Charlie Kirk and Political Violence

Hey, everybody.

Welcome back to the Find Out podcast.

You're getting actually the second episode that we taped today.

We were hoping to speak with the new Senate candidate in Maine, Dan Cleben,

who's also the owner of the Maine beer company.

But in light light of the breaking news tonight, we decided to shelve that episode until Tuesday

because there's obviously huge, huge breaking news happening this evening in which right-wing commentator and Turning Points USA founder, executive director Charlie Kirk was assassinated this afternoon by a gunman that it's still a little unclear at this hour.

It's 8.42 Eastern.

whether they have the right person.

They don't.

Cash Patel said they don't.

No, they did.

That's that was earlier.

Now I think they do have the right person.

They say they have the right person.

Conflicting reports.

Yeah, yeah, nothing appears.

We do not know who this person is.

Anything about this?

You may know by the time you hear this in the morning, Thursday morning.

But also,

we cannot forget there was also a school shooting today in Colorado.

And our understanding is that there are three people

in critical condition.

No, no loss of life, thankfully, so far.

But obviously, this has lit a match

in the country with people talking about this.

And I think what we're here to do is: one, just sort of talk it out because we know that you count on us to be there every Tuesday and Thursday.

And so that's what we're doing.

But it's also important to talk about this horrific scourge of gun violence and also this

horrific scourge of

right-wing

media spinning up people very dangerously before we even hear who this person is.

And I think, so we are going to try to navigate this over the next 30, 45 minutes.

Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to have as many laughs as we normally do, but it's important to talk about this.

So, guys, and I want to go to Chris first because Chris has a lot of experience with these right-wing radical groups that, you know, prey on breaking news to distort stories and things so chris what what are you thinking right now after seeing such a display as this was today

yeah so that the people listening to this know i've only gotten to talk to these gentlemen for like two minutes before we hit hit record uh since this news really broke uh

in short Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better.

I am someone who has not just been studying misinformation, disinformation, radicalization, and extremism for nearly 10 years now.

I'm someone who has been studying Charlie Kirk Turning Point USA and the effect that that has had on our country and our politics as a whole.

Charlie Kirk is,

as Donald Trump's immediate response to the assassination indicates, tremendously important to the building of the MAGA movement.

He is a very large part of the reason why so many young white men are leaving college and ending up back in their parents' bedroom, seething,

angry, pissed off, and lashing out both online and in person, committing

acts of violence in the real world and horrific, horrific harassment in online environments, whether that's in video games or social media

or hacking into people's phones and swatting people.

Charlie Kirk was a fucking monster, and we should not sugarcoat that.

Charlie Kirk is part of the reason that Americans, particularly the youngest Americans, who I, as an elder millennial,

used to look at Gen Z as like they're going to be the ones to save us.

They're growing up so much more educated and with greater access to the world than we ever had.

Charlie Kirk is the reason for so much of the regression that we have seen culturally here in the United States and in our politics.

With all of that said,

fascist movements, authoritarian movements love a fucking martyr, and Charlie Kirk is now a martyr.

Charlie Kirk's death will be used to justify political violence and state violence against American citizens.

We are living in the reality that Donald Trump, the man who Charlie Kirk bust hundreds of people from around the country to Washington, D.C.

to help invade the United States Capitol and commit an insurrection with the attempt to end our democracy.

Charlie Kirk paid for that.

He led that.

He did that.

Charlie Kirk led insurrectionists who beat cops relentlessly for hours on January 6th.

He paid for that.

He made that happen.

He is now their martyr.

Donald Trump pardoned all of those people.

We have people who committed acts of violence against cops, got pardoned, and now they have a martyr.

We are going to see an explosion of violence in this country.

I am not going to sugarcoat this, not here to make you feel better.

I'm going to tell you the reality.

We are on the precipice

of a massive step forward in Donald Trump's administration's authoritarian creep.

It is going from a creep to a leap.

We are seeing National Guard troops already deployed in Washington, D.C.

Trump has been salivating about deploying into Chicago.

Now he has the opportunity in

September.

The fall semester has begun.

There are going to be campus protests against the genocide in Gaza.

Donald Trump has everything that he needs to start enacting the state violence that guys like Stephen Miller wanted to see back in 2017.

I mean, I don't necessarily disagree with any of that.

I still don't think he deserved to die for it.

Like, that's sort of my take on it.

Like, I think, like, yes, that's all true.

But the thing I can't feel good about is like going, well, does the ending meet the necessary punishment that we we want to see?

Like, I would have much preferred us just beating his cause in the ballot box versus how the fuck this played out.

Because, like, that's, that's just, I just, yeah, I just can't.

It'd be a nice fairy tale to live in, but

Donald Trump and

Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk and all of these figures,

extremely wealthy and extremely powerful figures, have made peace impossible.

Now, I haven't said anything about a response.

I haven't said anything about the left.

I haven't said anything about Democrats.

I haven't said anything about retaliation from our side.

I'm just talking about what Trump is going to do.

And that is

because, like, he, with his own assassination attempt, it was,

I kind of think this will end up very similar to that, where it was like a week of fury and anger, and then everybody forgot it happened.

Like, I think like we think because we live in this news cycle world where every single news cycle just it just gets rinsed and repeated over and over and over again.

These things will persist longer than the average one, but I can't imagine that we're still talking about this in a couple of weeks, to be honest.

So, for context, and I've mentioned this before, but I worked in the gun violence prevention world for a couple of years,

including what was called the summer of hell, when I think it was nine or 10 black churchgoers in South Carolina were shot and killed in the church by a white supremacist who should not have had that gun.

It was the Pulse Nightclub with 52 people, I think, were shot and killed.

Allison Parker, who is the reporter, they got shot 10 years ago.

This was all 10 years ago.

I agree with everything that both of you are saying.

Charlie Kirk was not a good person.

No.

But

nobody deserves to be sitting in a tent and being shot from 200 yards away.

I have a real, I just, I'm never going to be okay with that

unless it's, you know, a criminal that has caused massive, you know, is a mass murder or gotten out of prison.

Like I understand, there's, there's

a law enforcement situation.

