, please.

I think the thing for all of us about Charlie is that everyone felt Charlie's, used the word innocent earlier.

Michael, it wasn't just that he was innocent in the sense, obviously, that he was an innocent person.

He was truly innocent at heart.

Charlie didn't change from the time that I knew him at 18 years old.

I mean, the first time time I met Charlie, and I've talked about this before, was the Breakers in Palm Beach.

And he was walking around.

He had just started turning point.

And he was like very scrawny at the time, but very tall.

He was a bean pole.

And he was just a bundle of energy, which never stopped.

I mean, legitimately, endless levels of energy.

If you're talking about meeting Charlie, Charlie was just energetic all the time, all the time.

I don't know where it came from.

And he was walking around the Breakers as a kid, trying to gather donors.

And he came up to me as Mr.

Shapiro, you know, great to meet you.

And it was like, I wasn't used to being calling Mr.

David, I was like 28, right?

And Charlie was 18.

And

Charlie, I met him, I turned to Jeremy Boring, you know, the other co-founder of

the Daily Wire, and I said to him, that guy's going to be the head of the RNC.

Like, there's just no doubt.

And as I've said, you saw it that earlier.

The first meeting.

The first meeting, right off the bat.

You could tell, because this is the thing about Charlie.

The way that people know Charlie as this unbelievably talented debater and a terrific broadcaster and an unbelievably clear advocate for his values and for biblical values and for truth.

And the reason that legitimately tens of millions of people are mourning him.

And I mean, I should just say, from a Jewish perspective, every synagogue that I know of did a tribute to Charlie Kirk over the weekend, like on Shabbat.

They stopped the services to do tributes to Charlie, which is an amazing testament to who Charlie was.

But you could tell that early that Charlie,

the thing is, Charlie got good at those things.

The thing Charlie was always amazing at, the thing he had an inherent talent for was coalition building.

He was always an unbelievably great coalition builder.

I mean, it's something actually that Tucker talked about yesterday on JD's show.

And that's and that's an amazing thing.

I mean, this is a fractious coalition, and America is a fractious country.

And to have somebody with the ability and to dedicate his time and effort to actually building those coalitions is really tough to the point where he's able to bring together people who can

disagree on an enormous enormous number of things and still point their ships in the same direction.

I mean, Tucker Carlson and I talked on Friday.

Okay, now, everybody knows that Tucker and I have had our disagreements and have our disagreements about an enormous number of policy issues.

And I'm sure at some point we'll publicly discuss those issues and talk about our differences and all that.

But that doesn't matter because we're going to point our ships in the direction that Charlie wanted those ships to be pointed, which is in the direction of making the country stronger and better.

And

that was Charlie's gift.

That was the thing that Charlie was amazing at.

He had innate talent for that.

All the other stuff, I watched him cultivate over the course of 13 years.

I watched him get good at debate.

I watched him become a charismatic speaker.

Charlie was not a naturally charismatic speaker.

That is an unbelievable skill to be able to actually better yourself in all of these ways and get better every day at doing them.

So by the time that this horrifying act of evil happened, he was just the best there was at it.

That is just an incredible testament to not only the amount of determination and energy and grit that Charlie put into things and that rolled off him every time he met him.

He's just, again, bouncing around the room every time you met him because he had another thing to do, another thing to do.

And the fact that I remember when I got the, when I started getting the texts,

I obviously

kept saying on the show, and I've said it for days since, like, there are no words, and I'm rarely at a loss for words.

They're legitimately no words.

But the thing that I remember stunning me is when they reported when the headlines came up with his age.

Because I was like, I've known Charlie for a long time.

And so you think of Charlie as somebody who grew up with you, which is true.

The fact that Charlie was 31 years old and had accomplished all of these things, I mean, just when Matt, you say irreplaceable, utterly irreplaceable.

I mean, just completely irreplaceable, which is why everybody, I mean, this is why his movement is going to have to be the replacement, right?

Everybody is going to have to do their part part because when a giant drops the load, it's got to be a bunch of normies who pick it up.

But I think that's the other thing about Charlie, aside from the fact that he was a giant.

I said this on the show a couple of days ago, is that

people describe people as larger than life.

Charlie wasn't larger than life.

He just was life.

He was just so alive and so normal.

So normal.

That's why people connected to Charlie, right?

He wasn't a persona.

There are so many people in this space and in the political space who are just kind of like caricatures of themselves and personas and performative and all this kind of crap.

And Charlie wasn't any of those things, right?

Charlie was a guy who had to be taught not to wear a baggie suit, as we were talking about off the air.

Charlie was a guy who, as you mentioned, someone told him he had Riz and he said, what the hell is Riz?

That's who Charlie was.

And the fact that a normie can change the world that way.

I mean, and that's what Charlie was.

He was saying normal, good, innocent things, the kinds of things that you want your children to grow up with.

I'm going to show my kids videos of Charlie.

My kids are like 11.

I have four and they range from 11 to 2.

I can show them Charlie Kirk videos.

You know, Charlie used to always check us and say, no.

Like if we had some content idea and you'd go, there's 10 year olds watching.

There's 14 year olds watching.

Always remember.

He brought an innocence to the world, but an innocence with a level of sophistication in how to approach the world.

And that is so difficult to do because people who are innocent tend not to know how to do the other thing, the activism thing and the coalition building thing.

He's a fine tool athlete.

Unbelievable, like truly amazing.

And developed tools that weren't even in his arsenal at the beginning.

This is why, you know, people talk about Charlie being talented and they think that talent is a sort of compliment.

A lot of people are born talented at a lot of different things.

Charlie was born talented at a great many things.

And then there are the things that he legitimately made himself the best in the world at.

And that was an inspiration to people, too, because if you go back and you just watch the sort of arc of his career and his trajectory, which, as Michael says, was going to lead to the White House.

I mean, like, no one believes any different.

If you watch that arc, the ability to continue to improve his own trajectory by becoming that's part of the tragedy is he was getting better at everything and he was already the best.

He was getting better at all those things.

And

that's an amazing, that's an unbelievable thing.

And that's what was taken from us.

And the other thing is that you just to kind of close out my monologue here.

You know, that

it wasn't just that I received messages from everybody.

We all received messages from everybody, because if you knew Charlie, even tangentially, everybody knew how affected you were by Charlie's death.

It wasn't just that I received messages from all over the world, from obviously friends in Argentina and in Britain and in Canada and tons from Israel, obviously, because Charlie, of course, was publicly extremely pro-Israel.

Not just that.

I got messages from people who are very prominent figures, who are liberal, who were deeply disturbed and upset, and

who are not.

I don't want to say that everybody who disagrees with us politically

is a person who celebrated Charlie's death, because that's not true.

This is the opportunity that Charlie provides.

What Charlie was about was opening doors.

So, all those kids he was talking to on campus, so many of those kids became conservative, became God-fearers, went to church on Sunday because of Charlie.

And they weren't people who already were on Charlie's side, right?

That was Charlie's dead.

He took a bunch of people who weren't going to go to church last Sunday, and they all went to church last Sunday.

The church pews, from everything I'm hearing, were overflowing.

Overflowing

Charlie charged.

He said,

make heaven crowded, Charlie.

