#0040 - JD Vance Hosting Charlie Kirk's Podcast

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On this episode, we cover the Charlie Kirk podcast from September 15th, 2025, with guest host, the Vice President of the United States, J.D.

Vance.

The No Rogan experience.

Start now.

Welcome back to the podcast.

This is a show where two podcasters with 117 hours of Joe Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan and from time to time, the figures and arguments that exist in Joe's wider world.

I'm Michael Marshall.

I'm joined by Cecil Cicarello.

And today, we're going to be taking a step away from Joe Rogan and the Joe Rogan experience, which is why, if you notice to start there, we're still stuck at 117 hours of Rogan experience.

That number hasn't gone up because we're actually going to talk about someone who was who is in Joe's orbit, which is Vice President J.D.

Vance, who was appearing on the show of somebody that we were both surprised to note had never been on Joe Rogan's show.

Charlie Kirk never appeared on Rogan.

So

we are going to cover J.D.

Vance's address from the White House, which formed the September 15th episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

Cecil, why are we doing this?

So as many people know, Charlie Kirk, a right-wing conservative pundit with the largest, one of the largest conservative podcasts around, he was murdered in September.

The Monday after the shooting, the vice president of the United States of America decided to take over his show for a day as the guest host.

Now, this is something of a cultural moment in the United States.

Sure, some people in politics have been on podcasts and some people in politics post podcasts, but to have the sitting vice president take over your podcast for a day really is something special.

And as soon as the show was released, there were dozens of clips making arounds.

And we figured, just like how we decided to cover Joe Rogan, that people have watched some of these clips, but not the whole show.

And we figured we were qualified to look at this show, listen to it, break down what was said.

And so while this isn't a Joe Rogan show, it's in his orbit and it's something that's really popular.

So we veered off just on this very episode to take it on.

Now, we also started this whole endeavor because we thought that Joe had a real cultural impact on the latest election.

And by listening to this show, we discovered that he wasn't the only big podcast that helped conservatives win.

Joe went to Donald Trump's inauguration, but Charlie Kirk spoke at it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So who did J.D.

Vance talk to on this show?

So talk to the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Taylor Budovich, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Communications Director, Kaylin Dorr, the Charlie Kirk show executive producer, Andrew Colvett, Colvett, White House press secretary Caroline Levitt, rival podcaster Tucker Carlson, Director of Health and Human Services, Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., and the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

Okay, so quite a mix of people there.

What was the conversation about?

Well, they talked about Charlie Kirk.

They remember him, and then they talk about what he did for Trump and his presidency, and how ideas on the radical left helped kill Charlie and how his legacy will continue after his death.

Okay, okay, so we're going to actually talk about those

radical left violence as the main segment, as our main event.

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Time.

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That was Quinn announcing our main event.

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So for the main event, we're going to be covering their discussion of left-wing violence and how that contributed to Charlie Kirk's murder.

Marsh, do we want to take a second here and make sure people recognize that we are biased moving into this?

Yeah, I think that's worth doing.

So I think where our bias

would be, we're both from the left.

I think we would also both agree that shooting Charlie Kirk is a terrible thing to do.

That's a terrible thing to do for somebody who had a family.

It's a terrible thing to do on a national stage.

It's not good good for the rhetoric and the

political tensions in America.

It's also politically, strategically, a very bad idea.

It's just, it seems to me bad on every single level, but most of all on a human level.

So, we're not here to support that.

We're not here to cheer on.

We're not one of the people that JD Vance will talk about who is gleeful at the idea of Charlie Kirk having been murdered.

But we are coming from the left on this.

So, when we see

what we see in this conversation, an awful lot of

talk around around how the problem in America right now is radical left-wing violence.

We're going to look at that.

We're probably not going to come to the conclusion that JD Vance has, but we're also going to try and base our conclusion as much as possible on the evidence.

But we're going to have a bias in that because we don't think it's true.

But

bear that in mind as you listen, everyone.

Yeah, I think that's really important to point out early on.

We are going to be biased on this.

There's no way to cut that out of us.

We're both, I think, politically minded and we understand politics in both of our countries and in each other's countries.

And so we are going to come at this from that particular standpoint.

So it's something to think about.

Hopefully we'll try to be as, I think, as fair as possible, as fair as we can be.

So we're going to start.

This show is about eight minutes in.

He starts right away talking about Charlie's movement and left-wing assassins.

But that's not the only way that I'm going to honor Charlie.

And there's going to be a lot of discussion over the next two hours of this radio program about what exactly that looks like.

It's important, and Erica asked me this, to make sure that his movement, the movement that Charlie started, has to keep going.

We have to build upon it.

We have to add to it.

We have to make sure that the next generation of young people feels confident and courageous to speak their mind and to speak the truth.

We're going to talk about that.

We're going to talk about why do we do this?

Of course, we do this so that we can enact good public policy and take back our country.

We're going to talk with senior officials in the administration about what we're trying to do to honor Charlie's legacy in that way.

Of course, we have to make sure that the killer is brought to justice.

And importantly, we have to talk about this incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the last few years.

And I believe is part of the reason why Charlie was killed by an assassin's bullet.

We're going to talk about how to dismantle that and how to bring real unity, real unity that can only come when we tell the truth and everybody knows that they can speak their mind about the issues of the day without being cut down by a murderer's gun

um but yes so this was released on september 15th that's five days after charlie kirk was shot um At this point, the vice president of the country was already confident enough to be broadcasting from the White House that this was a left-wing shooting and even to be talking about taking back our country, which obviously raises the question, back from whom?

Who exactly has your country in a way that needs to be taken back by the vice president and the president and the movement that it seems to me very much is in control of America right now, which is that MAGA movement.

He talks about the need for the killer to be brought to justice, and that's something I think we both agree with.

Anybody who's going to carry out a political assassination in that kind of way ought to be brought to justice, but it should also be done as accurately as possible as to what their motives are.

And it's worth saying that it was plausible at this point that the shooter could have been heavily committed left-wing.

Obviously, a lot of people wanted that to be the case.

In the wake of

the assassination, a lot of people jumped on every single detail that they could in order to distance the shooter from their movement and to identify him as someone from a movement they disliked.

And that was happening right across the political spectrum.

The right was saying that the bullets were inscribed with messages covered in trans ideology, and therefore this was evidence that this was a trans shooter or a shooter who was a trans ally.

The left was saying that the shooter was a groiper, a supporter of Nick Fuentes, because of some of the memes that they shared and photos of them dressed as a Pepe the Frog meme in their social media.

In truth, both sides, all sides of political spectrum here, were rushing to pin this particular shooting on the groups that they disliked with very little evidence on which to support that, very much as a way of using this event to

smirch or besmirch or delegitimize their political opponents.

However, to both sides this, to straight both sides this would slightly miss the point.

Because while the right and the left people right across our spectrum were trying to tie the shooter to their political opponents, the voices that were attributing the killing to left-wing violence and to trans ideology were the president and the vice president and the head of the FBI.

Now, some of the most powerful people in the country who were right-wing figures were the ones trying to pin this to a left-wing movement.

I had a good look around.

I really tried to find some.

I couldn't find any evidence that equivalent people from the left-hand side of the spectrum of leadership positions were engaged in that kind of speculation about the shooter's motive.

So I couldn't find anything from Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Corey Booker.

I couldn't find anything from those people who might be considered in left leadership positions.

If they did say it, I couldn't find it.

I really tried.

So it's completely true that social media users on the left and on the right jumped on any sign that they could that this shooter wasn't one of theirs.

But the only irresponsible speculation that I could find from those in positions of leadership and responsibility were coming from the right at a point at which the exact motivations of the shooter weren't identified.

And even as we broadcast this, as we record this, they're still not completely understood.

Yeah, exactly.

They're still not completely understood.

They seem to be sort of all across the spectrum.

There's there's uh indications that he's that he had uh some things in his past that may may make people think he leaned right things in his past that may make people think he leaned left the thing is is this is an individual and he's a person who did this and and they are all they are their own person they don't necessarily represent a movement they represent the thing that they very specifically did the the i i want to touch on what you suggest here earlier where you said that all the people on the the high end power had on the right right had said this was left-leaning.

They had said this before they even caught anyone.

So before they even had anyone in custody, before any of that, they were saying this is left-wing violence.

The day it happened, Nancy Mace, who is a ranking Republican, came out of the House of Congress and said the Democrats own this.

She said this before any, I mean, this is, this is maybe an hour after he was murdered.

She said the Democrats own this.

So they were looking to pin this on the Democrats.

And pay attention to that language, too, that you said, where they said they're trying to take back the country.

They are doing this very specifically because they want to take the underdog position.

They want to say,

we are oppressed.

We are the underdog.

We are being attacked.

And it's something that they do very well.

And it's something that they spin very well.

And it's something that their side very much understands and agrees with.