A law enforcement situation.

What I don't like is vigilanteism.

And I, I know too many gun violence survivors.

I know

Colin Goddard, who was, uh,

who was shot in Virginia Tech under his desk.

I know Lucy McBath a little bit, whose son, who was black, was killed because he played loud music in a convenience store parking lot.

I know Andy and Barbara Parker.

I met them seven days after their daughter was shot.

And I

have sat with these people, and it is just absolutely horrific.

So where I go with this, and I, again, I agree with all of this, you know, that the right is stirring this up and everything, but like,

how can we not address?

the gun violence epidemic in this country.

The evidence is overwhelming.

Utah, where this happens, is a concealed carry state, and they also do not have universal background checks, which means, and most people don't know this, and I don't know why the left doesn't talk about this more.

That means that you can go online, meet someone who doesn't have their real name, meet in a parking lot, exchange cash, and that gun is gone.

Why are we doing this?

Like, that should be like, Closing those loopholes just means that dangerous people can't have the guns.

It doesn't mean that the guy who goes shooting on the weekend or hunts deer is going to lose his gun unless he's got serious convictions.

Unless he shouldn't fucking have it.

Unless he shouldn't have it.

So we have two problems here, right?

So we have the right-wing

fascist sort of

group, and we have this gun violence epidemic that if we even took some simple steps, we would reduce gun violence.

Even the, for the most part,

the bill that Biden, the bipartisan bill that Biden passed has actually in this country dropped a little bit gun violence deaths a little bit yeah so imagine if we did a real thing what it could potentially do you know like those i mean those are fine right the close the book nothing to do who says the only country where this happens and we're done right

right it's the onions you know most probably most famous thing and there's nothing left to try you know so i i i am conflicted but what really concerns me and luke i want to hear from you next but like what what really does concern me is how fast the right weaponized this.

It caught me off guard.

Like, two fucking, it was literally 20 minutes later that libs of TikTok had, this is war.

Right.

And again, as of 8.53 Eastern Time, we do not know who did this.

Right.

So they were doing this when the body was still war.

And they were, you know, Jesse Waters on Fox News tonight said, we are going to avenge him.

Who is that?

What does that mean?

I don't know.

And what does avenge mean?

It means us.

Right.

Stephen Miller said we're going to get rid of the evil that did this, not catch the suspect, not apprehend the individual who did it.

The evil.

I think it's important for us to say that Charlie Kirk was assassinated in the midst of spreading a dangerous conspiracy theory about trans people.

Again, I'm not justifying his death.

I'm not saying that I wanted the guy to die.

Gun violence is bad.

He was in the midst of giving Republicans and his audience a justification to harass, intimidate, and kill trans people.

That is what Charlie Kirk is.

He was a cancer in the United States.

Not saying that he deserved to die.

His political views were entirely protected by the First Amendment.

But we all need to recognize that.

You know, Tim, you asked, why haven't we done anything?

Charlie Kirk.

That's why.

Charlie Kirk.

Let me make sure that I give this quote exactly.

So this is a quote from Charlie Quirk.

So Charlie said, 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.

That is a prudent deal.

It is rational.

Nobody talks about this.

They live in a complete alternate universe.

Charlie Kirk is living his fucking dream right now.

Well, he died for his dream, which is for everybody to just have fucking guns.

Utah is a constitutional carry state.

Yeah, and you can do it on a college campus.

Yeah,

if you're 21 years old, you can carry, you can concealed carry a weapon on your person in class on that college campus.

Why?

Because people like Charlie Kirk are out there saying that everyone should have a fucking gun.

There should be no limits.

No one should have any guarantee to safety, including himself.

And he died.

Well, but I thought guns made you safer.

I thought that was how this worked.

Where was the good guy with a gun?

I've actually waited for that.

There were tons of guns in those running, you know, those MAGA hat-wearing fucking kids at that Utah College campus watching.

They were probably fucking, you know, stacked with fucking

with handguns in their waistbands.

And they ran the fuck away because you can't use your handguns to a rifle bullet from 200 fucking meters away.

Well, I'll give you an example of how that language and that approach is working.

I saw somebody that I grew up with today, he has since deleted it, but said, what do you want to bet it was a trans person that shot Charlie Kirk?

Now, we know that 97.7%

of

mass shootings in this country are committed by biological men.

So Charlie and the right have convinced people that trans people, who are a very small minority, are creating, are causing most of the mass shootings, even though it is like for it's like less than 1%.

And

for context, that was the lie he was spreading.

The question he was asked was in regard to mass shootings, wherein the speaker said, How many mass shootings were perpetrated by trans people?

And Charlie said, too many.

Not a number, not a percentage, too many.

That is demonizing language.

That's all it is.

Yeah.

But I think the thing that really caught me today, and I probably should have been prepared for it, was just the rage and the anger that came from the right when this happened.

And that I got so many people coming at me saying, you guys did this.

And I'm like, crazy accusation to make with no evidence.

Who?

Like, first of all, we are the ones, the Democrats and the progressives, who want stronger gun laws.

So it's a little weird to blame us for a gun death when we want to limit those.

But also, like, all you've got to do is Google it.

Look at what the Democrats said tonight.

Look at all of them.

We even, we, we postponed the, the FAFO uh gerrymander event till next week because we thought it was in poor taste.

Governor Newsom made that call.

It was the right call.

And, you know, every Democrat that you see that is elected, and I'm not talking about somebody with 12 followers that you could amplify and say, look, this is the whole community.

Democrats across the board have been condemning this.

And it's the right-wing agitators who are calling for war.

Now, I don't remember them calling for war when the former Speaker of the House in Minnesota was gunned down on her doorstep.

She didn't get the flags raised or lowered to half mass like Trump's doing for Kirk.

Trump couldn't pick up the fucking phone.

Or I don't even think he said anything about it.

So let's talk about this part.

Like, how,

this is a really hard question, but like, how do we start to like

get through to some of these?

Because this is, as you said, Chris, this is going to get worse.