I saw the Charlie effect at church because I'm sitting there, and we're kind of a buttoned-up, more traditional parish.

Shocking, I know, not a lot of tank tops.

But I look around.

I look around, and there were sweatpants and t-shirts.

And I was so happy to see the sweatpants and t-shirts.

I knew every single one of them was there for Charlie.

And so I think that we shouldn't just use this

as an opportunity to mobilize on behalf of the things that Charlie believed to carry forward his legacy.

His legacy was going to people we disagree with and getting those people to realize that Charlie's principles were right.

Right?

That's the unbelievable legacy that he leaves because again, being murdered in the way that he was, doing the thing that Charlie was all about, doing outreach.

He was doing outreach, right?

Religious outreach.

He He was talking about Christ in the question before he was killed, right?

He was doing religious outreach.

He was doing political outreach, values outreach, biblically based outreach.

And being killed in that way means that there is an opportunity to reach out to people who weren't going to be devotees of Charlie or devotees of the ideas that he espoused.

And to ignore that, I think, would be to ignore a huge part of what his legacy can mean.

So, yes, I totally agree with the vice president.

You can't have unity with people who celebrate the murder of Charlie Kirk.

You absolutely cannot.

Those people are, I'm not going to curse, those people are the worst that humanity has to offer.

The people who celebrate the death of a wonderful person like Charlie and a husband and a father.

And I cannot watch the tapes.

I mean, you're playing, you know, before the show started, the videos of Charlie with his, I can't watch them.

I have such a hard time with that.

I mean, you mean

because we all have young kids.

It's so painful.

It's so painful to watch and knowing that those kids are going to grow up without their dad.

It's unspeakable, unspeakable.

And people who celebrate that,

there are no depths in hell that are rich enough for those people.

But I think that there are people that we can reach out to.

And that was always Charlie's idea.

There are always people that we can reach out to.

He convinced literally millions of young people to move to the other side of the political aisle.

And so I think there's an opportunity to make people make that choice.

Make that choice.

Choose between the demons who are celebrating Charlie's death and the rest of us who would like to have a functional country where we can talk to one another.

I love what you said.

I mean, I do think this is an opportunity.

This is that fork in the road moment as a country where we, and this is, you know, we could get into the whole

cancel culture debate or whatever, which I personally find to be ridiculous because if somebody

reveals themselves to be a ghoulish, nasty, vile person, then that employer should have every right to fire a ghoulish.

If you threaten to murder someone or encourage the murder of someone for speaking their mind, then it actually helps the marketplace of ideas to get that person out.

That person is undermining the marketplace.

To quote Chesterton, it's the thought that stops thought.

You need certain foundations, just like any marketplace, you need certain rules and basic guidelines, or else you can't even speak.

I can't have a conversation with you if you're going to threaten to murder somebody.

It's a deliberate misread of what cancel culture is, of course.

And this idea that you as an employer owe it to an employee to continue to employ them after they post in celebration of Charlie's murder.

Of course, you don't have an obligation to continue signing a check who is celebrating to somebody celebrating also with murder.

Like, duh, that's a basic aspect of freedom also.

There's no equivalence also, because, and this is the really frustrating thing about this conversation.

Oh, the rights engaging in cancel culture.

Well, even if I accepted that framing, there's a difference here in

the kinds of speech that are being quote unquote canceled.

The left will cancel you if you say that

men can't have babies.

That's what cancel culture is on the left.

They'll cancel you for saying things that are true and normal and obvious.

And on the right, to the extent that anyone's being canceled, and it's not being done through force of law, certainly not through violence, it's just being done through free speech and people, freedom of association.

But to the extent that anyone's getting canceled, they're getting it canceled for saying things that are objectively vile and disgusting.

And in some cases, illegal.

Right.

And so

there's a fundamental difference.

Like, society should treat those things differently.

I love the point you're making because it's truth versus a lie.

And I think I hadn't seen it put that way yet, Matt, and I think it's really smart.

Yeah, well, I just think

that

when we talk about the difference in

canceling on the right or the left, there are a lot of other differences, too.

I mean, one of the big differences is that the right,

especially historically,

over the last several decades, doesn't have the institutional power that the left does.

And so when the left cancels you, they're using institutional power to do it.

I mean, they're using big tech platforms.

They're using these big corporations.

So

they have that institutional power that the right doesn't have.

So there are a lot of differences.

But

I think the most important difference, again, it goes down to the actual speech we're talking about.

I mean, not all speech is exactly the same.

There is just a difference.

And so it is good.

We should, in society, react with revulsion to things that are are revolting.

When someone says something revolting and disgusting, we should react with revulsion and disgust.

But when someone says something that is good and normal, we should not react with revulsion and disgust.

Hold on, hold on.

I'm confused.

I think I've got you.

Yeah.

No, I mean,

it's this common sense stuff that we all know it, and yet somehow it erupts into a debate on X.

I think that what happens is that everybody flattens out these positions into the dumbest version of the argument.

There's a sort of pixelation that happens where it's like, well, that means that I should be able to say anything and no one should ever be angry at me.

No one should ever criticize me, no matter what I say.

And if you do, that's a form of cancel culture.

And it's like, no, you've now reduced the argument to the stupidest version of the argument.

The argument that I think all of us on the right were trying to make, maybe sometimes ineffectually, but I think correctly, was if you say a man is not a woman, that is not a cancelable offense or should not be.

And yet that was a cancelable offense for half of our industry.

I mean, legitimately.

I mean, this is the thing that's,

you know, there was an incident that happened, just personal memory, from 2014 where I was on CNN headline news, and there was a transgender identifying person, a very large male transgender identifying person with extraordinary large female hands.

And I only remember the size of the hands because I was grabbed by the back of the neck during that television interview.

because I had the temerity to call him sir and ask about his genetics.

And the entire panel immediately responded by rushing to the defense of the person who was doing the physical assault on camera.

And that is the predicate to all of this.

There are permission structures that have been created on the left for violence.

And these permission structures are deeply evil, and they are not the same thing as saying a man is not a woman.

Like,

if you are some of the people who we've been watching, we haven't played any of their tapes because they don't, frankly, deserve the airtime, who are out there and making statements about how Charlie deserved what he was going to get or other people should the New York Times featured a Twitch streamer no is who has spent his days for the last several years defending terrorism violently threatening people and calling for violence and the New York Times featured that person in the pages of the New York Times

are we not supposed to react to that with revulsion as Matt says of course we should react to that with revulsion it's not the same thing no it's not the same thing we we have to recognize the left and the right when people have as you point out what's often a degraded degraded debate about speech.

You have to begin with something.

You can't think from nothing.

You can't speak from nothing.

You have to begin with basic truths, and like

men and women are different, for instance, or basic moral goods.

C.S.

Lewis called this the Tao.

Others have called it the natural law or the first principles of practical reason.

It's like in math.

You have to start with an axiom, A equals A, A plus B equals B plus A.

It's not that you can prove those things, but you can't prove anything else without those things.

If we now deny that murder is wrong, we're past reason.

I just want to say again, guys, thank you for making the trip here.

You know, you guys were so gracious about, I mean, you were just like, anything we could do.

You know, can we do more?

Can we do more?