So they are trying to spin this up as quickly as they can to try to take that underdog position, even though like you like you said they own all the branches of government they are the ones in power yeah i think that's fair although i will say that um if you're going to take an underdog position the moment that one of your leading figures gets executed in broad daylight isn't a bad time to consider yourself an underdog i mean certainly in the events that happened on september 10th they were the underdog in that situation they were the wrong party presuming of course presuming of course that it was done because of sort of sectarian violence because there was a political motive behind it.

But that's not necessarily what we've been able to find.

And I think they are trying to blame it on left-wing extremism.

They're trying to say

it's left-wing extremism that did this.

And there really isn't anything that points to that.

And I think that it's important.

And I said this on another show I do.

I think it's important to point out that it isn't left-wing ideology to murder someone.

So I and I also feel like the people who were trying to find that in the in the news and trying to find that it wasn't a left-wing person who did it,

that's useless effort.

You don't need to do that because you are not responsible for what happened to him.

The person who did it is responsible for what happened to him.

The people who are marginalized and who were attacked by Charlie Kirk, those people aren't responsible for the things that happened to Charlie Kirk.

I think this is an attempt to implicate trans people and trans allies with this murder.

And I I think that that was something that they tried to do very early on.

And especially leaking those bullets,

the things on the bullets to the Wall Street Journal and having them post that the first day.

I think it was a very clear attempt on their part to try to implicate trans people and trans allies with this murder.

So yeah, I do agree there.

Although I think you're saying in the middle there that killing someone and going off and killing someone for their ideas isn't a left-wing thing to do.

And maybe that.

So

I'll push back very slightly on that, I think.

So I think it is conceivable that someone could take extreme issue with Kirk's anti-trans messaging, for example, and be motivated to violence.

That isn't unimaginable.

The fact that they did it wouldn't castigate the entirety of

the left wing.

It'd be just as easy for everybody on the left to criticize and condemn that person for that action.

But it wouldn't stop them being left-wing for having done that.

And we just need to be sure that we don't run the risk of a no-true Scotsman fallacy of like, well, how do we know they can't have been left-wing because they killed that person?

It gets you to a position where nobody on the left can commit any violence, which obviously isn't something we think is true um of course that's not relevant here unless we find out that the shooter was politically ideologically motivated um and done so by a leftist ideology and that isn't what we're seeing anything of so far but let's say let's say that we do let's say that they uncover evidence a manifesto where they said i'm killing him because i strongly believe in left-wing politics i believe in trans rights and high taxation and a high and a large social safety net or whatever kind of left-wing politics that might put in a manifesto.

Let's say that's true.

Even if Vans and Trump and Cash Patel were right about this, by coincidence, and that this was a murder inspired by political ideology, would that be then evidence of what was, quote, an increasingly destructive movement of left-wing extremism?

That is what the vice president of your country is saying in this address from the White House.

Well, we can actually look at the evidence of this.

You know,

what is the

usual political bias of extremist and violent extremism in America?

There's lots of studies on this.

I'm going to cite a a few of them.

So here's a report on terrorism and political violence by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In 2025 so far, there have been five left-wing attacks compared to one right-wing attack.

So there's that growing threat that Vance appears to be talking about.

Five times as much left-wing terrorism in the first half of this year than there was right-wing terrorism.

However, and I'm going to quote from the report here, from 2011 through 2024, an average of 20 right-wing terror incidents took place each year compared to an average of nearly three left-wing incidents annually during the same period so right-wing uh right-wing attacks are seven times more likely than left-wing attacks and in fact if you look at the graph that will uh we'll throw the graph up on uh youtube the graph from that document from that report even shows that if you track year-on-year violence from the right compared to violence from the left the only year at which left-wing violence exceeds right-wing violence is 2025.

And that's because there has been a minority of right-wing violence in this year.

So it's not that there's a rise in left-wing violence.

It's that in the first half of 2025, we saw a statistically significant drop in right-wing violence.

Is it because maybe they're getting their way currently?

Well, this is this is maybe it.

This is exactly what I'm what I'm thinking.

I mean, that is obviously not to condone violence.

No.

But yeah, what we see is left-wing violence has been relatively static, give or take, since about 2015.

Right-wing violence rose significantly from 2005 through to 2015, stayed static for a while and then has started to drop just in the last couple of last year or so.

I've got another report here.

This report from this is a comparison of political violence by left-wing and right-wing and Islamist extremists in the United States.

This concludes, we find that radical acts perpetrated by individuals associated with left-wing causes are less likely to be violent.

In the United States, there is no difference between the level of violence perpetrated by right-wing and Islamist extremists.

And the statistics from that

particular report show that homicide incidents in America in the time they were studying, there were 42 from the left, there were 227 from the far right.

In terms of fatalities, that's multiple fatalities each incident, 78 from the far left, 523 from the far right.

I'll put these graphs, I'll put those tables up

into the show.

There's another link that will make exactly the same point.

So every bit of evidence that we have makes it pretty clear that is there a sign of a rising tide of left-wing extremism only if you start your clock January 1st, 2025.

If you take any other longer-term view, what you'll see is an

extreme significance of right-wing violence.

So finally, sometime between 24 hours and 40 hours after Charlie Kirk's assassination, the U.S.

government removed a report called What the National Institute of Justice Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism from the Department of Justice website.

And that report included the summary, quote, since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives.

In this period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.

So that table that I was talking about previously.

So it is worth wondering why the government chose to honor the life of their free speech fighter.

And that's something we're going to hear an awful lot about, that Charlie Kirk was committed to free speech by deleting inconvenient data from their website within 24 to 48 hours of his death.

Finally, I just want to mention that they have been pointing out that, and they will continue throughout this whole episode point out that the ideology is the motive, that the motive behind this is the ideology.

They will try to continually say this throughout the entire episode.

And what I want to point out is that they won't mention ideology when it's inconvenient for them.

For instance, this last week, there was a Mormon church that was shot up in Michigan.

The person who did it had roots in the MAGA movement.

They had certain, they were filmed.

They had a photo of them in a Trump 2020 shirt.

They had a Trump fan sign on their house from June of this last year.

So there are indicators that show that they are possibly Trump supporters, but that never comes up because in this case, the ideology doesn't fit so they don't want to say our this political ideology did it instead they'll point something else out in this particular case so you see when they're using this to shoehorn ideology in to see if they could maybe demonize that ideology to go after people who share that ideology yeah i think that's fair i also think it's worth all of us reflecting on when we see arguments we agree with or sides we agree with that are doing the same thing.

We should call out when our side are doing the same thing and ignoring sort of signs of ideology.

And then that means when when it comes to the sides we disagree with, we can call that out incredibly strongly without any sort of fear of hypocrisy or

double standard.

Yeah.

So this next bit, they're introducing Stephen Miller to the show.

Joining me now is Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, dear friend of mine and dear friend of Charlie Kirk's.

And before I get into the nitty-gritty of what I want to talk with Stephen about, you know, there's a lot of questions about the investigation, where we are in the investigation.

I want to be respectful to the FBI's process, but just know that we are on top of this, and the entire administration is trying to do as much as possible to find everything that we can about what led to this, about how we got here, and of course, ultimately, how an assassin took Charlie's life.

I wanted to zoom out with Stephen a little bit and talk about all of the ways that we're trying to figure out how to prevent this festering violence that you see on the far left from becoming even more and more mainstream.

And before I do that, Stephen, I want to do this with every guest because you're a friend of Charlie's.

And one of the things I'm hoping that people get out of this is an understanding for the kind of guy that Charlie was, who he was.

And so before I talk to you about what we're doing to try to prevent something like this from happening again, maybe you could just talk about why you love Charlie, what memories you have of him, something that would give our audience a sense of what he was behind the microphone.

What a strange juxtaposition.

Before you talk about the festering, disgusting things that are happening on the left, why don't you just tell me how great Charlie was, really quick?

Yeah, I think that juxtaposition is like really jarring.

Like, this is a eulogy for their dead friend, someone that they say they cared about, they loved an awful lot.

I don't doubt those things are true.

And having a eulogy

to him in a tragic circumstance is entirely understandable.

But I would argue that talking about festering violence from your political opponents more generally is neither a good way to honor a friend nor a responsible way to diffuse the violent rhetoric that is going around.

So we can't be talking about how the tensions are high and the temperatures are high and that we need to do something about that while also castigating everyone you disagree with as, you know, festeringly violent.

Yeah.

I, very early after Charlie's death, I don't know exactly how quickly it happened.

I didn't double check to see when he announced it, but he had announced, fans had announced that he was going to be on this show relatively quickly after Charlie died.

And it felt like to me as an outsider watching this, that they knew they had a very motivated audience in Charlie Kirk's audience, and they would be listening to this show.

And he did not want to waste that motivation making nice.

He didn't want to come on and just do a Charlie Kirk thing and just talk about Charlie Kirk.

He wanted to make sure that he had a call to action in this piece throughout the whole thing.

All right.

So now we're going to talk about,

he moves on a little bit.

And this is now still Stephen Miller, but they're talking about crazies on the left.