And this is really concerning language that I heard people saying to me today that have no idea what happened and have no context, but seem so convinced.

that the left is the perpetrator of violence when, again, all you have to do is Google political violence in the U.S.

to figure out it's almost exclusively on the right.

There are mass shooters who credited Charlie Kirk in their manifestos.

Yeah,

which he did not like to talk about, by the way.

There were numerous times people try to talk about that at his debates.

And for

the free speech absolutist, he would kick them out, which is curious.

But yeah,

it is not a left-wing thing.

I don't think the average person thinks that anyway.

Like, I think what you're hearing is largely very far-right people saying this shit.

Like, I think if you talk to the average person who voted for Trump or is a Republican, they'd be like, I don't think that all these left-wing people are like trying to kill us all.

Like, I don't think that's a commonly held belief.

I do think that a fraction of MAGA definitely thinks that, like, a large fraction.

But I think in the end, if you were to poll all of America, only maybe a very small bit would actually believe that that rhetoric is true.

I, I just, I, yeah, it was dangerous.

I mean, it's a dangerous amount of people.

That fraction is not 1%.

It's probably 15 to 20 is my guess.

So that's too big.

But I don't want it to come across like every Republican thinks this shit, because I guarantee that I had a number of my Republican friends reach out to me asking what I thought about this today, and all of them were not in that realm at all.

They were like, they had, there was no animosity towards the left with it.

It was just like, this is crazy, which it is.

Yeah,

I would

say that it's in the tens of millions of Americans who believe that.

Yeah.

So, I mean, 10% is 30 million.

Yep.

So, oh, that's

insignificant.

Charlie Kirk.

No, no, it's not.

He's creating those 10 million, tens of millions of people.

For sure.

I just think it's important that when we create this narrative, like I hear what you guys are saying, and it's not inaccurate.

I just want to contextualize it with the full scope of like when you zoom all the way out, this is a much smaller group than we're making it sound like it is.

It does exist and it's too big, but it is still like, and it's something we have to combat.

The biggest problem we have is not the size of the group.

It's that the president supports that kind of language.

And really, what's going to matter is what Trump says coming out of this and if he really goes hard down that lane or not, which I think he will.

He did.

Yeah.

There you go.

So there you go.

There's a, I haven't listened to because it's four minutes.

It just came out.

And we could do it live, I guess.

He said, it's, it's the person who sent it to me said he's blaming Democrats from the Oval Office behind the resolute desk.

Yeah, that's not surprising.

And even, you know, one of the guys that I talked to about this, I said, anybody who follows politics knows what's going to happen next.

Trump is going to blame Democrats for the shit and inflamed it.

That is for sure.

That is true.

So I think what people need to really think about, and I mentioned this earlier, but Donald Trump and Pete Hagseth and Janine Pirot,

these fucking reality TV shows and these B-list Fox News hosts, have created the conditions for a mass shooting and a shooting between uniformed individuals and civilians in DC.

They have deployed the guard, not just from D.C., so it's not just people who live and work in Washington, D.C., putting on a uniform and, you know, doing disaster relief or picking up fucking garbage in our nation's capital.

They are taking them from red states.

They are taking guardsmen from red states who they know are ingratiated in the Magus information fucking swamp.

They are putting them in our nation's capital.

They are making them carry fucking weapons.

And then

Janine Pirot, the district attorney for Washington, D.C., is saying that she will no longer prosecute citizens who are carrying long guns openly in the district.

These motherfuckers are trying.

They are doing

their damnedest to make sure that American troops are getting fucking shot.

So this is the con this Kirk assassination happened in the context of Pete Hegseth, Janine Pirro, and Donald Trump, these fucking TV rejects who Republicans elected, right?

Who Republicans wanted to put in a position of power.

They are putting the pieces together for shit to get so much fucking worse.

So much fucking worse.

And now that MAGA has a martyr,

this type of thing is just going to happen more often.

So what do we do?

What, like, what for people, I mean, people listening, right?

People are here.

I mean, look, like it's, it's bad.

But how do we, like, what do, what should people,

what should people do to protect themselves?

Do we have an answer to that?

Is that just the.

I wish we did.

I don't know.

Yeah.

I don't know if I have the answer to that.

I mean, so my video that no one's gotten a chance to see because I just fucking posted it and it's too fucking long.

It won't show up in your fiends

is people need to start getting locally organized.

Right.

Like I run a nonprofit called Veterans Fighting Fascism.

The big project of Veterans Fighting Fascism is getting people to start anti-fascist book clubs.

We are in the midst of an authoritarian takeover.

Like I, I, I feel like people who watch MSNBC and have have been watching Nicole Wallace, whose show I used to be on all the time, or Rachel Maddow talking about like fascism, authoritarianism, and bringing on all these historians.

They, I feel like they were warned too much and they became desensitized to it.

But if you go and you sit and you read the books and you sit down and you have the time to really absorb them, you see that

we are going through a predictable arc of history.

This has happened before.

History doesn't repeat, but it often echoes and often rhymes, right?

We know what's going to happen next.

This political assassination will be used to justify state violence against citizens.

There's going to be a tit for tat of assassinations in this fucking country.

I'm sorry if people don't believe this.

This is the reality we live in now.

This is what history says will happen.

We are going to see troops in the streets of more cities.

We are going to see ICE and other federal agents and local law enforcement getting more aggressive with American citizens.

So we can't sit around and hope that Congress is going to save us.

Republicans control the whole fucking federal government right now.

Our only choice is to get active locally, make sure that you know who you can trust in your own neighborhood.

Because when the fucking Gestapo shows up in your fucking town,

you need to organize.

You need to be ready.

You need to know where you're going to get your basic essentials.

This might sound fucking hysterical,

but put yourself back in the mindset that you had in October of 2024.

And

try to put yourself in the mind of the person that you were last October.

And imagine me saying, there are going to be troops, federalized troops from Republican states going into blue cities.

You would have thought I was fucking crazy.

Well, guess what?

I fucking wrote that down and I was training people on the future that was going to come.

And half the people, more than half the people that I put this fucking scenario in front of were like, no fucking way, this is unrealistic.

This This shit is predictable if you just read about history.