And we felt that love and we feel that love.

And,

you know, so just thank you again, because I know getting the three of you in the same spot.

We don't like each other.

That's

getting us to voluntarily be around each other.

But what we all would, you know,

we've been talking to a lot of our friends in the conservative movement, just in the broader American culture.

And right now, it feels that not just the beating heart of the conservative movement or the Republican Party, but it does feel like the beating heart of America is in Phoenix right now.

It's a TPUSA.

And so this is the place to be.

And however, anyone can help.

Some people can help by spreading the word, starting a chapter, sending a donation, whatever they can do, though.

This is where it's at right now.

Thank you for saying that.

And I also want you guys to know that

Erica feels that too.

I talk to Erica multiple times a day as we're just, because on top of the show duty, it was sort of,

I don't think people realize this.

I was originally like comms, PR,

dealing with incoming on Charlie.

And then we started the show.

And so

I still wear two hats.

Charlie would do this, and then he would go run Turning Point.

And it was sort of, we just kind of did it together when we built this part out.

It was kind of like our side hobby, which became this moment every day to sharpen ideas.

And by the way, when you talk about how Charlie leveled up, it was this microphone

that did that for him because the number of reps he was putting in every day, he was sharpening and sharpening and sharpening.

We had the sounding board and these chats that we have,

I'll never delete.

I'm going to, you know, where we're working through, you know, this new news cycle came up and we've got to figure out how to navigate it.

And every day doing that, you're just sharpening your mind, sharpening your mind so that when he would go on campus,

it would come out the way it did.

And it was amazing how his life was like that, where every piece of it fed into the next, where turning, you know, this show would feed into the campus events, which I'm now going to call basically campus tent revivals.

It just,

it occurred to me this morning, I was like, that's what they were.

And you start realizing he buried this stuff in this political conversation, but he was telling people to follow Jesus, repent and be saved.

Listen to the gospel.

God wants so much more from you.

He wants you to be a part of something bigger.

It was a tent revival, and thousands came.

Thousands came.

And yeah, they cast a ballot when it came time in November.

God bless them.

That was a good thing.

Because it was innocent and it was fun and it was just basically true.

You know, some of the pushback that people kept giving Charlie, which was, you know, why is he going to college campuses and talking to people?

And Charlie would answer that, right?

I mean, he said, because that's where the people are.

You got to talk to the people, right?

I mean, it's pretty simple.

But they would say, well, you know, in his debates, he's, what is he even doing?

All Charlie did was ask extremely simple questions that people on the other side could not answer.

They couldn't.

I mean, that's why the 10 set, the revival 10 set on it proved me wrong, because people had a very difficult time, as it turns out, proving truth wrong because it was true.

And Charlie was uniquely capable of speaking to that truth.

I know we haven't played any clips of Charlie.

Well, we will.

We have another hour, so we're going to keep it.

I would love to play clip 38, where Charlie is talking to young men because they really are in need of this advice.

This is going to live for you.

Play Cut 38.

I don't give advice to young women on how to find a man.

I will say to young men, get your act together and

really make self-control and self-discipline a priority in your life.

One of the reasons why so many young women are upset with the dating pool, I hear this all the time, is that they see men that can't control themselves.

And as you can tell, the young ladies are very enthusiastic about hearing this.

And by the way, here's a thought crime for you.

Women want to be led.

Women want to be led by strong men.

And

you will.

Men are different than women, and women are different than men.

And both need each other, by the way.

I mean, that's true.

And, you know, it sounds controversial when he says it.

And then you think for more than 20 seconds, and it turns out that it's just true.

And Charlie had a unique gift in clarifying and crystallizing that truth and then weaponizing the truth and delivering it out there in viral fashion, which is why, again, tens of millions of people are more.

He's why we have giant marches chanting his name in South Korea and London, and you have squares being dedicated to him in Israel and New Zealand marches.

And like all over the world, people are mourning Charlie in a way that I think would have astonished, frankly, I think it would have astonished Charlie.

You knew him much better than I knew him.

It would have blown his mind.

We knew that Charlie was getting uncomfortably, freakishly famous.

His name ID, some pollster did it for us without us knowing and told us afterwards.

It was like, you know, we knew Charlie was getting

very famous to the extent

You don't get buried down South Park without

exactly well yeah but but you know it's kind of funny because I remember the first plane ride I took with Charlie

years ago.

There was one kid that came up and like, kind of on the sly, like, piss-bumped him.

And I was like, oh, that's cool.

And it got to the point where it didn't matter if he was in London.

It didn't matter if he was in Manhattan.

It didn't matter if he was at some like random bar.

This is a really funny story, actually.

This is some random bar with, like, in kind of the boonies.

It's a whole backstory.

With a couple Fox hosts.

And at this random bar, over the course of an hour and a half conversation, about 150 people came up.

I literally heard this story from one of those Fox hosts two days ago.

Yeah.

Yes,

and kept getting selfies, and they would hand the phone to the Fox host and be like, Could you get me a picture of Trump?

And this, you know, like there were two rather famous people that he was having engaged in this very long conversation with, and they would be like, Sure, you know, you know what I mean?

And so we knew he was getting weirdly, weirdly famous and and uncomfortably so, but he embraced it.

He had said, you know, he used to really kind of, I think, struggle with it a little bit, but as the years went on, he was like, I've just embraced it.

This is my life.

And he would always, he'd say yes to every selfie.

Every selfie.

Sure, come have a selfie.

And he'd go, you know, like this very Charlie Kirk smile.

But anyways,

he said he would, to your answer to your question, I think he would still be blown away because

I think

it's hard to know when you're living it just what's happening.

And, you know, I mentioned to a reporter it was 15 billion views his content got in the fall lead up to the election

across, and TikTok did a survey after the election and they discovered that Charlie was the most trusted voice for Trump voters under 30.

And he was

way more popular than President Trump.

And so when you look at what happened with the youth vote, especially knowing that the boomer vote fell off 2%.

So the boomers went to the left 2% this last election,

and young people went like 13%

points to the right.

And so you look at, I think it's a completely fair thing to say that I don't think we have President Trump if we don't have Charlie.

The president said it the other day, didn't he?

As did Susie Walter.

Well, vice president has said it, certainly.

I remember when I, when I was on with Charlie at the last Amfest in December,

right after the election, I remember saying that to Charlie.

I said,

without you, the president is not the president again.

And I think everybody who watches politics with even any remote level of

intuition and understanding knows that that is the case.

And again, that's an area where I remember when they announced the TPUSA was going to be doing the vast majority of Trump's voter outreach.

I was like, do they have any prep in that?

Like, normally you hire a group that has outside expertise in that sort of thing.

And again, that's just an area.

He was constantly leveling up.

That's a crazy thing to level up.

And he never

asked for any credit for that.

I mean, he is the reason that Trump got elected, but I never heard him ever say that.

And this is in our business, you know, you've got everybody always wants credit for everything.

I think I was actually the first person to tell you that.

Yeah, well, I mean, you always have everyone.

So

for Charlie to have that level of influence, but to never play that.

In fact, he did the opposite.

He would deflect credit.

He would give it to other people.

You're the perfect example for that because you had that incredible documentary, What is a Woman?