I want to be mindful of time here.

A lot of people are very worried about how we got here in the first place.

And you have the crazies on the far left who are saying, oh, Stephen Miller and J.D.

Vance, they're going to go after constitutionally protected speech.

We're going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.

That's not okay.

Violence is not okay in our system, and we want to make it less likely that that happens.

Walk me through at a high level, like what you and I have been working on, what the whole administration has been working on to try to make sure that we don't reward and promote this craziness?

Yes, so it's an excellent question.

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 is 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 what emotions I'm feeling right now, 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.

Charlotte showed that.

Amen.

So, first of all, nobody is pro-violence.

I don't think it's true that there are NGOs, left-wing or otherwise, that are actively promoting promoting violence right now.

Those aren't organizations that are out there, and the kind of organizations they're going to target aren't the ones who are

promoting violence.

They're going to be targeting things that are just promoting speech and ideas that they disagree with.

So, I think that's kind of part of it.

I'd also point out that when he says that focused anger and righteous anger is one of the most important agents of change in human history, that doesn't necessarily mean positive change.

Anger can absolutely change things, not always for the better.

And I think that's kind of mine, that's something to bear in mind here.

It seems awfully ironic that the last words that Charlie Kirk sent or said to Stephen Miller were about stopping left-wing activists being violent, especially when we hadn't seen a great deal of that.

You know, we've already shown there was no substantive evidence that left-wing violence was a real threatening issue in America at the time.

So those last words are either deeply ironic, or

maybe Stephen Miller isn't being quite honest about what the last words that his good good friend shared with him were because they're awfully convenient.

It could be either way.

Maybe it's just complete coincidence, an unfortunate coincidence, a deep irony.

Or maybe those weren't his last words, but they're rhetorically useful when you're then talking about anger and righteous anger.

They're doing their absolute best here to paint the image of a they.

There's a they out there, almost like a deep state, an NGO, this NGO that is fomenting violence.

It's out here creating violence.

It's spreading left, dangerous left-wing ideology that is going to also create more violence.

Well, an NGO is an organization.

So what's the name of that organization?

Or what are the names of those organizations?

They don't, you know, what do they, what do they promote?

What part of the organization engages in violence?

And isn't violence already against the law?

Isn't violence already something that we already say no to and we already say, if you are promoting violence, we don't agree with it.

That happens all across the political spectrum.

So they're saying, we want to go after this left-wing violence.

And they very carefully couch it in the beginning with, we're not trying to stifle free speech.

We're just going after these NGOs.

But I think what they're trying to do is say, we're going to try to shoehorn as much as we can to try to stifle speech we don't like.

We're going to try to shoehorn as much as we can into that place.

And they're keeping it vague too here.

That allows them to attack a much wider swath of the left wing.

If they keep it vague and they don't mention any specifics, they get, they have their pick of targets.

Now they're channeling their anger still into left, attacking left-wing groups.

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 what that means.

So 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.

Thank you, Stephen.

So now these are terrorist networks of people?

Who are these terrorists?

Who are these terrorist networks?

They're just saying it, and then they're not following it up with anything at all that is specific.

Yeah, I mean, it's gone from like left-wing extremism into NGOs promoting violence, and now they've become terrorist networks just in the span of these few minutes of conversation.

This is kind of the ramping up of the rhetoric.

This is something we'll actually see JD Vance do, I think, at a later point in this conversation.

But this is just, as you say, a way of creating a permission structure for going after their political opponents in ways that they think they can use this tragedy and use kind of response to this tragedy to do.

I mean, if there really, truly were organized campaigns of left-wing terroristic violence.

Looking at the evidence alone, those haven't been successful, just numerically, just statistically looking at the numbers, because we just haven't seen substantive numbers of that.

This was actually recorded before the

shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas.

So we're not going to talk about that too much because

it wasn't live when this conversation was happening.

But I'm not in America right now.

So maybe I'm only seeing a very skewed view of what's happening in America.

But the violence, the political violence that makes the news primarily over here are the ICE raids of people snatching, you know, ICE officers snatching people off the street and using violence to subdue innocent people, of raids where militaristic vehicles with Christy Norm riding in them are knocking down people's front doors and arresting them in the middle of the night.

Those are the political acts of violence that we see an awful lot of.

I'm not seeing large spread swaths of left-wing political violence going on in America.

And maybe that's my skewed perspective or the skewed perspective of international news, but I'm just not seeing the evidence of it and the numbers don't bear it out either.

Well, and they're trying to create it.

I mean, we heard the president very recently say, I'm sending troops to Portland.

And then there's a bunch of people saying there's literally one block in Portland where there's protests and they're just protesting the federal government there that is carrying out these ICE raids.

It's not violent.

They're not burning anything down.

They're not marching through the streets and terrorizing people.

They're literally in one small section of the city doing a very specific protest.

But they are saying it's horrible there.

It's awful.

We're going to send troops, et cetera, et cetera.

So

this is not just, this is not.

This rhetoric that these two gentlemen are saying is not isolated.

They are doing it across the board and it starts all the way at the top.

And it starts with dehumanization.

One of the things that they do very often that the Republicans and the conservatives have been doing for many years now is dehumanizing.

They, you know, Trump has said our nation is being poisoned by immigrants.

He has said they have bad genes.

Here's a quote: quote, you know, now a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes.

They got, and we got bad, a lot of bad genes in our country right now, end quote.

That's straight up like, like, that's like Nazi propaganda.

That's like eugenics, right?

When you're talking about things like that.

So, so these are, this is a, this is not just a one-off thing.

This is happening at the very highest echelon of our political, of our political spectrum.

If, and if they want less dehumanization, maybe the person who is spreading tons of dehumanization out from their office could practice what they preach and not use dehumanizing language.

but they do it all the time.

Yeah, I mean, arguably that's what festering is.

Festering is

another attempt to make things dehumanized.

Yeah, we're going to take a short break.

We'll be back right after this.

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All right, we're back.

Let's jump right back in.

So now there's an interesting moment in this where they talk about Tim Walls.

Yeah, so I talked to Charlie.

It was either the night of or the day after our debate with Tim Walls.

And, you know, he was excited.

He told me how great I did.

And obviously, it's awesome to hear from a friend who tells you that you did a great job.

But he asked what I thought of Tim.

And I said, honestly, you know, because you get in this sort of bunker mentality in the campaign, it's us, it's them.

And I was like, honestly, even though I'm glad that I think I did well, and I certainly don't want this guy to become vice president, I actually kind of liked him afterwards after 90 minutes of talking with him.

And Charlie said, that's why I do all these debates.

It's like you can disagree vehemently with somebody, but if you're actually communicating with them,

it's really hard not to appreciate at least a little bit as a human being.

Even if you think they're 100% wrong on the issues, you can appreciate them a little bit as a human being.

And that's what Charlie was so good at.

So

with all respect to you and all gratitude for being such a big part of his life the last couple of years, Bobby, good to see you.

You too, Mr.

Vice President.

Thank you.

So, I mean, first of all, honestly, credit here,

this is where they're talking with

RFK Jr.

in the middle of the show here.

Credit here for them pointing out that they actually quite liked Tim Waltz when they met him.

If more of their eulogy and more of their messaging in this eulogy, rather, was about how the people they disagree with are likable human beings and not monsters, we'd have a lot less of an issue with this eulogy because they're talking about how people aren't monsters.

Compare that with how they talk about the left more generally.

There's no consistency there while they are dehumanizing people, while they are talking about people festering and being sort of essentially the enemy within.

There's just absolutely no consistency there with how, with his message here, about let's be uh treat the people we disagree with as human beings.

I'd like to see more of that, but at least he is kind of making a point to say he actually quite liked Tim Waltz.

So, okay, mild amount of credit there.

There's an effort in this whole podcast to try to depict Charlie Kirk as a communicator, as someone who was, this was his job.

He went out into the world, he communicated with people, he brought people together.

They sort of see him as this unifying force.

But is that what debate really does?

I'm actually not so sure.

If you watch some of the clips, and especially the clips that Charlie promoted, this is Charlie dunking on kids, college kids, that aren't as practiced as he is at this stuff.

So he has all the rhetoric on his side.

He has all the hours and hours and hours of doing this.

And a brand new person who's never done this stands up to a microphone and Charlie dunks on him.

He takes that clip and then he puts it all over his social media.

How much conversation can you get in three minutes with somebody?

If it's even three minutes, it might not even be that long.

How much did Charlie's position change over the years?

Did Charlie hear all these people who had differing opinions and weigh those against his?

He's constantly subjected to different ideas.

Did he broaden his horizons at all?

Did he change his mind?

These are things I would like to know about Charlie Kirk.

Did he really change his mind?

Because as an outsider and looking at his body of work as an outsider, it didn't appear that he changed very much over the years.

So is that communicating?

Is that actually communicating?

Is that getting to know people?

Is that getting to know other ideas?

I'm not so sure.