So I have a question on it because my perspective, I think you could be right.

But the reason why I hesitate on this is more so

two reasons.

And I'm curious what you think about these two reasons because I could be wrong.

It's just like I'm not as educated on the topic as you are.

One is when I look back at history, the critical difference between history and now is social media and the amount of access to information people have.

People didn't have, like you look back at the Holocaust, people didn't know what the fuck was going on.

They only knew what state media was telling them.

It's a night and day difference.

So like the way in which you can structure an authoritarian regime is very, it's much more difficult in this day and age to execute that.

And then the second piece of it is, as that ramps up and you start to see this like much more federalized troop presence in places they don't belong, I firmly believe that the overwhelming majority of Americans, regardless of your political persuasion, do not support that.

And I think they would go, you know what?

No fucking way.

And in turn, it would make Congress, people in Congress or Republicans go, all right, maybe not this, because this is not working for most people.

So that's where I go, like, if you could be right, and Trump could just trample over those people and go, fuck you, I don't care.

I'm just going to go all in.

But my guess is that they'll run into those roadblocks of reality and not be able to fully execute their vision, just like partially here and there, which is what I've seen so far from them.

I think if you.

If you have your history that you learned in high school, that's the version of history that you believe, because that's what you were taught.

And that's what the history books, you know, that teach you from the beginning of the Stone Age to modern theory in one book, like

teaches you.

If you talk to historians of the Holocaust, they will not tell you the Germans didn't know what was happening.

No, not the German.

I just mean in general.

Like, you know, the Holocaust from a, like, even if you look at concentration camps and the way that they were put together, like concentration camps weren't even a popular concept until much later in the whole thing, because even the people within the German government didn't believe they could execute that so like there was a lot you know it's a it's i agree it's very complex and it's not exactly like a cut and dry thing but the populace of germany a lot of them were like they knew what was going on but not the way that they would know what's going on today that's my point yeah i i mean there is there is no direct comparison there is no there was no internet there was no you know smartphones right uh there was no social media these things these things are all different the visceral version of violence is different but yeah I mean, we all saw the video, right?

Every one of us.

Unfortunately, I saw the video fucking 20 seconds after it happened.

But think about it.

It's the worst thing I've seen in a fucking year.

Think about the reality that you have seen happening in Gaza.

Gaza is a very important thing.

Yeah, that's true.

It's not the worst thing I've ever seen.

It's a really, really good point.

Conflict in history.

And more than half of this country.

has not been exposed to any of that, any of the violence.

And a chunk of the the half that has seen it is saying it's fake.

Right.

But the difference is that it's not happening in their front yard.

That's the thing.

Like, Americans will respond to what happens in America because they're very selfish people and they don't give a shit what happens in America.

Here's what I want.

Here's what I want.

I want a Democratic lawmaker to introduce a bill to Congress called the Charlie Kirk Gun Control Act.

Because

I made a video about this where

somebody said to me, Don't let him be the martyr for gun control.

And it is maybe the comment that has made me the angriest in the last fucking two months.

Yep.

Because my response was, I would thank Charlie Kirk day and night if he was the reason the kids stopped getting fucking shot at school.

So if a lawmaker passes it through and makes them fucking vote on it because it's Charlie Kirk that, you know, finally, you know, that's this happened to him, that'd be it for me.

I 100% agree.

I don't know why anybody would think otherwise.

I don't give a shit what they call the bill.

I could not believe somebody told me that.

Realistically, the only way that something like that passes is if Charlie Kirk's wife comes out and becomes a public figure, which she is currently not.

And Charlie Kirk's wife becomes, I'm going to go to Fox News and I'm going to camp out in front of Fox News until they make it's not happening.

That ain't happening.

No.

But to go back to Zach's question,

you are right.

Gaza is not happening on the front lawns of

every American.

Right.

But it's there if you look for it.

But

it is not far away.

It is not hard to access.

No, it's not hard to access.

It's just the visceral nature of it.

It's like if you see it every day in your life physically, it's different from seeing it.

I mean, if you see ice driving down the road, it's different.

Exactly.

Well, look, like

we were seeing this in Arkansas with the farmers that we talked about the other day.

Exactly.

That they are all of a sudden upset because Trump's policies are affecting them.

And I think this is, I think this is one of the big schisms in this country is between the people people who have empathy for others and the people who don't.

Yes.

And that is the problem.

Until it becomes their problem, we are always going to struggle to explain it.

I think a lot of people don't pay attention to politics.

I think, you know, Zach, your point about social actually works, I think, sometimes in the opposite, because then you get stuck in these echo chambers where you can be fed a whole lot.

And you believe that everybody feels the same thing that you do.

I mean, it happens to us.

These people that I grew up with are,

they're not lying.

They are convinced that the left is the perpetrator of the majority of the political violence in this country.

Because that's what they're told.

Because that's what they're told.

Right.

So they, I have had people blame me

today, blame me for Charlie Kirk getting shot.

That's fucking crazy.

Like, I mean, I worked at gun violence prevention.

I know people who have been, like, I've seen gun shot wounds.

It's literally the last thing.

Even those are the worst thing.

Like, if you survive, you never, it never never goes away.

No.

And, you know, I think the guy I mentioned from Virginia Tech, I think he's still got a bullet in him somewhere.

Like, you know, they just leave them in.

And those are constant reminders.

And

this is where I think Chris is right.

Like,

I don't think a national message is going to solve this problem.

I do think we've got to go back to door to door.

And people talking like that.

Right.

And I think we have a huge problem in this country, and especially since COVID, where we do not engage with each other in person as much as we used to.

There is no water cooler chat anymore.

If you work in an office, you work in an office two days a week, which means like you're probably chocked full of meetings all day long.

And then you go back home.

We aren't communicating, which is causing the sides to get further and further apart, the schism.

Right.

And, you know, I think.

I mean, we've talked amongst ourselves about like how we could potentially build some community.

And I think it's a thing that's on a lot of people's minds.

And I think that's a, I think that, that leads to extremism too.

If you're stuck in your mom's basement because you were told to quit college because college is useless, which is what Charlie Kirk says.