And

the

question, Charlie took it and ran with it in such an amazing way.

And he would always be like, I got to give credit to Matt Walsh.

Like he would go out of his way.

And I know he messaged you privately a lot saying, like, oh, you're doing amazing.

This was so good or whatever.

But, you know, he gave you a lot of credit for that.

And I think I saw you at the inauguration at some event, I remember, and I made it a point being like, I want you to know he really like respects the heck out of you.

Yeah, well, he gave me far too much credit.

One of the few times I disagreed with him is when he would do that.

But I do remember, I mentioned it on air a couple days ago that

after

the election that Charlie made a point.

I mean, he had just had this huge victory, that he was the pivotal player in it.

And he made this point of putting putting out a tweet to give me some small token of credit because on the trans issue.

And

I just remember thinking, again,

that's

too much credit, but also nobody does that in this business.

No one ever, especially when you just had a huge victory and you're thinking,

who can I give this credit to so it's not going to me?

No one does that.

He's like one of the very few guys I know who.

You know, I'll give you an insight on that because,

you know, there was a lot of people that would chirp at Charlie or attack, and he

you had to be, I mean, you know, a certain level of doing something wrong for him to name you, to put you,

to name check you.

And that was usually like, oh, you're, you know, trying to, you know, come at Pete Hegseth, and he's our boy.

So if you're coming in the way of Pete, then there might be a comp, there might be a point.

But other than very, very specific instances, and

I had a really long conversation with Charlie about this, and he was talking about sort of how the Greeks sort of had a hierarchy of virtues, but not just that, it was like roles.

And he put being an entertainer, no offense to you guys, because I think you guys are all much more than that, but

he put being an entertainer, and I think the Greeks did too, like the actors and all this,

really low.

Criminals and prostitutes.

Yeah,

Yeah.

It was really low on their list.

What they put high was being a philosopher, was being a theologian, was being a statesman.

And I remember Charlie very clearly saying, our job is to keep the coalition together.

Our job is to be these three.

He's like, a lot of people can do that.

He's like, we have to do this.

Because, you know, it was so easy and so tempting to get infuriated when these pot shots would come over and nobody knew the work that we were doing and he was doing behind the scenes to sort of like assuage this person or bring this person back or you know, make sure that they felt.

I mean, there was a lot of that going on.

But to me, that is the skill.

And actually, that is different from, certainly than entertainment.

It's even different from philosophy.

There are a million dimes door philosophers, a lot of people who have a brilliant idea, and just ask them, you know, and they'll give you their white paper on it.

There are very, very few people who can build a coalition and fewer people still who can maintain a coalition.

The only other example I can think of in modern politics is Trump, who holds these disparate parts together.

And Charlie was the glue.

It is unbelievable.

The friendships he could maintain, the pieces that he could broker for the common good, for a common purpose.

That there is simply no comparison.

And when you're looking at elections, when you're looking at moving the ball forward in the country,

it was the most important thing.

I totally agree.

And I promised you guys a, by the way, that was like a very Charlie thing because Charlie would always be like this.

And every so often I'd catch him where he wasn't like fully tuned in.

He'd be like, yeah, that was great.

Anyways, we'll be right back.

By the way, that's real.

He answered all of his

audience questions.

Did he actually answer any questions?

No, he.

Did he actually read all the questions?

Yeah, he did.

That's unbelievable.

I'm not even kidding.

He read them because I saw them going

unread.

Anyways, Matt, I wanted to pay tribute to you because it just became such a big part of the tour.

I wanted to at least play one of those videos that you helped inspire with Charlie.

Play Cut 68.

What is a woman?

It's a person who believes

they're a woman.

No, but that's not a definition.

What objectively is a woman?

It's a woman.

No, what is that?

A woman.

Give me a definition.

Just anyone who believes they're a woman.

No, but what is that?

That's circular reasoning.

What is a woman without using the word woman in the answer?

Can you answer that question or no?

It's just a person who believes they're a woman.

I mean, what's wrong with that?

You can't use the word woman in your answer.

The inability to answer the most fundamental, obvious biological question, what is a woman?

This is not troubling.

Like, it's so simple, it's so obvious.

And I guess the question is: when is womanhood then achieved?

Just like for that, whenever they decide.

I mean, like,

last chance.

Can you tell me what a woman is?

Are you a woman?

Why are you so hateful?

I asked you what a woman was.

That's not hateful.

I gave you the definition.

Thank you for your time.

Yeah, I haven't seen that one in a long time.

It never gets old.

It never gets old.

What did we just witness there, and why was it?

Well, it's the, I mean, it's the question, it's the

question of a generation.

They've had now

several years to figure out a good answer to that, and they still haven't quite gotten there.

And I always loved seeing that.

And I would certainly do.

I know we all did the same thing with Charlie, that

he would stumble on a certain point or a way of phrasing it, and you go, well, that's great.

I got to go use that.

Of course, you always got to give credit, but that was the.

Not always, because sometimes Charlie would be like, I'm going to steal that.

Don't worry.

I'll give attribution 30% of the time.

As long as you're at 30% to 40% attribution, you're fine.

But

that kind of goes back to,

you know, I hate to

drag it back down to the depressing stuff, but that goes back to what we've lost is like this kind of give and take,

we're building off of each other.

And

we've lost that.

Now, I also wanted to say,

just real quick, and I've made this point a couple of times on my show and on X and stuff, but we've been talking about all the tributes to Charlie.

and all the people that love him and what a testament that is to him and his character and his his effectiveness.

And all that is true.

And that is the greatest testament to the man

is that millions of people are mourning his loss.

But I also do think,

and

we shouldn't lose sight of this, that

all the people on the other side who are celebrating his death and dancing on his grave,

it's infuriating to see, it's disgusting, it enrages me.

But also, that is a testament and a tribute to Charlie as well.

And when I die, you know,

I would like to think the same thing is going to happen because that means

that I was effective.

Your enemies,

if you are a warrior,

And Charlie Kirk was a warrior.

He was a peaceful warrior.

He was a happy warrior.

He was nonviolent, but he was a warrior.

If you're a warrior, then your enemies should celebrate when you're no longer there.

When you're out of the arena, they should be happy because that means that you were winning.

That means that you were punching hard.

And so we should all want that for ourselves.

When we're no longer here, if our enemies couldn't care less, just another day at the office for them, then that means we didn't punch hard enough.

That means we didn't fight hard enough.

And so

I do also see that as a testament to that.

So can I ask you, all three of you, a question?

What are you going to do next?

I mean, nobody can replace Charlie.

We know it's going to take, like, I guess the question is sort of, how has this changed you?

What practical things?

I mean,

you're going to be going to campus.

I have a real answer to this, which is

I owed Charlie a text because unlike Charlie, I was not diligent or fastidious about these things.

He was just unbelievably good at constantly being in touch with people.

So I owed him a text a few days prior.

But I thought, well, whatever, I'm going to see him.

I'm going to see him in a couple weeks because

he and I were scheduled to speak together at the University of Minneapolis, or as he called it, Mogadishu,

in 12 days, 12 days after it happened.

And so it happens.

And then, you know, you're in a fog, and then you're getting the news, and then you, and then later,

this popped into my head.

