Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying Process the Assassination of Charlie Kirk and His Legacy

(Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse podcast live stream. I forgot to even check what number is it. 293? 295. 295 of course, yes. I'm Dr. Bret Weinstein. You are of course Dr. Heather Heying. The last time that we were streaming while we were on the air, Charlie Kirk was shot and those of you who were watching know that we did not know how to respond to this because of course at the time we did not have any idea how serious Charlie's injuries were. That became obvious when we stopped streaming and saw the footage of course. In any case, we've done a lot of thinking in the intervening week and there's an awful lot that needs to be said. So we are going to discuss Charlie's life, his death, the significance of both, and then how it is that we move on from this with today's stream. Anything you want to say before we launch into it? Well you, just in terms of sort of the logistics of what we usually do here, we pair a rent up top with sponsors to whom we are very very grateful. And you worked with our amazing ad broker today and asked if we could move the ads off this live stream because you felt that it wasn't appropriate to have commerce involved in what you understood to be a tribute to a man assassinated in the prime of his life and who was a great hope to many people. So we won't be starting the way that we usually do and I think let us let you just begin. All right, first I want to just say(...) Charlie's death has impacted me profoundly. I did know Charlie and that's part of it, but I don't want to overstate the degree to which I knew Charlie. I want it to be, I want you to have a perfectly accurate understanding of where we were so that you can understand what it is that's really throwing me about this. Charlie and I were becoming friends. When I first became aware of Charlie, I did not know what to think because of course I wasn't paying attention to Charlie himself. I was paying attention to whatever it is that comes through with the algorithms being what they are and I have long been profoundly concerned about the Republican Party. So his tight connection with the Republican Party predisposed me to think negative things about Charlie.(...) But I came to know Charlie in the run-up to rescue the Republic when we interacted and it became clear to me that he was very supportive of the nonpartisan movement that was taking form, that he was not a dyed in the wool Republican though he obviously was on that side of the aisle. And the more I interacted with Charlie, the clearer it was that I had misunderstood him and misjudged him. That this was somebody who was really interested in figuring out what was true and bringing people together and that that was a lesson for me and it's not the only time I've learned that lesson where somebody I thought I had a bead on, it turned out, was much much greater than I had hoped. So Charlie and I were becoming friends. He in fact was one of a small number of people who rescued Rescue the Republic when it was in deep trouble. He bailed us out financially and he was going to be the closing speaker at Rescue the Republic. We were all very excited about that.(...) He canceled when he developed laryngitis which I learned after his death is something he was prone to but at the time his doctor had told him that he couldn't deliver that speech or he risked losing his voice at a critical moment in the campaign. But in any case we continued to work together and I think it's quite clear. I finally went back to my text exchanges with Charlie. We had numerous phone conversations with my text exchanges and just reminded myself of what they were and it was quite clear that we really appreciated each other despite coming from opposites of the political spectrum. Now I guess the first section of what I want to discuss here is why this feels personal beyond just the fact that somebody that I knew was(...) assassinated in an extremely public and terrifying fashion. And I think the first thing to say is that one of the things that was very special about Charlie was that his instinct in a moment in which we are polarized like few times before in history, his instinct was constantly to reach across the aisle to jump the divide to humanize those that are being dehumanized by others.(...) And I think it's why we got along and as I think our viewers will know it's also our instinct is to figure out what is going on on the other side and try to understand from their perspective. So that's a rare characteristic. It's very easy to fall into the polarization and Charlie was so good at not doing that. I didn't know him as you know and I've spoken to many people who also feel a deep sense of grief and loss and mourning despite not having known him which has been a strange thing in and of itself to grapple with which is I think where most of our viewers will be. But to the point that you're making right now, the exchanges that I have seen that he has with interlocutors whom he does not know on college campuses mostly also reveal a willingness to push back with a generosity of spirit but a rigor that is also also quite rare right now. That it's not just that he was overwhelmingly kind and gracious and recognized everyone's humanity which he did. Which we should all be doing and which many of us are failing to do. But he also and this is rarer yet and is also something that we strive to do,(...) strive still but strive to do explicitly in the classroom. And it does feel like he was making a classroom out of all of these interactions that he was in. When people came to him with views that he did not agree with, he told them no and he told them why and he appreciated when they engaged back with him.(...) But I know that many of the youth of America now are shocked when someone pushes back without conflating.(...) I don't, you know, what you're saying with who you are. That the pushback as far as I can tell never with Charlie Kirk and it is this is a rare rare characteristic.