I feel like

this is one of those things that they're doing throughout to show that Charlie was this really amazing person who did all of these things.

And Charlie went around to a bunch of colleges all over the United States and he dunked on kids.

That's what he did.

That's what his job was.

Yeah, absolutely.

And we will actually cover in the toolbox the hagiography of Charlie Kirk, which we'll go into in some detail.

But I think that's a really good observation because I think while they do constantly say that he would talk to anyone about anything, he was always willing to have conversations with people.

What he actually did, as you say, was sit on stage with a microphone.

and have somebody he's never met come up and they would ask him a question, they'd have a back and forth for a couple of minutes, and then they'd leave.

And that would all happen in front of an audience.

That That isn't a conversation.

That is an attempt to

rhetorically spar.

It's an ideological exchange,

a minor battle, a skirmish, but it's not a conversation.

And I say that as someone who has spent a large part of my career having actual conversations with people that I can disagree with, sitting down for an hour and talking to someone who comprehensively disagrees with me in order to see where is their common ground.

That, I would argue, is kind of more of a commitment to being able to talk to just about anyone.

What we see from Charlie Kirk is incredibly performative.

It's there for the cameras, it's there for the audience.

You see the clips that turning point were put out.

The person stood at the microphone asking questions is surrounded by people in MAGA hats.

And in that situation, is that a conversation or is that a performance for an audience?

This next clip is about meritocracy.

Shortly after Usha and I left Charlie's family and Charlie's remains in Arizona, I wrote a story in The Nation magazine about my dear friend Charlie Kirk.

Now, The Nation isn't a fringe blog.

It's a well-funded, well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American Civil War.

George Soros' Open Society Foundation funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement.

The writer accuses Charlie of saying, and I quote, black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously.

But if you go and watch the clip, the very clip she links to, you realize he never said anything like that.

He never uttered those words.

He made an argument against affirmative action as a policy.

He criticized a specific Supreme Court justice as an individual.

He never said anything about black women as a group.

He made an argument for judging people of all races and backgrounds by their own individual merits.

The very evidence she provides, this hack of a writer, shows that she lied about a dead man, and yet she wrote it, an esteemed magazine published it, it made it through the editors, and of course, liberal billionaires rewarded that attack.

Now, of course, even if Charlie had uttered those words, it wouldn't mean that he deserved his fate.

But consider the level of propaganda at work.

Charlie was gunned down in broad daylight, and well-funded institutions of the left lied about what he said so as to justify his murder.

This is soulless and evil.

Some dehumanizing language.

It is absolutely dehumanizing language.

It's also worth pointing out that he's talking about the nation.

He talks about this in a magazine that goes back to the American Civil War.

And in the next sentence, he talks about how it's funded by George Soros.

And so, and what he's trying to imply there is that George Soros, the liberal billionaire, has some kind of editorial oversight, that his money is influencing the editorial policy of the magazine.

It's a guilt by association thing.

And I think the reason he's doing that, we heard them talking about NGOs who are out there promoting violence.

I think what they're talking about is George Soros' various organizations or organizations like it.

So, this is one of the examples I would argue that J.D.

Vance is raising of liberal left-wing NGOs promoting violence, the type of thing they're going to go after.

This is why he's raising this up.

We actually have, so he's saying that Charlie Kirk never uttered the words that were quoted in the nation.

We actually have the clip of this.

We do have the clip.

Let me play it now.

Joy Reed and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Katanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks.

We would have been called the

racist.

But now they're coming out and they're saying it for us.

They're coming out and they're saying, I'm only here because of affirmative action.

Yeah, we know

you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.

You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.

Play cut 52.

But I rise today as a clear recipient of

affirmative action, and particularly in higher education.

I may have been admitted on affirmative action both in terms of being a woman and a woman of color, but I can declare that I did not graduate on affirmative action.

This is my personal story.

I hear it because of action affirmative.

She can't even say that.

We know,

we know.

It's very obvious to us that you were not smart enough to be able to get in on your own.

I couldn't make it on my own, so I needed to take opportunities from someone more deserving.

You know, this is how arrogant Joy Reed and Katanji Brown Jackson and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee are.

They're so narcissistic, they think this is persuasive.

They think we're like, oh,

of course,

that's why we need affirmative action because you have impressed us with your brilliance.

Of course.

Oh, no.

Imagine imagine the world without Joy Reed.

Imagine the world about Sheila Jackson Lee or Michelle Obama or Katanji Brown Jackson.

They think this is persuasive.

They think as they kind of now reveal that I'm only here because of anti-white, anti-Asian forced discrimination policies

that turn me into a bitter, resentful activist that hates white people, honestly.

I mean, just pointing out Charlie Kirk, constantly in this conversation we'll hear he's such a great communicator and if that's an evidence of him being a great communicator I have a very different standard for great communication than everybody who's speaking in this uh in this show

yeah I they say he he didn't say these things he didn't come after black people he used you as the black people he didn't he he didn't very specifically say black people but he said you are coming after you are doing this he's not talking and he and they're trying to they're trying to soften it.

He's trying to soften it by saying, oh, I was just talking about one single person.

I was just talking about one single person.

That's a dog whistle racist, everybody.

That's what that is.

That's somebody who's who's trying to couch their language very carefully so that they can say really horrible things about a specific black person while pointing out it's because of their race, but not also send it off to everybody, all of the black population.

That's what he's doing.

Yeah, and look, you could argue that he was talking about just those specific four women who just happened to be black.

And that's what Vance is doing here.

That's what he's trying to do, is to say that Charlie was only talking about those women and not all black women.

But also notice in there what Charlie Kirk was saying was the job was a white person's slot that was stolen.

You know, white people deserved it.

And if someone black is doing that job, it's because they stole it from someone more deserving.

The assumption is that the job, the slot, the position at university was there for the white person and the black person came along and stole it.

I think this is, even if we grant him that he's only talking about a handful of people, which I think is a very generous grant, we're still in there is the underlying assumption that white people deserved it first.

And they're talking about this sort of meritocracy, right?

Everyone should just show how great they are, and then we should judge people on how well they present themselves and the ideas that they have and then how far they get on their own, right?

We should judge people because they, you know, we should look at how far they're getting, how smart they are.

That doesn't take into account that there are some populations in our country that are very much

advantaged over other populations.

There are many places.

We very specifically in our country have

curriculum and money for schools comes from property taxes.

Those property taxes, the more your house costs, the more you pay in property tax.

Therefore, the better your schools are in that district.

That happens all the time.

That's very specifically selecting a small group of people who live in a rich area to get way better schooling than a lot of other people who can't get that level of schooling.

Meritocracy only works if you have the same advantages.

Yeah, it does.

And it only works if you have a completely even playing field for

assessing people's abilities as well.

And what we obviously see is some people,

part of that assessment is, will you fit the culture of this organization?

What kind of fit are you from around there?

And people make that assumption based on who else has done well previously.

And that will be, if that's an unbroken string of white people, then the kind of judgment you're going to make about what kind of person is going to fit in is going to be influenced by that, which is why it's important to take those kind of things out.

But look at what the structure of what Vance is forwarding here.

Look at that structure, okay?

Someone in the nation gave their interpretation of what Charlie Kirk said.

an interpretation that I actually think is a reasonable reading, the assumption that this wasn't just talking about a handful of women, but was more broadly talking about affirmative action, promoting people of color above white people where it isn't deserved.

But it can't be that that's how someone could validly take what he was saying.

It now has to be characterized as a lie.

And so Vance is saying that it's a lie that the nation published.

There's no principle of charity there.

There's no compassion.

There's no assumption that somebody could disagree in some way.

It has to be, they disagree with me, therefore they must be intentionally lying.

And then from there, he goes to the writer is a hack.

And from there, the magazine editor too, this is published by prestigious editors.

Well, they've published a lie.

So they at best didn't check it, at worst condoned the lie.

And from there, we have liberal billionaires rewarding it.

Rewarding it how?

Vance doesn't say.

But by publishing it, I guess, by the billionaires still investing in that magazine, despite the fact the article is in there, Vance leaves all of this open.

But from

we're from this writer disagreed with me about what Charlie Kirk's words meant.

That's where we started.

And now we're at, there is a vast and well-funded liberal network designed to promote lies and celebrate death.

That's what he's built on this incredibly flimsy foundation.

Yeah.

And

he ends it with, you know, they lied about it so they could justify his murder.

I didn't hear many people at all.

In fact, I didn't hear anyone justifying the murder.

What I did hear was that there were people pushing back against what seems to be sort of a state-ordered mourning of this person.

There were people who were pushing against back against that, and pushing back against whether or not I should care about Charlie Kirk dying.

Charlie Kirk is yet another gun death in a country full of gun deaths.

Should I pay more attention to this particular gun death or this school shooting that happened the same day Charlie Kirk was shot?

And Charlie Kirk famously said,

we shouldn't control guns and gun deaths are essentially eggs that we need to break the omelet, to make the omelette of the Second Amendment.