I said, oh my goodness, I was supposed to do an event with Charlie a week and a half from now.

And so your first instinct is, well, there's no way that that event can go on.

That's just, whenever something like this happens.

But then two seconds later, you say,

there's no way it can't go on,

especially given this man, especially given this movement that he built and everything that he stood for.

He said, there's no way

that we can cancel that.

And so I said, well, look, this is a decision for TPUSA to make, and you can speak to it more.

But it seems to me that the tenor around here is we've just lost the leader, this irreplaceable man, and

we don't even necessarily want to keep going on, but we have to do it.

Well, yeah, and that's why we did our Friday show.

And

if I could, you know, I was not in a good place.

I'm still not in a good place, but I knew we had to do it because Charlie would want us to do it.

And

I kind of likened it to what happened at Pentecost a little bit.

Because what happened was Charlie died, and his followers, his team, his staff, I mean, it was we were trying to make sense of the chaos.

Part of the team was in Provo, part of of the team was in Phoenix, and we were trying to just

put one foot in front of the other.

And then Erica got up and spoke to the world, and it was like that was like our Pentecost, where, and all of a sudden, we were filled with courage.

And I don't think that was just us

on the team.

I think the whole country watched it.

And I think that's why, you know, I think Hannity played it twice.

He played it a second time from top to bottom.

And

I was incredibly grateful for that editorial decision.

And I think people wanted that and needed it.

And Erica was so brave.

And I can just tell you, we have been inundated from the grassroots.

These young kids, we're probably at 40,000 new, maybe more,

new chapter requests to start new chapters.

And I've said this on doing media hits.

To put that in perspective, we had 900 college chapters and 1,200 high school chapters.

And Charlie, just a few weeks ago, was like, we're going to be on every high school in America.

We're going to do 35 and 1,000.

And I was like, well, I I Googled it.

I go, Charlie, there's only 23,000 high schools.

We're going to be on 23,000.

We're going to found a new high school.

The whole team's like, Charlie,

and eventually he goes, okay, fine.

We'll do 15.

And then he tells the guy who's building the slide, because this is a presentation.

He goes, you can put 10, but it makes him think he's doing 15.

And he was so committed to putting a Club America, which is our high school brand, on every single American high school.

And I just marvel because that is such a fresh memory.

It's two weeks ago, two weeks ago that we had this, and I just marvel that now in death, he is going to absolutely accelerate that mission, that goal, so much faster than he could have ever possibly imagined.

And that was the Charlie is a more, more, let's do more.

We have to go harder, we have to go faster, more.

And the whole team knows that.

And he was just, and he covered it all in this amazing grace.

And

I just want to give some kudos here.

I want to make sure I have enough time to the Daily Wire.

I just found out that the Daily Wire is donating a million dollars to TPUSA.

And I, from the bottom of my heart,

thank you guys so much.

I'm blown away by that generosity.

And I know Erica is too.

Our pleasure.

Easiest board decision.

God bless you guys.

That's breaking news.

And

an amazing, amazing gesture of confidence in what Charlie built and what we are going to keep moving forward and growing and multiplying.

Ben, you noticed something, you picked something up about that clip that we showed of Charlie where he's asking, what is a woman, what is a woman, what is a woman?

Pause.

Why are you so hateful?

Right.

And we all laugh because it's inherently ridiculous because Charlie obviously is not being hateful.

But that, I think, when, you know, I think we're all feeling Matt's visceral rage, or at least if we're not, we should be.

And the question is where to direct it.

And I think that that visceral rage has to be directed at the ideological frameworks that create the impetus for violence.

In that statement, when she says, Why are you so hateful?

That's kind of the whole thing.

The reason I say that is because there is a basic framework for ideology.

There's been this flattening where we pretend that all ideologies are equally likely to create violence.

There's a favorite of the media, right?

It's just, or politicians.

Political violence is bad, however it's formed.

Political violence is bad.

Both sides have everyone's doing it.

Okay, here's the thing.

We all know which ideologies, everyone knows which ideologies are most likely.

We are not burning down the country.

We're not burning down businesses.

We're not throwing rocks at police.

We're praying.

Correct.

And let's be real about this.

The minute, literally the minute I heard that Charlie was shot, I don't know about you guys, but I had some pretty good suspicions as to what ideology was behind the murder of our friend.

It's always the ones you most expect.

Well, and so the question is why, right?

The question is why.

And the answer is because there is a framework of mind that has been created in which people claim that there is the problems in their own life.

And this is what Charlie stood against, right?

Because Charlie was constantly talking about personal responsibility and making your life better and take your life in your own hands and you can be a success, right?

That's that clip we played earlier for men.

Like be better.

If you're a person who takes the failures in your own life and you externalize those onto a shadowy group of people who are responsible for all of your failures, and then you say, those people are victimizing me to the point where they are

genocide, erasing me, trans erasure, trans genocide.

And then you say, well, if those people are trying to kill me, it's self-defense, right?

Speech is violence.

It's self-defense for me to shoot somebody like Charlie Kirk for saying that.

When she says, why are you so hateful?

The reason she is perceiving fact as hate is because it is a denial of her sense of identity and a sense of threat that is now justifying violence.

That is the reality.

There's an undergirding to some of these ideologies, particularly this ideology, that has violent extremism as an after effect.

That's just a reality.

And there are multiple ideologies that are like that.

So I think that the BLM ideology had aspects of this for sure.

I think radical Islam, as Charlie routinely talked about, particularly in the last couple of weeks before his murder, radical Islam, obviously, is deeply ensconced in the sort of conspiracy theory about our failure is the fault of all these other people.

These people are trying to harm us.

Therefore, we are justified in doing violence to them.

And when I see the New York York Times trotting out Hassan Hiker repeatedly now, this is like the second time repeatedly to talk about Charlie's murder as though he is the representative of good faith debate when he is back to every terror group I can imagine.

And legitimately.

Said America Deserve 9-11, has openly talked about how his political opposition should be physically harmed.

You're a lawyer, right?

I mean,

when does it cross the line into incitement?

Does it have to be, when a specific name has to be used?

Because this is relevant to what happened with Pam Bondi and all the clip that's, I mean,

you know, she was saying,

she basically said hate speech is illegal.

And Charlie, I mean, I think she ended up clarifying later to her credit that the clip is, I'm told, is incomplete.

She ended up quoting incitement, right?

Michael looks sad.

There's no reason to

use.

If you're just saying that threats and incitement are illegal, of course they are.

You don't need to say hate speech.

No, exactly.

So that'll

snowboard for things I don't like.

Yeah, I mean, but it ties into, it ties into what happens next here, and that's why I'm asking,

because a lot of people, you know, there was a push to sort of smoke out all these people that were criticizing or that were dancing on the grave, rather, and that's perfectly fair.

And that's a social consequence, but not a legal one.

When does it become a legal consequence?

So I think that what they've been attempting to do, and Cash Patel is apparently talking about this, is labeling Antifa a terrorist group, which absolutely they should be.

I mean, clearly they should be at this point.

And that if there are people who are funding groups that are violent, then we should obviously be looking into them, probably under racketeering laws and conspiracy laws.