Oh, yeah.

And then you don't have a job.

And then you get angry.

And then you just get further into that ecosystem.

Like we have to come up with new ways to get people out of the house.

I can't even believe I'm saying this, but like out of the house and actually engaging with people.

I think that would lower the temperature in certain situations.

I'm not, it's not a full solution, but it's a real problem.

Well, there's so many of these people that have

watched his videos for years, and they listen to him talk about how, well, if it's not a trans person's fault and it's not an immigrant's fault, it's probably a woman's fault or a black person's fault.

And they fucking never talk.

I mean, a bunch of them have never talked to a woman, a bunch of never talked to a trans person, never talked to a fucking person of color or an immigrant.

But they're more than happy to fucking blame them.

And it's because they never left.

They never, I mean, it's no fucking secret that half these people live in tiny towns where there's probably no, no, none of these people anyway.

Right.

No minorities there.

For sure.

I think it breeds itself.

Something, Tim, that you said, and I think, could look what you just said proves this point.

Like both sides of this are siphoned in on one core emotion.

The left is empathy.

We are an empathetic group of people and we try to create a movement based on empathy.

And the right is anger.

And that is why we lose because anger is so much more visceral.

Empathy takes work.

It takes.

I got some anger.

Don't worry.

I know you do.

Everybody knows that shit.

But like, that is the true difference.

It's like, look, I mean, the proof is right here.

We're four guys talking about, like, you know, with some semblance of empathy about a guy that is antithetical to everything we believe because we want to get on here and like not shit all over this guy, but the opposite of like, let's try to create some good out of this bad situation.

That, even in and of itself, is empathy.

Do you think anybody on the right would do this shit if a Democratic anti-prove they wouldn't?

No, fucking Mike Lee made jokes about Melissa Hortman.

Yes, he did.

And actually, Tina Smith, the senator, one of the senators from Minnesota, actually went up to him in the hallways of the Senate.

And he was such a fucking coward about it because somebody got in his face and said, what you said was disgusting.

And then you could just see him cowering in the background.

And Charlie Kirk proved it himself because he made jokes about the guy that hit Paul Pelosi with a fucking hammer and said that anybody that a true American patriot would bail him out.

That's what he had to say about that.

Yep.

Yep.

I think it's, it's you know i i don't want anyone to to hear what zach is saying and think that i have empathy for charlie kirk no that's not what i'd be

i'm not gonna say charlie get that i think design like deserved to to have what happened to him right uh

i i think that again like like i said before charlie kirk made the bed that he's currently laying in this is the type of politics joe walsh who we had on our show

a few months ago, Joe Walsh considered Charlie Kirk like his son not very long ago, just a few years ago.

I heard him.

He tweeted that.

He messaged that today and it was something that I, it made my stomach drop.

I just heard him on CNN say that again, that he was like his son, but

Joe Walsh has changed and he recognized that the person that Joe Walsh used to be didn't want debate, didn't want to spread political ideas.

He wanted to get in people's faces and hurt them.

He wanted to agitate them, to hurt their fucking feelings.

And Charlie Kirk died that person.

That is who Charlie Kirk was when he was alive.

And that is who he should be remembered as.

He should be remembered not as a political thinker, as a political figure, as a movement builder.

He should be remembered as someone who is destructive to

American democracy, to decency and as someone who literally paid to try to end our democracy by taking mega fucking morons from all around this country putting them on buses and sending them to attack fucking cops and beat them with with american flags with blue fucking stripes on them charlie kirk was a piece of shit

And our country is worse off because of him.

And we will not recover because now he is fucking gone.

Him dying, not a good thing.

Him, like all, as much as I fucking hate him, him dying is not a good thing.

It is just

a point in a line in the history of America getting more unsafe and more extreme and more divided because characters like him until today never had to fucking pay a price for any of the harm that they caused to any vulnerable vulnerable communities.

There are trans people, there are black people, there are brown people who are dead today because Charlie Kirk evangelized hate for 10 fucking years.

And

I am not fucking sorry for Charlie Kirk.

I'm sorry for his family.

I'm sorry for anyone who

had no choice but to love him.

I'm sorry for his kid.

I'm sorry for his wife.

But that man

is part of the reason that we're in this mess today

where the president is fucking bulldozing through our constitutional rights, where our president is allowing our fucking NATO allies to have drones flying into their country, where our fucking allies in Ukraine have lost hundreds of thousands of fucking citizens.

Because Charlie Kirk wanted to be a fucking

famous fucking influencer.

because I don't know, someone probably bullied him in high school, and he just wanted to create a movement of angry young men who would one day maybe become mass shooters, who would maybe fucking go out and

abuse a fucking woman.

That man was a fucking cancer on the United States, and

it sucks

that we're here at night as we're recording this, spending our fucking time.

Not because Charlie was a great man, but because his toxicity was so fucking influential that we are paying the price that we have no choice but to spend our fucking time talking about the damage that is coming because of his fucking death.

It sucks.

This is a shit.

Everything about the situation

we all have to live through.

And this is why, and this is why, I mean,

this is going to sound sound really flippant, but like, this is why long-form content matters, because we can't have this conversation on social media, right?

And when you just have little clips and you're trying to own people, and trust me, I've used social since the dawn of social media.

That was what he was built on.

That was

built on, but like, Charlie Kirk owns Lib.

Right.

And that was it.

But this is why

we, and by we, I don't mean just the four of us, but I mean us on the left, have to get serious about combating this because we're not.

You know, there's a few of us out here here that are trying to build ecosystems to make it a welcoming place for men or anybody who maybe is like not liking what's happening on the right to be with us.

And it's like, you know, we've talked Crooked was one of the first and Midas does it and us, the siren thing just started and Valor, like there's a couple, but like we have to get serious about this.

This isn't just about building businesses.

This is about saving this country from falling down a rabbit hole that we cannot get out of.

Like we, yes, find out is a business, but we always talk about impact first, revenue second.

We are trying to build communities here because if people are feeling lonely or they're having mental health issues, they're going to go to the place that just tells them they're fine.