He essentially said that.

That's one of the things that he's been quoted as saying.

So why should I be forced to care about him?

Why is that something that you're sort of impressing on me?

That's what I heard from a lot of people on the left.

I didn't hear anybody saying, yes, I'm super happy and this is justified.

I didn't hear that.

Yeah, I think we saw like a reverse whataboutry of why aren't you sad about this?

Yeah, there's other stuff going on, but why aren't you upset about this?

And people are trying to force that.

I think there were some people who were gleeful.

There were some people who were making light of it, making jokes of it.

I think none of those people were in positions of leadership in the left and probably won't ever be.

You're right.

You're right.

I would also say that when the when big news stories happen, there are always going to be some people making jokes about it, regardless of what type of news story it is and regardless of the spectrum.

And I mean, obviously, Charlie Kirk and his side were big fans of having the freedom of speech to be offensive.

So I would actually, while they're not necessarily the jokes that I would be sharing, I think it's important that people have the right to be able to make distasteful jokes even without like undue consequence.

But it seems like JD Vance's position here is that, no, they shouldn't.

On this issue, it is important that nobody makes jokes that are offensive.

Nobody says things that upset people.

Nobody

says things that upset me.

So I think there were people who were gleeful, but those people weren't in positions of authority and they weren't the majority of people.

And so to paint them as being indicative of leadership of the left or the moral leadership of the left is a deliberate attempt to cascade an entire side the political spectrum based on minority actors.

Yeah.

And I mean, he's basically saying that this particular article helped justify his murder, and that's just not true.

That's just not a true thing to say.

Okay, so here's more about gleefully talking about Charlie Kirk's death.

But I was struck not just by the dishonesty of this smear, but by the glee over a young husband's and young father's death.

Quote, she says, he was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist.

The nation wrote, who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses because there was no other way to pretend that it was morally correct.

He had children, as do many vile people.

That's what they said.

He had children, as do many vile people.

Now, hours before this smear was published, my wife and I had the honor of escorting Charlie's body back to his home in Arizona.

We took his wife, Erica, we love you, his parents, his sister, and a few of his best friends with us.

And as they offloaded Charlie's casket from Air Force Two, I worried that Erica would collapse with grief.

Now, I am a very lucky husband to a very wonderful wife, but I have never been prouder of my wife than that moment as she held Erica in Erica's very darkest hour.

And I thought of Erica as I read that disgusting attack on Charlie.

He had children, as do many vile people.

That's what they said about him.

I said the Lord's prayer.

So what we have here, start off, he's talking about the dishonesty of this smear in the nation.

So now we're at a position where this is just accepted as a lie, a smear, dishonest.

All this characterization of this particular article is just going with it.

So he reads a quote from that article.

He stops at, he had children, as do many vile people.

I'm going to carry on the quote from there because he doesn't carry the ut on the very next line.

It is rude of me to say all of this because we live in a culture where manners are often valued more than truth.

That is why a slew of pundits and politicians have raced to portray Kirk's activities, which harmed many vulnerable people, in a positive light, and to give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't grant to anyone who wasn't white, Christian, straight, and male.

There is no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign, and refusing to join in doesn't make you a bad person.

So yes, they were being deliberately provocative by sharing their opinion, but what they were saying there was you don't have to pretend somebody was something other than what they actually were at this time.

So you could argue that that's rude, but you can also argue that it's free speech.

And you could also, you know, you can argue that the vice president of a country characterizing this as a gleeful smear, well, maybe you could say that's also free speech.

You know, they're all arguing here that Charlie Kirk was a defender of free speech.

And the vision of Kirk that they want to portray should have been first in line to defend their right to say these things.

If they were really caring about honoring the memory of the person they think they knew, why aren't they celebrating the right to free speech if that's what Charlie Kirk was really all about?

Equally, Charlie Kirk spoke out against homosexuality.

He spoke out against trans people.

He spoke out against affirmative action and as we've said, demonstrated that he felt that black people weren't as deserving of places, that white people deserve place universities that black people would have to steal to get in.

When the article says he was an unrepentant racist, transphob and homophobe and misogynist, why is J.D.

Vance apologizing for positions that Charlie Kirk espoused here?

Is that in honoring the memory of Charlie Kirk as to whitewashing what he says or changing the meaning of what he said?

He was unrepentant.

Why are you repenting or at least denying that he said or held any of those positions?

Now, personally, I think some of that, the way that article is written, I think it's a bit distasteful.

I also think it's strategically naive.

You know, I agree that you're not compelled to whitewash people after they die.

But if your goal is the furtherance of your ideals in the broader public, I think it might put off more people than you're going to reach.

If you write like this, you're going to put off more people than you reach.

But that said, there's been plenty of gleeful celebrations of attacks of other political figures, Nancy Pelosi and her husband, etc.

So maybe I'm wrong about how strategically valuable this kind of talk actually is.

It evidently hasn't harmed Trump's popularity.

And I would also say that the writer, I am not the writer.

I am not ever have going to be, I was never going to be on the end of Charlie Kirk's transphobia, his homophobia, his misogyny, his racism.

So it isn't for me to judge what is tasteful or distasteful for someone else to be writing.

I think ultimately all of this is speech.

And what JD Vance is saying is it shouldn't be right, it shouldn't be allowed for magazines to publish articles containing opinions I disagree with.

Yeah, that's a great point, Marsh.

And I was going to, I'm also going to bring up too, like, it's hard for me as a white guy to judge these terrible comments that Kirk made throughout his career that affected marginalized groups.

I don't spend my time trying to justify everything I've gained as fair, right?

I don't try to defend my right to use a washroom.

I think that if someone spends their time and spends their life spreading hurtful messaging, they shouldn't be lifted up as some kind of saintly truth teller in death without some setting the record straight.

And someone is trying to do that.

And you say that is hurtful, awful speech that they're doing.

I think that what you're doing is you're twisting Charlie's memory and something that I think he very much said over and over and over again.

I have no idea of whether he believed it, right?

I can't tell you whether Charlie Kirk actually believed in free speech.

I can't tell you that.

But what I can say is he said it a lot.

He sure as hell said it all the time.

So you're twisting this person's memory to fit your own narrative.

This part is is them sort of chastising people for being happy when a bad person dies.

But unity,

real unity, can be found only after climbing the mountain of truth.

And there are difficult truths we must confront in our country.

One truth is that 24% of self-described, quote, very liberals, believe it is acceptable to be happy about the death of a political opponent, while only 3%

of self-described very conservatives agree.

3% is too many, of course.

Another truth is that 26% of young liberals believe political violence is sometimes justified, and only 7% of young conservatives say the same.

Again, too high a number.

In a country of 330 million people, you can, of course, find one person of a given political persuasion justifying this or that or almost anything.

But the data is clear.

People on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence.

This is not a both sides problem.

If both sides have a problem, one side has a much bigger and malignant problem, and that is the truth we must be told.

That problem has terrible consequences.

The leader of our party, Donald J.

Trump, escaped an assassin's bullet by less than an inch.

Our House House majority lever, Stephen Scalise, came within seconds of death by an assassin himself.

And now, the most influential conservative activist in generations, our friend Charlie, has been murdered.

This violence, it doesn't come from nowhere.

They just say it comes from somewhere.

Don't say it doesn't come from nowhere.

Come on, man.

You speak for a living.

That's literally the truth.

Interesting question, though.

Who is more likely to commit commit it?

And I think we talked about that earlier.

Like, who's more likely to commit actual violence, not just talk about it?

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think this also, it doesn't account for when you ask the question and who you ask.

Okay, so here's a quote.

This is a study from 2023.

23% of Americans agree because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.

And that was up from 15% in 2021.

Okay, so this is a 2023 study.

And what was the demographic breakdown of that particular study?

And this was published in The Guardian.

One in three Republicans believe that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country, compared with 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats.

So just two years ago, one in three Republicans were saying that.

So that's much higher than the numbers of liberals he's talking about now.

And all of those actually represented increases since 2021.

Breaking it down further, almost almost one in three white evangelical Protestants believe that patriots may have to resort to political violence to save the country, which is markedly higher than any other religious group.

Support of political violence jumps to even higher levels among Americans who believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.

46% defend violence

from that group.

For those who have a

favorable view of Trump, 41%

support violence.

Americans who believe in the so-called great replacement theory, 41%

of those, and Americans who affirm the core tenet of white Christian nationalism that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.

39% of white Christian nationalists support political violence.

And just to highlight, that was a study published in 2023.

But every one of those views, that 2020 was a stolen election, that the white race are being replaced in America, that God intended America to be Christian, those were positions endorsed and promoted by Charlie Kirk.

Charlie Kirk himself and the people who thought like Charlie Kirk were statistically way more likely to be in the category of people who believed political violence was necessary in 2023.

All of those figures are higher than the numbers that Vance highlights about liberals who endorse violence.

So, look, it is bad.