If you are donating money to a ex-Mormon trans furry group that is openly planning violence, then you should be held legally accountable for that in the way that you would be, as we all know, if it were a white supremacist group and you were funding a white supremacist group.

We all know that that would be investigated by the FBI.

And I don't mean to step on your point here, but I just want to underscore why what you're saying is so critical, and I want the audience to understand that is because one of Charlie's best friends in the administration was Stephen Miller.

And Stephen Miller came on our show yesterday.

I think he said the same thing on Hannity.

The last text message, and there's so many prophetic little nuggets, guys.

I wish I could share them all.

The last text message he shared with Stephen Miller was

we have to root out the people that are funding the violence.

What we're talking about here is organized crime.

All right, sorry.

I didn't mean to cut you off, Ben, but I think it's important that people understand

that Stephen Miller, one of his dearest friends, you know, this is the last thing he got from Charlie.

Do you not think that Stephen Miller is going to make this his

immigration will always be his number one issue, but this is not going to go away, and the admin is going to take

I think that would be the best thing because I think that what you're going to see from the left now is an attempt, and you're already seeing it, to claim that the right is cracking down on free speech as a response to what happened to Charlie.

This is why they're retelling this idiotic line that it's cancel culture to fire somebody who's cheering somebody's murder.

It's why they're now trying to spin that quote from the Attorney General into they're cracking down on free speech.

Being meticulous about your policy pursuits, which is something that Charlie very much was.

Yes.

You know, being meticulous in how you actually do the thing is the thing that the administration needs to do next.

And Stephen Miller is definitely going to do this.

I was talking with my friend Chris Rufo about this because Chris is very much into this.

Just you have to be incredibly meticulous in your use of power to achieve your goal.

And that's the thing that needs to happen next.

I mean, we need to have the conversations that we've all been talking about with people who disagree with us.

And we need to obviously point our boats in the same direction to try and generate more power and

more victories and more successes behind Charlie's legacy and the things that he stood for.

But the thing that the government can do needs to be really meticulous, and we need to be meticulous in how we pursue that.

And the government can be very, we should be very, very clear that this was left-wing LGBT extremism.

I mean, all of the evidence we have right now points to that very, very clearly, and that needs to be said.

It can't be said enough.

And in particular, you know,

the trans connection here is also very clear, and I think more is going to come out about that.

Trans ideology is

inherently dangerous.

It is inherently violent.

Trans ideology is inherently violent because it is a violent rejection, first of all, of the self.

You are rejecting yourself.

If you're in the throes of this ideology, you're doing violence to yourself.

We know the suicide, as trans activists themselves are always very quick to point out, the suicide attempt rate is extremely astronomically high.

So this is an inherently violent ideology.

And kind of going back to your point earlier, Ben, that

how are these things incited?

Well, these people are being told that your very existence

hinges on

the acceptance and affirmation of other people.

And so

not just like your identity, but your life itself, your very life, your very existence depends on other people affirming it.

And if they don't affirm it, then they have caused you to not exist.

And to those of us who are sane, that sounds, it sounds crazy.

We can't wrap our minds around that.

That's what these people believe.

That's what the ideology teaches.

It's what the media has been saying.

It's what the schools have been saying.

It's what Democrat politicians, it's what the president used to say under the old regime.

This is the message that used to come from the White House all the way on down, that if you do not affirm these people, and that is to say, accept their delusional

perception of

themselves, then you are killing them.

And so when you go to people who are already in the throes of this violent, inherently violent ideology, they're already delusional, they're deeply confused, and then you tell them that, hey, those people over there, if they don't accept everything you say about yourself, they are killing you.

They are a threat to you.

They're committing genocide.

They use that word, transgenocide, and they use that label against Charlie.

They've used it against me.

They've used it against you two.

That is not, now we kind of laugh it off because it's silly.

It's ridiculous.

Genocide.

What the hell are you talking about?

But the people that they're telling that to believe it.

They believe that we are literally committing a genocide against them.

And so when you do that, when you go and tell people, these people, if they don't affirm you, they're killing you, they're committing a genocide.

And then one of those people goes and kills one of the people that you made that claim about, it is 100% also your fault.

You intentionally caused that.

You might as well have just told them, hey, go kill that guy, because that is in effect, that is what you said to them.

And that has been the message.

It can't be stressed enough.

That has been the message, not just from the left-wing fever swamps on the internet, but from the very top of the Democrat-leftist pyramid on down.

That has been the message.

And so they own this.

And by the way, this individual, I'm not even going to say his name.

You are my rage outlet, so just keep rage tweeting, please.

But he was bragging about it.

And before it happened, he was saying there were people with foreknowledge, and they didn't come out.

So shame on them.

I hope they burn in hell.

We'll be right

I said this before,

but it bears repeating.

The last message that Charlie sent me was,

I think it was just the day before we lost him,

which was that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country.

And

I will write those words onto my heart, and I will carry them out.

If people ask me, you know, what emotions I'm feeling right now, and this is something people say, I mean, you kind of know the answer.

There's incredible sadness, but there's incredible anger.

And

the thing about anger is that unfocused anger or blind rage is not a productive emotion.

But focused anger, righteous anger, directed for a just cause, is one of the most important agents of change in human history.

Trolley showed that.

Amen.

And we are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.

So let me explain a little bit bit what that means.

So

be quick, Stephen.

The organized doxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people's addresses, combining that with messaging that's designed to trigger incite violence in the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence, it is a vast domestic terror movement.

And with God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.

It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name.

So, Ben, I want to go to you because, again, you're the lawyer here.

He mentioned Terror Network, Domestic Terror Network, and with Luigi Maggioni, the news this morning was that the judge dropped the domestic terror sort of angle to the prosecution.

Is this legally defensible?

Is this just a New York bad judge?

I haven't actually read the decision from the judge or the rationale for it.

I do not understand how it's not just clearly first-degree murder.

I mean, it's obviously premeditated murder.

So dropping it to second-degree murder as though it's a crime of passion is totally crazy in every possible way.

And again, when we talk about people who own it, Bill Burr shouted on multiple shows on national TV, Free Luigi.

When we talk about inherently violent ideologies, it's not just the trans ideology that is inherently violent.

If you are a person who says the existence of wealthy people is a threat to me, that they are killing us, that there's a group of people and they are manipulating your life such that you're poor and they're rich and they are harming you.

They are actively harming you by their very existence.

The billionaires are actively harming you just by existing.

They are evil by their existence, then why should we be surprised when healthcare CEOs get shot on the streets?

And then there's a post facto after the murder justification in the same way that you saw with Charlie.

There is something so hideous that has been bred on the

point I've been making on my show is typically nobody gets shot over marginal tax rate conversations, right?

It's not as though every political debate in America ends with somebody shooting somebody else, but there are particular types of political debates in America in which one side sees fit to murder the other side.

And it is baked into those ideologies.

And so I don't want to hear this nonsense from

Democratic politicians who just generically denounce political violence.

If you are unwilling to say, as a Democratic politician, for example, Donald Trump is not a fascist, right?

When you talk about thought matrices that create violence, if you keep calling Donald Trump Hitler, everyone said this, it's true.

If you keep calling Donald Trump Hitler, over and over and over, someone might think, you know, he's Hitler.