And right now, that is all on the right-wing side because they will blame other people for their problems.

They will never make you take accountability for anything.

And by the way, you will always be miserable because they cannot have you get out of that hole.

Because if you get out of that hole, like Joe Walsh did, you come to our side.

And so they're going to perpetually keep you in this horrible, horrible situation where you both hate people and you honestly hate yourself.

And that's why we have to create much more spaces on our side

with a variety of types of content to welcome people and get them out of that, because otherwise they're going to sit there and they're just going to get more and more vengeful and bad things are going to happen.

Like you mentioned, Chris.

And it's a really scary thing.

But we also have to get serious about addressing this because we haven't to this point.

And I, you know, I don't mean to sound flippant, but like, I, I am a product of

anger.

I am someone who I used to be a Republican.

I grew up, you know, very conservative.

Like, I was never religious, but my credit, my Catholic grandmother going to church multiple times a week was like the biggest and like Catholic guilt like made me who I was, made me angry at other people who had other ways of life that I didn't understand.

Right.

And I, I will always be that person

because that conservative Republican, whatever you want to call it, that that influence is fucking baked into who I am.

And it's part of why I feel compelled to study these people.

Like, I want to understand my own fucking anger.

And it's, and it's why I am so unforgiving

because

I see the damage that that my hate used to cause people for their

uh their

inherent uh attributes their their property who they were

that is what it is to be a Charlie Kirk MAGA Republican to hate people for what they were born as

I hate people for hurting people.

That is the only hate that I retain.

I don't hate, and hate is an emotion that I feel like too many Democrats, liberals, leftists, whatever, like want to purge from themselves.

Hate is a human emotion.

And I'm not saying everyone should have it to the extreme that I hold it or even Luke has it.

Luke's hate is far funnier than mine.

That is true.

That is 100% true.

Hate can be useful.

Right.

Like I have, I have used hate to find justice.

I have used hate to motivate the research that I do to hold people accountable for committing hate crimes.

And I think that more people,

I would love to influence more people.

If there's any impact that I have on the world, it's to take people who feel hopeless and depressed about how bad fucking things are

and turn that depression into fucking anger.

And turn that anger into motivation to work for a better fucking world.

And one day we'll be able to use that anger to be like, to get a Democratic Congress to pass comprehensive

reforms on the Second Amendment.

But today,

you know, you're going to have to use your hate and your anger to protect your community from the immediate threats.

And the immediate threats are fucking ice coming into your community.

The Supreme Court just said that it's okay to arrest people because they're brown.

That is the United States Supreme Court just saying, like, you can racially profile people and just fucking arrest them.

You did it without a fucking reason.

Because of their brown.

Why would they come up with a, you know, why would they have to say it?

Why they so you rather than get depressed and be like, oh, democracy is failing.

There's nothing we can do.

Recognize that democracy takes fucking work.

Right.

If, if you're, if you're someone who wants to idolize the founding fathers and you read the Constitution and all that shit, recognize that these motherfuckers were like bare knuckle brawling over ideas.

You need to step up.

You need to be willing to put some energy behind your beliefs.

And it doesn't have to be violence.

Shouldn't be violence, but it should be action.

It should be intensity.

It should be dedication.

And

don't let the sadness of this moment or the depression of this feeling of this ending doom paralyze you.

Instead, if you have to, if you're anything like me, transform that sadness, that depression, that despair into anger or even hate and use it to motivate positive action to make the world a better fucking place for the next generation.

So I have a slight twist on that.

So we make sure we get

all perspectives from here.

So the way I have always looked, I don't disagree with anything you just said.

I just, my framing and my approach to it is a little bit different.

Get angry.

Oh, I can get get angry.

Don't worry about that.

But what fuels me to continue to fight when it seems like there's no hope is the rage and the anger on the other side at

the racism and the bigotry.

That fuels me to stand up as a white man, as we all are, and say, no, no.

I am not going to do this.

And I'm going to go down.

If we're going to go down, I'm going to go down swinging.

I'm not going to go down with my door shut and my windows pulled down.

And I don't think that's for everybody.

And I don't suggest that that is for everybody.

But like, we need people who look like us right now to raise their fucking hands and say, Enough is enough.

I'm not with this.

We have been reliant on the left, on black women for far too long.

We should not be relying on them to carry us over the finish line or women in general.

And white men in particular have been behind.

We do horribly with them.

I think Kamala won 37, 38% of them.

42.

Oh, it's 42.

All right.

Well, that's still bad.

It's not good.

Still a blowout.

But here's the deal, folks.

And this is what gives me hope.

You take that 42 and you make it a 44, the election changes.

No, 100%.

We don't have to win the majority of them.

We just have to win more.

I mean, Donald Trump won

from the Electoral College a sizable amount.

But from the the actual votes, it's not that much.

We're not that far away, folks, from being able to turn this around.

What we have to do is basically get to next January, essentially.

And, you know, that is going to be really bumpy.

Chris has outlined all those things, but we can still win.

There are still more of us than them.

The problem that we have had is a lot of our voters have sat on the sidelines because we have had very milquetoast responses to the genocide.

Genocide, I'm saying, because people have accused us of not saying that.

We've only said it like every episode.

3 billion times.

But anyways, but like, we didn't have good answers to that.

We never held anybody accountable from the Wall Street crash in 2008.

Nobody went to jail.

People lost everything,

everything.

And I was part of an administration that said we were going to come in and fix it, and we didn't.

We did some good things.

I'm very proud of it.

We didn't do that.

And that fueled a whole bunch of other things that came up.

We have to start to be the party of accountability.

Yes.

Wait, wait, wait.

I thought that was the right.

I thought they were transparent and accountable.

I thought that was the whole thing.

Yeah.

I mean, everything they say, you could just turn it 180 on them, right?

But

there have to be consequences, like you said, Chris.

And like, I'm tired of Democrats just saying, like, we got to put it in the past.

We got to just move on.

Fuck that.

Like, these people have done damage to this country.

People

at this point, that's there.

There's two things that I will not accept the Democratic candidate not doing.

One, saying we're going to get these motherfuckers back for what they did.