The idea, the fact that there are so many people on the left who believe that violence is necessary is bad.

That is a bad sign for American democracy.

But if the fact that the people who make up his base and make up Charlie Kirk's ideological bedfellows think even more so that violence is necessary, perhaps he ought to be arguing that liberals are less in favor of violence than Vance Trump and

Kirk's base profess to be.

Maybe that's the argument here, is that liberals believe this, but our base believe it even more.

And to be clear, this isn't me saying both sides are just as bad.

It really isn't that.

Or even that either side is right.

This is a function of a deeply polarized democracy.

And if you ask when the music, if you ask when the music stops, when one side's in power, you're going to be more likely to get the other side endorsing more extreme positions.

And the final thing I'll point out about it is it's a question of what counters political violence as well.

Because again, from this side of the ocean, seeing ICE agents grabbing people from their homes and sending them to foreign prisons and breaking down people's doors and arrest them in the middle of the night feels a lot like political violence.

From a polling perspective, if you included that in political violence, the numbers for who is supportive of political violence would go far, far higher.

So the framing in the question matters an awful lot.

So that's those figures, I think.

All right.

So now Vance relays a story about people yelling at him.

A couple of months ago, I had landed a fundraiser in Southern California.

And since, you know, we'd be out there anyways, my wife and I decided to take our kids to Disneyland.

one weekend.

We had fun, and to be clear, most of the guests said very nice things or they just left us alone.

But there was a loud and very minority that would shout at my children, who were eight, five, and three, whenever they got the opportunity.

You should disown your dad, you little,

one middle-aged woman yelled at my five-year-old.

Tell the Secret Service to protect the Constitution, not your father, screamed another.

Are these women violent?

Probably not.

Are they deranged?

Certainly.

And while our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far left.

Okay.

J.D.

Vance is one of the most important people in government, and his policies and the policies of the president, who he represents also, have a potential to harm millions of people.

If you have someone shout at you while you're in the office, That's just the job.

That's what you asked for.

You went on the campaign trail.

You begged for it.

You went in front of people, millions of people, multiple times over an entire summer, in fact, longer than that, to beg people to put you into that office.

You have to deal with all the things that come with that office.

And sometimes that's negativity that is not just brought on by press, but it's also brought on by you just being a public person.

And you have to deal with that.

That's your job.

You signed up for it.

Don't cry about it now.

That's not something you get to complain about to the rest of us.

You asked for the job.

If you don't want it, don't do it.

But that's that's what the job is.

Everybody before you had to deal with the same thing you had to deal with.

You might have to deal with it a little more because your policies are a little more extreme than people who came before you.

And yeah, I realize that they're telling a story here about somebody being mean to kids, but I wonder how reliable the narrator is in all this.

He's been less than truthful so far this hour.

How reliable is it?

I do think someone yelling at your kid is shitty.

I wouldn't yell at your kid and I think that's bad.

I would not suggest to do it.

But if they're telling you you're a terrible human in front of your kid, I don't have a problem with that.

And I don't care.

I couldn't care less about that.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

And the thing is, this comes straight after him talking about the scourge of left-wing violence, how that is the real issue right now is that there's these extreme left-wing violent actors.

But he's talking about people shouting at him.

You know, he's conflating violence with people criticizing, using their words to criticize him, using words he didn't like to criticize him.

Even as he says, they probably weren't violent.

So this isn't an illustration of violence in any way, but he's using it in the same conversation of like, oh, there are these

assassinations and somebody was shouting at me.

And were they violent?

No, but were they deranged?

Certainly.

So this is just another example of the same thing.

He's also calling for there needing to be a de-escalation while characterizing those who disagree with him vocally as deranged, lunatic, and possibly violent, like probably not violent, but leaving the opportunity,

the possibility in there for violence.

This whole eulogy has been, at least in part, about how Charlie Kirk firmly believed in free speech.

He was a fierce defender of free speech.

But now, Vance is looping in that people shouldn't be allowed to shout at him when they perceive him to be supporting attacks on the Constitution, even.

And this feels to me just like an awful lot like someone is using the death of someone they say is a very good friend of theirs as a justification for their own political actions which i don't know it just feels tremendously exploitative like incredibly exploitative

all right so now these gonna he's this is all at the very end of the show and all these clips run right after each other so this is continuing on with the clip he's talking about someone passing out leaflets

after charlie died One of his friends and one of our senior White House staffers had left-leaning operatives in his neighborhood passing passing out leaflets telling people what he looked like and where he lived, encouraging neighbors to harass him or, God forbid, to do worse.

While he was mourning his dead friend, he and his wife had to worry about the political terrorists drawing a big target on the home he shares with his young children.

Are these people violent?

I hope not.

But are they guilty of encouraging violence?

You damn well better believe it.

Did they encourage encourage the public to approach public officials and let them know what they think?

Because that's pretty much the job they said yes to.

That's the job that they begged everybody for.

And that's the job that they lobbied for with this current administration.

I would love to see a flyer that encourages people to do worse, quote, do worse.

Until you produce it, I'm not going to believe that you actually, that actually says that.

If it shows where they live, I again, I can't say that that's something that is so, that is, that is encouraging violence.

I disagree strongly.

Yeah, exactly.

It sounds terrible if there's a flyer telling people to do worse while giving out the name and address of someone.

But if that's true, that's a matter for the police.

And I honestly don't know of anybody who would support that.

And it's incredibly easy.

And we said at the top of the show, you and I come from a left-wing perspective.

I would condemn that.

It's quite easy

for me to condemn that.

Don't hand out flyers with people's names and addresses on them and encourage them to commit violence.

If the flyer says do worse and encourages violence, that's bad.

Don't do that, people.

See, incredibly easy to condemn that.

But as you say, it's just really hard to take J.D.

Vance's word for it that this is true.

That is actively, factually exactly how it went down.

When he spent the last hour illustrating that he's happy to massage the fact to

fit his political project.

You know, we saw his characterization of that article in The Nation, which completely misses all of the context that actually explains what the article is about and gets characterized as a smear and dishonest and part of a left-wing liberal, well-funded media, at least trying to take it down.

Like we've seen him build these castles out of sand, and it's hard not to assume he isn't crying wolf again here.

Yeah.

And if somebody is going to pass out flyers and say, here's where Brett Kavanaugh lives, go stand there and do a protest.

I don't care.

I think that that's fine.

You signed up for the job, man.

That's what the job is.

Yeah.

The right to peaceful protest is one of the forms of free expression that apparently they weren't big fans of.

Yeah, okay.

So now we're continuing on.

Now, is saying that the far left people are lunatics.

We can thank God that most Democrats don't share these attitudes, and I do, while acknowledging that something has gone very wrong with a lunatic fringe, a minority, but a growing and powerful minority on the far left.

There is no unity with people who scream at children over their parents' politics.

There is no unity with someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order to excuse his murder.

There is no unity with someone who harasses an innocent family the day after the father of that family lost a dear friend.

There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination.

And there is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers, who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father, deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words with which they disagree.

Did you know that the George Soros Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie's death, do you know they benefit from generous tax treatment?

They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer.

And how do they reward us?

By setting fire to the house built by the American family over 250 years.

I am desperate for our country to be united in condemnation of the actions and the ideas that killed my friend.

I want it so badly that I will tell you a difficult truth.

We can only have it with people who acknowledge that political violence is unacceptable.

and when we work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country.

So you can hear the rising crescendo of

this deeply rhetorical speech.

This is what he came on the Charlie Kirk Shaw to say, absolutely.

And you can hear how he's smuggling in his premises along the way.

You know, this growing and powerful minority that supports terrorism on the left, is it growing?

Is it powerful?

He hasn't shown that.

He hasn't proved that.

He's just stated that.

But because he's smuggling it into the conversation now, we just need to just accept it.

He talked about this newspaper article if somebody published a newspaper article that said charlie kirk deserved to get a bullet in the neck because of what he said i would agree that's completely unacceptable in fact i would go far further than the charlie kirk they're describing would go in that i would say that person should be fired for writing those words charlie kirk is a defender of free speech maybe he'd be out there saying no no people are allowed their opinions i would go further than that version of charlie kirk and say that person should be fired but why hasn't vans talked about those people?

Why hasn't he brought examples of who he thinks those people are?

Because what he has brought is an article in The Nation that said Kirk didn't need to be mourned.

You know, he's saying there's articles out there, Soros-funded articles that say he deserved to be shot and justifying his death.

That is not what's in that article.

In fact, in that article, here's a quote from it that JD Vance will not read.

Here's a quote from the article.

I do not believe anyone should be murdered because of their views, but that's because I don't believe people should be murdered generally, regardless of who they are or what they've done.

I'm against the death penalty.

I'm pro-gun control.

I believe war is a failure of humanity, not a necessary

byproduct of it.

I won't celebrate his death, but I'm not obligated to celebrate his life either.

Unquote.

That, to me, sounds a lot like someone who's written words that Vance disagrees with.