And what do we do with Hitler?

We try to shoot Hitler in the head.

You know,

on your both sides point, Ben, there's this meme that's come out.

Seth Moulton, this Democrat congressman, goes on TV, has been spewing this, that the vast majority of political violence in America is from the right.

And when I heard that, I said, well, look, I don't know.

I haven't looked at the statistics.

Maybe that's true.

It doesn't ring true to me, but maybe it's true.

So I go and I look into the statistics.

And I say, oh, there's this study, that study.

So I said, okay, well, let me just look into particular cases.

There was an event a couple years ago at University of Pittsburgh.

Two Antifa operatives show up.

These are members of an Antifa cell, go to Antifa meetings, were caught going through TSA with explosive material on them multiple times, still allowed to board the airplane.

They sit off an explosive at the event.

And it was over the transgender issue.

Injured, very seriously injured, a female cop at the event.

I looked into that.

I said, well, this would be an example of left-wing violence, right?

No.

It was not classified as left-wing violence.

It was pled down.

It was classified as obstruction of justice, not included in any of the stats.

I looked through some other cases.

Covenant.

They treated Covenant as a non-leftwing attack.

Covenant.

They said that the shooter was seeking fame.

It was not a left-wing attack.

This is a transgender ideologue shooting through a window of a church and murdering kids.

So I realized the way that they get away with this is very simple.

They don't count the left-wing violence.

It's a completely bogus statistic.

And so to your point, Ben, yes, you have to call this out.

To Stephen Miller's point, this is largely organized.

There are groups that fund this, that promote this, that publicize this, groups with foreign knowledge of attacks.

This is organized.

And our government has taken on organized crime before, taken on the mob, taken on terror groups, taken on all of these things.

We have the ability to do that.

It is not only our right through our representatives, it is our responsibility to do that to restore order.

And if we are not treating this as an organized, criminal, political threat from the left, then we are just twiddling our thumbs.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: And the left will always be

more violent.

I mean,

it's not even close.

They have

a near monopoly on political violence on the left, especially over the last

10 years, in particular over the last five years.

They have a near monopoly on it.

And there's also a reason for that, which is that, and there's a reason why conservatives generally don't,

to your point, everyone's mourning, no one boarded up their windows.

Not only were there, was there no rioting, nobody was even worried that there would be.

Everyone just knew that there would not be.

Meanwhile, if you were to flip it around and somebody of Charlie's importance and status on the left were to be assassinated, God forbid,

we know that immediately all the windows are being boarded up in every major city.

And the reason is that

the left,

they are enemies of civilization.

They hate civilization.

They hate Western civilization.

And these kind of words that they use, dismantle.

They're always talking about dismantling.

They want to dismantle.

They want to tear everything down.

And they'll tell you that.

Tear down, dismantle, tear down.

Tear down the patriarchy.

Dismantle the white hetero-normative, whatever, the family.

Whereas conservatives, what are we

most,

like, at its essence, what are we trying to conserve?

We're trying to conserve civilization, Western civilization in particular.

And we have disagreements about how to do that and all of that.

There are certainly disagreements about that.

But all of us are fans of civilization.

And so we just inherently recognize that when you see a guy walk up to a healthcare CEO and shoot him and kill him in the street, you cannot have a civilization if that is allowed to happen.

If we get to a point where that just happens and we're okay with it, then we don't have civilization anymore.

We have a third world country.

And so conservatives just fundamentally recognize that is a bad thing.

Where on the left, they don't recognize that.

Again, it's hard for us to wrap our mind around this as normal people, but they do not see civilization itself as necessarily a good thing.

And

so to them, violence is, and if you're looking to tear down civilization, then

violence is always going to be a tool in that argument.

I think there's actually a deep nihilism implicit in that that doesn't exist on particularly the religious right.

And the reason I say that is because if you do, as Charlie believed, and as all of us believe, that there is a God-centered universe, a God-ordered universe that, for the most part, we can discern, right?

Not all of it, obviously.

We don't know why horrible tragedies, horrifying things happen.

I mean, everyone is suffering with the aftermath of that.

There is, in fact, a God-ordered universe, which is certainly something that Charlie believed.

If you believe that, then you also also believe that you have a duty in the world to act within that universe in rational ways, and you have duties to God to do the things that God told you to do, including things like don't kill people, don't murder people.

And if you don't believe any of that, if you believe that the world is just a system of power, that every argument is just a guise for power, right?

This sort of Michel Foucault argument, that all arguments, at their essence, are just a way of me getting power over you, then the response to an attempt for me to get power over you is to use power in response.

And that leads to revolutionary violence.

And we've seen periods like this in American history.

It happened in the early 20th century.

It happened again in the 1960s.

And I fear that we're headed into another period like that with a left that is so nihilistic in its desire to see every argument.

This is the thing they were trying to silence with Charlie, really more than anything else.

The thing they were trying to silence with Charlie was the argument.

It's the thing that he died doing.

They didn't want him making the argument.

Yes, he was an amazing coalition builder, and we've talked about this.

Yes, he was an amazing political activist.

The thing he was killed for doing was making the argument.

That's what he was killed for doing.

There are lots of political activists, and some of them are quite effective.

He was killed for making the argument.

Why?

Because there are too many nihilists on the left predominantly who believe that the argument is just a form of power that is to be met with a bullet.

Yep.

Yeah, and Charlie, and I, you know, again, there's so many things that are going to haunt me, I think.

But

he, in the last month, I would say multiple times, one of the most common arguments that he was warning everybody about was we America has two roads ahead.

We have a fork in the road is MAGA or Maggioni-ism.

And he would use that more than Mamdaniism, right?

Which was the more common, I think, refrain from

most.

And

that's haunting.

And I hope that

I hope that, you know, we have a joke around here.

It's like, how many times Charlie's proven right?

How many times he told us something, and we're just like, ah, gosh darn it, he's right again.

And I'm, you know, obviously this is something he would have never wanted to be right about, but

he was.

And I think in his memory, we have to do everything we can in our power to make sure that the country does not fray.

And I've said this before, but I'll say it again.

Charlie was he wanted revival.

He didn't want revolution.

He wanted the blood of Jesus.

He did not want blood in the streets.

And he wanted a country his kids could inherit and be and be prosperous and thrive and go to church and love their their spouses and um that is not the tone that we are getting from the american left and i found that you know you brought up hasam piker i do have a clip that would i don't i don't know if you guys want to play it i'm i'm of two minds of it but you know he's basically saying you've got to gutting your opponents liberals left-wingers you need to be showing your opponents guts you need to be gutting them you need to be shanking these somethings and letting the letting their intestines just ride on the stage.

Soak the streets in blood, I think, was one of his phrases.

Slice and dice him, he said.

And that guy is in the New York Times, so he's not a fringe player.

The New York Times featured him twice in the space of a week, twice.

This is the great

exponent of rational debate that they've got on left.

Ours was Charlie, and Charlie was murdered.

Their great exponent of rational debate is the guy who says, slice and dice your opponents and leave their intestines writhing on the stage.

And who won't be doing any of that himself, by the way.

Correct.

He will stay in his comfortable studio.

In his million-dollar mansion as a socialist, yeah.