And two, it's a genocide.

And to be clear, get these guys back.

I would tweak that language slightly and say hold them accountable.

I don't want

justice.

I don't want revenge.

I don't want revenge.

I want justice.

Here's where my thing completely, like, I agree with you.

It's the same thing.

My framing is different, right?

So like, I agree.

I want justice.

To me, justice is not in the courts.

To me, justice is policy that changes America for the better that they don't want.

That to me is just

voting, motherfucker.

Anything.

But I want the country to be restructured in a way that helps regular people.

And I think that that is where Democrat, like, I think you guys are well-intentioned, but I think that's a losing message for a lot of people who are not on our side because they're going to go, I could give a fuck about your revenge, dude.

Fucking do something for me.

And like, that is what we haven't done, just to Tim's point.

Like, we have not delivered.

We need to fucking deliver.

I'm fine with both, but we got to prioritize getting good shit done.

And I don't know what that is.

We tried that shit with Merrick Garland.

We'll do nothing.

How about that?

No, no, no, no, no.

No more of that shit.

That's not going to happen again.

But I think we're basically saying the same things, but I do think that there is a segment of the population who sat down when we didn't go after Wall Street and we don't call out this gen.

It is a genocide.

And we can say it's a genocide and also support Israel.

It's Benjamin Netanyahu.

It's not the Israeli people doing this.

It's a right-wing fanatical government.

Don't support the Israeli government.

They're not more right-wing than our government.

That's what we're going after.

But don't worry.

They have health care on our dime.

I mean, that is also true.

That's true.

That is also true.

But I do think that, like,

if we don't hold people accountable, there is a segment of the population that will say, you guys are both the same.

I don't give a shit what you're doing.

And I'm just going to tune it out.

I don't think that was untrue with the Biden.

administration that people looked at that after the fucking after four years of biden and went well he didn't do shit to fake or like go after what they did to us.

And also, by the way, he's really fucking old.

Right.

Well, yeah.

Yeah.

And he supports a genocide.

Like, that's a combo combo.

Like, I've got justice over here.

This, this arm, I'm saving.

Merrick Garland radicalized me.

Like, fucking Merrick Garland being like,

I'm just going to fucking rules and norms my weapons.

I mean, Merrick Garland goes back to fucking Mitch McConnell.

That fucking thing

is.

That's the fucking reason for everything we're experiencing.

Well, but no, now he's talking about how it's a real bad thing.

Everything is bad.

Fuck off.

Well,

the thing with Merrick Garland is that, like, I, I'm not going to defend it because I think it was a horrible decision.

And Biden was trying to make a right of Merrick Garland getting screwed.

Instead of thinking about the American public and picking somebody like a Doug Jones, the former senator from Alabama, who actually prosecuted the KKK, I want that guy in there.

And

Biden was playing the respectable man's game.

He said, okay, I won fair and square.

I'm going to come in.

I'm not going to attack anybody because that's not the game we're playing.

And it was turning the page.

I could turn the page.

They didn't think Trump would ever win again.

That's what that was.

That was the bottom line.

Like, they literally walked in there and went, Trump will never be president again.

It's not possible.

So it doesn't matter.

Let's return to something else.

And they were wrong.

No, that's my biggest fear for a Democratic candidate.

Fucking consequences.

Yeah, that's my biggest fear that they're going to run on a return to status quo.

No, that's a terrible idea.

I don't know.

No, that's all.

I think anybody who does that, I mean, even look, like, and I like Pete Buttigieg, but like, he's gotten, he's gotten, I'm trying to use the right words in the day like today, but he's gotten highly criticized for taking some very milquetoast positions on some things recently.

On Israel and trans folks, yeah.

It was Israel and trans folks.

And then you see Gavin Newsom, who was no darling, is no darling of the left, right?

Everybody, like when he basically was like, all right, I'm going to, I'm going to put this Jerry Manner to the point.

I'm going to put the fucking brass knuckles on.

And everybody went, okay, we like that.

He is all of a sudden the number.

He's in all the polls, which I I think the polls this earlier are stupid, but like he's leading.

So I don't ever want to hear another poll after Iowa.

I don't ever want to listen to another poll.

Remember, we were supposed to win Iowa by like 15 points.

I'm sorry, Anseltzer.

You are a very good pollster, but that was a bad one.

I don't ever want to hear it again.

But, you know, I do think there has to be a balance, but I also think that the next Democrat has to

come with a vision.

of a reformed government.

Yes.

Because you're right, Luke.

You're right.

And everybody here agrees.

There can't be status quo.

We can't be status quo.

You have to show us what you're going to do in the future, digitalizing government, making it easier to bring MBAs in to solve business problems, you know, which was very difficult to do in the government now.

You know,

frankly, like not just allowing people.

I mean, I'm going to say this about government.

A lot of people, when I was there, sitting on their ass, not doing a lot.

and making a lot of money.

We got to solve that problem too.

And I'm pro-worker and everything, but like some of the shit I saw like is just not okay.

And there were no way, there was no way to make there be any consequences or hold people accountable.

So we have a whole host of things that need to be solved.

And I think someone has to come forth with that vision.

And I think if they do it and they, and they have like a, there is an accountability angle too, because like, you know, Tom Homan and DHS and Justice are breaking the law every fucking day.

And so like, I, we cannot just let that go by because otherwise, why have the rule of law?

Like, what, you're going to, we're going to have it every four, every other four years?

Like we, we have to, we have to go after people when they break the law.

And I don't give a shit if 30% of MAGAs lose their mind over it.

They should.

These are called the consequences of your.

If they want to get mad that they did something illegal and they're getting in trouble for doing something illegal, sounds like you're not so much the party of law and order anymore.

Right.

You know, it kind of sounds like we should name our podcast, Find Out.

I forgot something here.

Release the fucking Epstein files because.

If that shit gets forgotten in the wake of this, I will lose my fucking

won't.