She isn't, the writer isn't supporting,

isn't cheering on the death, isn't justifying the death, isn't saying Kirk deserved to be killed.

The writer very specifically says otherwise, but Vance won't quote those words because it undermines the point he's trying to make.

Yeah, and

in his speech that he just sort of laid out, that is the type of person who he would want unity with.

He even says, there's some people I can't have unity with, but this person who denounces political violence, I could have.

Well, he can't because he's clearly using them as a way to say, I disagree with this entire stance.

So

he actually doesn't, he doesn't think there can be unity with that other side.

And there's a reasonable chance he's just not read that article as well because

that article circulated on Twitter with just that particular quote that he cited about Charlie Kirk being vile.

That circulated.

I wouldn't be surprised if he hadn't got far enough through to read this bit where the person is saying nobody should be murdered for their views.

We're going to take a quick break and then move on to our toolbox section.

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Wow.

So that's the tool bag?

And something just fell out of the toolbag?

So for the toolbox, this time we're doing hagiography.

Yeah, so hagiography, it's defined as a biography that treats its subject with undue reverence.

It was often related to the lives of saints.

so the stories of saints who posthumously, those stories would be representing those people as more pious or more miraculous or more benevolent than they actually were when they were alive in order to sanctify them and make them actually seem like good, holy, saintly people.

More generally, hagiography is a rhetorical technique that's used to essentially whitewash someone's reputation once they're no longer around to either dispute it or to sully

that reputation.

And it's often with the intent of using their smoothed over story to push an ideological position and capitalize on our societal reverence and respect for the dead.

So, wasn't this dead person fantastic?

We should carry on the great work they were doing.

And I'm going to tell you what that work was because they aren't around to dispute that anymore.

So, we're going to start our toolbox right at the beginning of the show.

The intro music was Amazing Grace on Bagpipes.

Hey everybody, J.D.

Vance here, live from my office in the White House complex and filling in for somebody who cannot be filled in for, but I'm going to try to do my best, my dear friend, the great Charlie Kirk.

The last several days have been extremely hard for our country.

They've been hard for me, hard for my family, hard for the countless people in this building.

who knew and loved Charlie Kirk.

And of course, they've been hardest most of all for his darling wife, Erica, and their two beautiful children.

The thing is, every single person in this building, we owe something to Charlie.

He was a joyful warrior for our country.

He loved America.

He devoted himself tirelessly to making our country a better place.

He was a critical part of getting Donald Trump elected as president, getting me elected as vice president.

And so much of our success over the last seven months is due to his efforts, his staffing, his support, and his friendship.

So look, nobody can dispute that this was a genuinely awful thing that happened to Charlie Kirk, his wife, his kids.

Absolutely.

But when he says every person in the White House owes Kirk, you know, that might be true.

You know, turning point USA has mobilized a lot of youth support to Trump.

But it is worth asking.

In the seven months since Kirk helped Trump into office, is America a better place?

Are Americans in a better place?

Do his supporters feel that their lives have gotten better?

Food prices, gas prices, job stability, cohesion with their neighbors?

Do we have a huge amount to

owe to Charlie Kirk?

Was he really a joyful warrior for the country?

Because what his vision of the country was and what he supported, has it taken America to a better place?

Or is J.D.

Vance kind of whitewashing that

path?

So the next piece here is them talking about how the left will make you feel alone.

And, you know, the lasting message is that,

and, you know, I think I've said this at turning point events before, is that the left wins, the enemy, they win when you feel alone and when you feel like you're the only one who thinks, eats, prays, breathes, lives the way that you do.

And Charlie was so great at connecting those dots and connecting human beings.

I mean, our friendships are all stronger because of him with one another.

But people, I mean, like I've never met Andrew, but I know I've talked to him through Charlie for years.

And he was so great at doing that.

And so I think it's our mission to go out there and embolden young conservatives, young Christians, most importantly, to go out there and continue to do his work because it's exactly what he would want.

He would want you to go find five people who don't believe in Jesus that day and give them, you know, a good lecturing and walk them through everything in a way that is respectful and is grounded in fact.

And I don't know how we replace that, but I think the energy that I'm seeing amongst people

is just palpable.

It's insane.

It feels kind of gross to me that this eulogy is all talk about enemies and how the left win and how we need to fight back against the left.

That kind of feels really gross in a eulogy.

Like, I don't know.

I don't know how anybody in my family would feel if this was

my eulogy was hijacked for political purposes like this.

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

And I think, too, the way they're depicting people on the left, and that's how they do it throughout, is almost like a monster in a kid story, right?

They're the boogeyman of loneliness.

They're going to come and they're going to wrap you.

They're almost treating it like it's an entity on itself and it's attacking people.

It's really,

they're trying to dehumanize the left, but they're doing it through villainizing it.

Yeah, just as they're talking about how great Charlie was at connecting human beings, they're trying to further like drive people apart and be divisive.

It's also, I think,

it's odd that this eulogy has this whole bit in it about how Charlie would have wanted me to convert more people to his religion.

It's almost literally sanctified at this point.

This is kind of, it becomes literally the work of a saint to get more people to believe in Christianity.

And maybe that just might be because I'm an atheist.

It might be my own bias here, but I just, I can't imagine these guys feeling as comfortable.

if this were a Muslim or a Jewish person talking about using a death from their group and a martyrdom from their group as a reason to recruit more people to their religion.

If this was someone who was Muslim saying, well, you know, my friend Muhammad got killed, and therefore I'm going to go off and find five people to turn into

turn towards Islam, I don't think this would be as comfortably accepted.

And I think they'd see that this is a really uncomfortable thing to be doing in a eulogy.

I absolutely certainly wouldn't want anyone to use my death in a way to try and convert people into atheists.

Please never do that if I die.

Now they're talking to Taylor, who's one of the White House communication people.

They're asking Taylor how Charlie communicated.

Taylor, talk a little bit about that about, because Taylor, those of you who don't know, is the lead in our communication shop here in the White House.

He knows more about talking to people than pretty much anybody in the White House, or at least that's what you're supposed to know more than anybody else about.

But like talk about Charlie, the communicator, because that's one of the things that made him who he was.

And in that, I'm going to tie two things that they said together, because

Kaylin's right.

We didn't have a Charlie Kirk.

Growing up, we had Barry Goldwater and Reagan, two guys that we barely were alive to know or overlap with.

The future has Charlie Kirk.

And, you know,

before Wednesday, Charlie Kirk was a young man inspiring young people.

After he was killed, he has become a titan.

whose inspiration will move through eternity, inspiring millions of people for decades to come.

So I actually kind of partly agree with some of the sentiment of what they're saying here in an odd kind of way, because I do agree that they're saying in death he'll become a titan.

And I agree

a figure posthumously is more

likely to be influential than he was while he was alive.

Because in life, Charlie Kirk would meet college-age kids, as you say, and use the fact that he was older than them, more experienced in these particular questions he was talking about, had more financial backing and more training than them, and had the microphone.

And he'd use all of that to beat them in pretty artificial debates.

So he could film some of those and release the ones online that made him look best in order to recruit people to his movement.

He was also an organizer and a recruiter to the movement more generally, but his strength was as a propagandist.

And a propagandist is a role with a shelf life because eventually your shtick started to lose effectiveness.

Steve Bannon's lost effectiveness before Charlie Kirk.

Kirk himself was already starting to lose ground to Nick Fuenters and starting to lose kind of market share from a propaganda point of view.

So it is possible that in the years to come, he'd have been in irrelevance had he not been killed because now he is posthumously a figure that will always be usable as a martyr and as a totemic figure to gather people around.

So I kind of agree that by doing this hagiography, they're creating something that is a symbol they can continue using forever rather than it running out of shelf life.

That's an interesting point.

And I think, too, one of the things that was going to limit Charlie's shelf life was he was going to continue to get older.

And the older you get and the older you look, the more you look like a bully when you're going to talk to college kids.

So eventually that shtick was going to run its course.

There wasn't going to be a gray-haired Charlie doing the same thing that 18 to 24-year-old Charlie was doing.

Yeah, but like in death, he can now be turned into anything his allies want.

You know, he is their free speech martyr who in life kept a watch list of professors that he wanted to get fired for their opinions and what they taught.

Absolutely, yes.

In death, he's the person who would talk to anyone as equals.

Whereas in life, he believed that women ought to be subjugated to their men and that women of color in particular were intellectually inferior.

When you're dead, you can't make any more mistakes.

You can't sully what someone wants to say that you stood for.

And just on that point, the professor watch list, which gets missed in a lot of this whenever they talk about free speech, Hans-Joeb Tieder, who's the Associate Secretary for the American Association of University Professors, Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governments, told the New York Times in an interview about that watch list, there is a continuing cycle of these sorts of things.

They serve the same purpose,

to intimidate individuals from speaking plainly in their classrooms or in their publications.