But he's, and he'll let, he'll, he'll offer up whatever leftist lunatic will take that and run with it.

He's fine to just offer that person.

That person also is a human sacrifice for him.

The person that that person kills most especially, but the person who carries it out, because now they're like, you know, they go to prison and Hassan Piker gets to keep living his comfortable life.

Well, people, you know, we respond in a cultural way, which is very important.

We respond in prayer and a spiritual way that's very important.

But we can't neglect the political either.

And when people violate the law, when people incite violence, when people engage in direct threats, when people do things that are illegal, it is incumbent upon us to prosecute them, including those people, to the fullest extent of the law.

Amen.

I want to end this conversation on sort of what happens next.

And I was just telling you guys, Charlie's main goal was that people would know Jesus.

But his political main goal was to keep the coalition together, to keep Trump's coalition together.

And it was such an amazing guiding light for Charlie, and it was a North Star because it would help dictate

where do you

dive in

and correct people, maybe name-check them if you have to, and when you wouldn't, when you would stay silent, what debates you would enter into, which ones you wouldn't.

And I guess my question is: does this have to get worse before it gets better?

Is this going to be, or how do we keep the coalition together?

Yeah, well, look, I think that

well, the question of where we go next and what happens next is impossible to totally answer because everything is different now.

Everything has changed.

Everything changed.

And I think that we don't know exactly how yet.

And so that's the first thing.

We are really living in a new country now, I believe.

And you have those moments, you know, these rare moments.

And in our generation, we've had a few of them where you wake up the next morning and, okay, this is a different country now.

And

this is one of those moments.

But what I can say is that there are a few things that have to happen going forward.

And maybe on the sort of, they have to get uglier first side of it, is that

we have to establish order.

We were talking about civilization, protecting civilization.

Well, you need order for civilization.

You need law and order.

And so that needs to be

reasserted in a big way.

And that can be ugly.

Now, it's done through the law.

You know, no one is calling for,

again, we are the defenders of civilization.

We don't want to see random violence.

We don't want to see people killed in the street.

We don't want to see that.

But we want to see our legal authorities exercise that authority.

And that can be an ugly thing.

Like

putting people in prison is not a happy thing.

We wish we didn't have to do that.

Executing murderers, people who commit crimes, need to be executed.

And it needs to be done legally and swiftly, not 35 years after they've been convicted.

I believe personally that public execution should come back.

There's a reason why Western civilization had public execution in many places for hundreds and thousands of years.

I think that's an example people need to see.

And a lot of that stuff is ugly, but here's the thing.

You're going to have ugliness no matter what.

And either we can have ugliness in the street, we can have the kind of ugliness where a CEO walking down the street at 5 a.m.

gets shot in the back of the head.

We can have the kind of ugliness where a man on a college campus who's just trying to make the argument gets shot and killed.

We can have that kind of ugliness.

The ugliness that can affect anybody, that anyone can fall victim to.

Or we can have the ugliness that's contained, where we have people in positions of authority who

use force.

to go and take the violent people and the dangerous people and punish them.

We can have that kind of ugliness.

And

that's what we need.

And then, after that, or at the same time, we've already talked about this a little bit, is unity,

not just random.

You know, you can't go, you can't just say, hey, everyone, let's unite.

Let's be united.

You can't go, if you go up to a group of a thousand people and say, hey, let's unite, guys, they're going to look at you and say, and they're going to ask, what do you mean?

To do what?

Unite around for what?

What are we uniting?

I'm not going to unite with you unless I know what we're doing.

And so that's why a lot of the calls for just sort of general, generic unity in America don't really work because there's always the question of

around what?

But as conservatives, as people on the right, you know, we can unite and we should.

And I think what we need to do is put to the side a lot of our

inner, you know, our squabbles, our family feuds.

Put all that to the side.

For now, we can get back to a lot of that stuff.

We probably will.

I'm sure we will.

Conservatives always do.

We will always get back to it.

But for right now,

we have more important things to do because one thing I know for sure,

and there are plenty of conservatives who I've had my own,

I've been known to get into feuds here and there with people.

But here's what I know, and we saw this with Charlie, that if I walk out of this building and I get killed, that

Every conservative, even the ones that I've feuded with,

that they will not be happy about that.

They will mourn that.

They will mourn that, the same if it happened to any of us.

They'll mourn it.

Even the people, the conservatives didn't like us.

But I also know that on the left, they won't share in that mourning for the most part.

And so, kind of the friend-enemy distinction is easy for me to see.

The people who will mourn your death are your friends.

The people who will dance on your grave and laugh in the face of your grieving wife are your enemies in this battle.

And so, that's where the unity needs to come.

The wretched demons, honestly.

Please, yeah, where do we go next?

You cannot have a marketplace of any kind, of ideas or of goods, if people are shooting up the marketplace.

And

it's not even just the murderer in this case, because there are freaks everywhere and horrible events happen.

But the loud and widespread celebration of that sort of thing shows us that there are three steps.

Step one is we want to have a robust conversation in a good country, right?

But we are where we are, in a degraded and dangerous place.

Step two, question mark.

Step three, flourishing and speech and national unity.

But there is that step two.

There is that question, how do we get there?

And there is no liberty without order, and there is no civilization in which half the country is going to dance when the other half is murdered.

And so that requires a cultural response.

I think you're starting to see that from a lot of companies.

That's very good.

That requires conservatives to let down their grudges that they're always holding all the time for just a little bit and rally at least around a person and a person whose clear vision has led us for a long time very successfully.

And it requires the government to get in and do its job as well.

And then and only then can you get back to the kind of country that at least I want.

And if the people who celebrate murder don't want it, too bad.

I mean, I know we at Daily Wire, we trust you at TPUSA to do it.

I mean, that's really the answer.

We're willing to provide, and we are providing, any level of material support, any level of support on the program, boots on the the ground, helping you to do what Charlie would have wanted to be done here.

And I think that the reason that everybody trusted Charlie, the reason we're all mourning Charlie, is because nobody did it better.

You spelled out two of Charlie's goals.

You said, you know, he wanted to bring people back to Christ and bring people back to church and back to biblical values, and he wanted to keep the MAGA coalition together.

And expand it.

And expand it.

And the question is, how you do that?

And the answer is you focus on the first and the second is a byproduct.

Okay, the answer is that, as Matt says, you have to unite around something.

And yeah, we can unite in the short term around the fact that there are a bunch of people who hate our guts and want to murder us, which of course is true.

But long-term unity, big movement change, which is what Charlie was really trying to drive and why he went to talk to people who disagree, is about building around those core values.

And so the long-term vision, yeah, we'll have our petty squabbles.

And yeah, some of those squabbles will be more than petty.

But the long-term vision has to be built around.

those original biblical conservative values that Charlie stood for, things like the Bible, things like free markets, things like family.

all those things are things Charlie stood for.

You got to build the coalition around values because we can't build it around the man, but we can build it around the values that he left behind and that he spent his entire life fighting for.

And we couldn't be, frankly, more honored to join you guys as much as we can in the fight.

Thank you for that, and thank you for donating the Daily Wire a million dollars.

Breaking news on this show.

Thank you guys for honoring Charlie so well today.

God bless you.