There's no fucking way luckily i you're right luke and i you know and i'm i'm sure he's gonna go trump's gonna go all in on this again he's blaming democrats yeah that's that's his move right is that right

distraction distract distract but we have to keep we have to keep the pressure on there so um that won't and you know and luke you made a very good point and like chris had this great great comment about how we were going to call we should call this the find out podcast but like

I guess this was not a time to make any funny jokes anyway.

So I guess it's a hard, it's a terrible

it's a terrible day.

Like, there's gallows humor and there's whatever I'm like cursed with.

You know, I had like the brief thought today that I was like, is this just like a fucking nightmare?

Like, because if you had told me yesterday, last night that I was going to fuck 24 hours from now, Charlie Kirk, this guy who I, by my own admission, hated, but would never, I did, I'd want to, I didn't want him dead.

Whether you liked his shit or not, which I fucking hope you did not, because I will think less of you as a person if you did

nothing he said was illegal nothing he said was punishable by punishable by death you can't like and and it and it's really tough when it's people that are that have condemned gun violence in the past you can't you can't pick and choose i know this this joke has been overused but i i just want to live in precedented times oh yep we've had enough enough like enough um

well guys i think that is probably enough for us speaking of enough this is enough for us is that a good transition That's a very good transition.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm getting better.

So, could we

just want to say one last thing?

I we can't end it that soon.

Um, we're already like a half hour longer than what I think we planned for.

So,

Tim is a member of Chorus, which we did an episode about this a week ago.

Uh, it's a progressive organization that is helping creators learn to do what we're doing.

Three out of the four of us have set up LLCs on our own without knowing how to fucking do it.

We have

been making it up as we go along, you know, TikTok videos, trying to break into YouTube, trying to get monetized, all this shit, like to try to get progressive pro-democracy voices out there.

This group chorus, which I applied to, but am not a part of, and hope I will become a part of, has uh dozens of creators who watch this assassination and though they are on the opposite side of the political spectrum of charlie kirk a lot of them i've heard from them tonight are scared out of their fucking minds yeah yep i think that that

like our our audience is obviously sympathetic our audience is as as rich would say if he were here the best audience they are the smartest audience and they know everything so everyone is not telling them anything

Not telling them.

Yes, everyone is saying that.

Our audience is the best and they're smart.

But it goes,

it is something that we should still say.

Like people need to recognize that

creators, influencers, Charlie Kirk was an influencer.

We are living in a world where we're putting our fucking lives at risk right now.

Speaking, as soon as Charlie Kirk got shot, a member of my family texted me to say, hey, keep your head down.

right?

Like, my family is scared of me getting killed.

Not even for the fucking Nazi hunting shit.

Like, for me doing this fucking podcast.

Right?

Like,

that's the world we're living in.

So, if you want to support us,

oh, that was.

Oh,

I would love

for you to do that.

And you can do that by going to findoutpodcast.substack.com.

And if you want to buy our merch and share our message, Tim is wearing the most popular shirt that we have put on our website.

There have been almost 100 of

faces sold.

They are very popular.

I know that was a hard fucking pivot, right?

But I'm serious.

That was a hard pivot.

If you want us to continue doing this, like you should recognize we're not doing this in a vacuum.

we're not just people you know spilling uh nonsense into a microphone i mean we are that too but

that's me for real is this is dangerous it it is not it is not you know my space

uh you know from 20 years ago like this stuff does have consequences so none of us are getting rich doing this

but if you support us we'd love for you to to join our sub stack, to maybe buy a shirt so that you can walk into a bar because you do real person things and introduce the Find Out podcast to other people in your life.

Yeah, that was a hard pivot, Chris.

We should have you host the next one.

You had no idea what our fucking ball joints are probably broken up.

Oh, I had no idea.

I will say,

I do want to echo, and I won't say too much about what was said

in a private group, but like, you know, I offered my assistance because I have been in this and I, several of people took me up on it, mostly just to, you know, say thank you.

But like some people were like, how do I say this or how do I say that?

Like, and because they were trying to

add something to the conversation without inflaming or saying something wrong.

And I think that is an important distinction between what the groups on the left are trying to do and the groups on the right.

Because the right just went out.

and like put a Hurowitzer out there and just

right.

And

what I saw today was a very empathetic crew, you know, as Zach is pointing out, the empathy part, really, really and scared and worried about what to do.

And I think that's, that's a really important thing to call out and

why it is important for groups like that to exist so that we can, you know,

help each other, not to coordinate messaging, but just to help each other.

And I said the LLC stuff, which I learned I registered in the wrong state.

I spent way too much money.

Maybe I should have gone to a course three years ago.

But, you know,

I think it's important to know that.

So thank you, Chris, for bringing that up.

And I think now that we have passed the one hour mark, where we have officially gone twice as long as we said we would, and

I have to go to bed.

He's old.

Don't forget.

He's old.

I'm old.

I'm old and I've got a kid.

So like, you know,

but I want to thank everybody for listening.

This was not a planned episode.

i hope that this provided some value i would say comfort but i'm not sure that comfort's the right word but um but we are always

tried to make a joke you did

you did you did if if people didn't run screaming after the first 15 minutes uh you know they'll they'll have caught the joke and we'll make sure we get the joke out there too but look like we're in this we clearly did this episode because we wanted to make sure that you knew that we weren't going anywhere.

We've got your backs.

And look, we have a lot of work to do.

You're not alone.

You can feel very alone and you're not alone.

You're not alone.

We are going to think of some ways in which we can build community better.

We welcome your thoughts, whether on our sub stack or hello at findoutpodcast.com.

You can email us ideas too.

But

most importantly, folks, be safe out there.

We care about you greatly.

We want to help, you know, and we're going to stick through this.

We will get through it.

We will get through it.

There are brighter days down the road a little bit.

Hang in there, stick with us, and we'll get there.

So, with that, have a wonderful, well, wonderful day because you're listening to this.

Have a night Thursday morning.

It's morning.

It's morning.

I'm going to pretend it's like 12 hours from now.

That's true.

So, have a wonderful evening, wonderful day, folks.

Have your loved ones.

Day you deserve.

Yeah, I like that.

Which, if you're listening to us, is a wonderful day.

It is.

So, thank you, everybody.

We'll be back next week.