And one professor included in the site, George Yancey, wrote that it is essentially a new species of McCarthyism, especially in terms of its overtones of disloyalty to the American Republic.

That's what Charlie Kirk was doing, this watch list in order to intimidate people out of their free speech.

That's what he did in life, but in death, he's the free speech martyr that

would talk to anyone and let anyone have their opinion.

All right, so now they're going to talk about Charlie and compassion.

And he does it through both the understanding of biblical terms.

I mean,

I spent, I'm sure like a lot of people this weekend, spent my weekend scrolling through old videos of Charlie.

And

one really, really hit me, the story of Jesus meeting the prostitute, where he says, you know,

those without sin cast the first stone.

And Charlie points out, everyone forgets what he says next.

And he says to the prostitute, go on, sin no more.

And Charlie understood both the compassion of the Bible, but the honesty and truth-telling of the Bible.

That is what I think has been missing in our political discourse: that you don't have to be nasty, you can be compassionate, but you should tell the truth.

And so the future of the political movement is going to be informed by young people brave and courageous enough to tell the truth, but compassionate enough to understand the suffering of those around them.

And that's Charlie Kirk.

This is absolutely textbook hagiography.

You know, Charlie Kirk, it's brave and courageous enough to tell the truth, but compassionate enough to understand the suffering of those around him.

Well, was Charlie Kirk really all about compassion?

Was he always about the truth?

Here's a few things for us to consider.

In 2015, at a speech at the Liberty Forum in Silicon Valley, Kirk said that he'd applied for nomination to the U.S.

Military Academy in West Point, New York, but wasn't accepted.

And he said the slot he was considered for went to a far less qualified candidate of a different gender and a different persuasion, whose test scores he claimed he knew.

And then he told the New Yorker two years later that he was actually being sarcastic when he said that.

But then he told the Chicago Tribune in 2018 that he'd been repeating something that he was told.

So maybe not sarcastic.

And that in a New Hampshire turning point event featuring Rand Paul in October 2019, he claimed he never said it at all.

So how honest is he being here when his story about whether he didn't get into military academy changes and whether he knew someone who got his position?

After George Floyd, after George Floyd's murder, Kirk promoted debunk claims about him, saying that he was illegally counterfeiting currency at the time, and that had once put a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach, things that were debunked, but were going around.

Not a great deal of honesty and compassion there.

He also falsely stated that during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, it took President Barack Obama millions infected and over a thousand deaths before he declared a public health emergency.

And he shared a meme confusing the point at which Trump declared a public health emergency at the point where Obama issued a national emergency.

In reality,

when it came to the swine flu pandemic, the Obama administration acknowledged the public health emergency on the 26th of April 2009 when there were fewer than 280 cases of swine flu in the US at the time.

And the first death occurred the next day, so not a thousand deaths.

So again, not true at all, not accurate, not honest.

He also described the public health measures of social distancing prohibitions in churches as a democratic plot against Christianity and also made unfounded assertions that authorities in Wuhan, China were burning patients.

He strongly opposed abortion and said in a September 2024 debate for Jubilee that abortion is murdering should be illegal.

He opposed exceptions for rape, including for children as young as 10.

And he compared the abortion to the Holocaust and said, actually, abortion is worse.

So where is this compassionate Charlie Kirk they were talking about in that situation?

And when it comes to gay marriage, what he said, this is a quote from Charlie Kirk on gay marriage.

Gay marriage happens and we're talking about gay stuff more than any other time.

Why?

Because they are not happy just having marriage.

Instead, they now want to corrupt your children.

So, was Charlie Kirk in life the compassionate defender of

honesty?

Was he compassionate to the suffering of those around him, the suffering of, for example, 10-year-old rape victims?

I don't think so.

What we're seeing here is a complete whitewashing of the man to become a figure that they can use politically.

Okay, so this is the last clip.

This is Conversations That Heal Our Country.

And his principal preoccupation was with conversation.

He thought conversation was the only thing that could heal our country.

We have all these forces, and particularly the algorithms now in social media, that are driving us apart.

And it's inexorable.

There seems to be nothing that could stop it.

And he understood that the only thing that could bridge that gap was debate, was open debate, and that censorship was the enemy of that.

And that in order to have real conversations, we had to end the vitriol.

We had to stop being poisonous toward each other.

We need to say what we mean without saying it mean.

Yes.

And he was just amazingly, he was so respectful of the people who disagreed with him.

He gave them the most respect and the greatest hearing.

He wanted their voice to be heard.

I saw on you know, one of the networks just now that there's this big revolt against the social media

because of their contribution to the polarization that ultimately led to his death, this brewing up of hatred.

Ironically, I think Charlie would revolt against that.

Yes.

Because he hated censorship.

What he said is the answer is conversation and dialogue.

And

we need to learn to do that if our democracy is going to survive.

If we're going to survive, we need to talk to each other, even though all these things are telling us not to.

RFK here says that

Charlie understood that conversation was the only thing that could heal our country.

I would argue after RFK's tenure at the HHS that he has no idea what heals what.

So maybe we shouldn't take his advice on it as far.

But again, this is classic hagiography right now.

So Charlie just wanted conversations.

He just wanted healing for the country.

But as long as he could manage those conversations, and as long as healing meant submission to his Christian nationalist ideology, where women submit to men and black people know their place and gay and trans people are grooming and corrupting your children i wouldn't call that healing this is talking about a man after he died with almost no real respect to what he said and did while he was alive Yeah, what he did is important too, because he took clips of debates, posted them on social media to get clicks.

And he posted very specifically debates that would inflame people, debates that would make people upset, debates that would get you to angrily put an anger face or a down thumb or whatever, because he knew that that was something that was going to get a reaction.

That was the attention economy that he was playing to.

And so he knew what he could do to tee you up, to get you.

And you could say that was actually raising the political temperature in the country.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And again, you know, he hated censorship.

They're going to tell us after he died.

So why was he keeping a list of professors who were teaching things he disliked, which was used to intimidate them?

Right.

And if they did believe that censorship was something he hated and that they ought to honor his memory, it's a shame that they weren't holding on to that value while people were being censored for not being sufficiently sad about their death, while people were being let go from their jobs for having said things about Charlie Kirk that were upsetting and hurt the feelings of the administration.

The idea of Charlie Kirk after he's died is now worth more to their political project than the words and the deeds of the man who lived.

And we can tell that from how little of his actual words we've seen from their project since he died.

Not in this eulogy and in so many of the places that have covered Charlie Kirk's death from a right-wing perspective, they do not give you what he said.

They don't quote him.

They don't show his words because who he was when he was alive is not the thing that's important to them.

It's who they can turn him into now he's dead.

Let's wrap it up with that.

Thank you, sir.

Appreciate you very much.

You're a beautiful person.

Okay, Marsh, end of the show.

We listened to a Charlie Kirk podcast with J.D.

Vance.

Was Was there anything good in it?

So, I did actually quite like that Vance picked out that Tim Waltz wasn't a bad guy.

That's obviously, and that we don't need to demonize Tim Waltz to disagree with him.

That's something that he departed from a lot of the Republicans' position on Tim Waltz, certainly during the election.

So, that's not bad.

I mean, he then undoes all of that by demonizing plenty of other people he disagrees with.

So, it feels more like a personal exception from someone he works with rather than a broad principle.

But in that one moment, it does model model what disagreement could look like.

So I'll kind of give credit to that one little slice of it.

And then the other thing is, like, he's talking about someone that he knew, respected, apparently loved.

I have no issue with somebody marking the loss of their friend.

And whenever they're talking about his memories of his friend and what he actually, and the people who knew Charlie, when they're talking about the things they actually did together, I have no issue with that at all.

You know, by all means,

mourn your friend.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I feel the same way.

I think like

some of it feels to me a a little less genuine than other people on here about the sort of friendship that they had.

I do think that there is a couple, there are a couple people that they talk to that really are mourning the loss of their friend.

I think their producer of the old of his show has some moments in this where he's really genuinely mourning long.

And I can't begrudge that.

Absolutely not.

I would expect that from someone who works closely with someone else.

I would expect that someone would create something like this to sort of eulogize their friend.

I very much disagree with the framing of the whole thing.

I think they framed it in a way that they could then justify attacking political opponents, using his death as a club to do it.

And I think that that's disgusting.

And that's using another person's life and legacy for your own ends.

And it's surprising that they don't see that, or at least they don't care.

I think that it's one of those two.

I'm not sure which it is.

I can't ascribe that, but you get to pick from one of those two things because that's obviously what they're doing.

Yeah, I think so.

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Imagine having to choose between a warm place to sleep and the companion who has never left your side.

More than 32,000 veterans in America know what it means to go without shelter, and for those with pets, that choice can be heartbreaking.

That's why Greater Good Charities delivers emergency packs with essentials for both, so that they don't have to choose.

This Veterans Day, be the difference that keeps a veteran and their pet together.

Visit greatergood.org forward slash veterans to donate today.

That's greatergood.org forward slash veterans.