(...) There was never a conflation of I don't agree with what you're saying with I don't like who you are. The fact that I don't like what you're saying or I don't agree with what you're saying has no bearing on whether or not I still view you as a human being. And that that may be one of the rarest characteristics we see in public but I think in private as well now. And one of the things that made him made him so powerful in a very good way. Yes. And I think one of the positive things that have come out of this terrible tragedy and I will get later to why the tragedy is so terrible in this case. But one of the things the positive things that has come out of it is there has been a survey of the catalog of all of the interactions that Charlie Kirk had on these campuses and you can see this again and again. And I have a couple people may have seen them but I think it's worth a minute or two just to see what this looked like in action because it is the degree to which he was falsely portrayed to his would-be enemies was spectacular. It was the absolute inverse of who Charlie Kirk was. And so Jen would you play the clip of the the the young man who introduces himself as a conservative. I'm a gay conservative and I just want to kind of ask you like what do you have to say for people like me who kind of feel like I guess it's kind of hard for gay conservatives because there's not a lot of us. So like what do you have to say to other gay people who who need to realize like they do have a choice. Yeah first of all welcome to the conservative movement. I don't think you should introduce yourself just based on your your sexual attraction. No I agree. I like because that's not who you are. I like to be thought of as a person and for sure you are a complete human being and I'm sure you treat people well and you're studying something. So I want to get away with this idea that you're gay anything. I just think that we have gone a long way in the negative direction in this country where we act as if the most important part of your identity is what you do in the bedroom. It doesn't mean that much to me but if you ask from a perspective as a Christian I don't agree with that lifestyle but politics is about addition and multiplication. I imagine you agree with a lot of what we talk about. Right strong borders strong country and for that you know we welcome you to the conservative movement. Thank you. I just think that's so remarkable because you know Charlie had a religious conviction that does say something about the characteristic that this young man chooses to introduce himself with but it does not it it doesn't throw Charlie at all. He he embraces him he invites him into the conservative movement and you know that is not the exception that's every single clip you'll find. It's an explicit and honorable rejection of identity politics in a way that mostly the rejections of identity politics that we see feel screechy and ideological in and of themselves.(...) So you know we hear two other forms of identification in that interchange. We hear conservative and we hear Christian and and yet they are not being worn as badges. They are they are being invoked as things that these people believe and that is actually I think one of the distinctions between you know like we we do have things that are true about ourselves which could be called parts of our identity but identity politics which as we see there and so many other places Charlie Kirk explicitly rejected is mostly about characteristics that were actually immutable(...) and so you know characteristics that are actually immutable are you know or you know or so we are led to believe are not anything to be you know proud of one way or the other. They can they can be true of you but you know it is it is who you have come to be who you have made yourself to be uh that is that is the thing to be thinking about and presenting to the world and engaging with the world about. It it is the necessary characteristic because if we don't engage in that the trajectory is clear. Again there's more to say on that topic but there was another clip that struck me. I think many of us have struggled with how to deal with trans folks because obviously this has been used as a Trojan horse by activists who are looking to reach the protections for women's sports etc and so there is a way in which it's easy to lose one's compassion(...) by virtue of what a small group of people is doing in the name of a larger group of people. But even here Charlie does this uh and it's just evident I would much better for Charlie to speak for himself than to allow me to do it so can we play that clip. I just want to say I'm a transgender male what age should kids be able to get things like hormone therapy because I don't know what's true what's not. Tell me are you comfortable telling me your story? I've known that since like third grade and I'm currently 19 almost 20. I've known basically since then I didn't start going by like a different name until seventh and eighth grade. I just don't know like with the met like the whole medical stuff like what's true what's not what's helpful because I've heard so many different opinions. First of all thank you so much for that. Yeah of course. So I'm gonna have an opinion that very few people will ever tell you which is I want you to be very cautious putting drugs into your system in the pursuit of changing your body. I instead encourage you to work on what's going on in your brain first. I think what you need first and foremost is just a diagnosis just someone that is going to listen to what you've gone through listen to what else is going on. My prayer for you and again very few will say this I actually want to see you be comfortable in how you were born. Yeah. I know that you might not feel that way but I think that is something that you can achieve. I think that with the right team and the right people you don't have to wage war on your body you can learn to love your body. Yeah there's just something so powerful you can feel he's not you know reviewing what he's saying in his head to figure out what will play well. He's just having an interaction with this person who's struggling(...) and it's a very human interaction and anyway that's such a unique characteristic and the loss of one such person is a spectacular loss because of how easy it is to fall into a polarization from which there is no return. How sad it is that that interaction feels rare. I'm actually struck by that because I watched that and did not think it unusual but then I think about how many other interactions I have seen at least publicly like that and it's very rare. It is almost all of us just feel like we've been backed up against a wall. We're in a corner and we're told we have to know what we think. We have to have certainty. We have to already have our opinions ready and those things about which we are are pretty certain then when we start getting badgered it's real easy to just lash out to just lash out and I've seen it I mean I've seen it in places that I didn't expect it. I've seen just the desire to demonize those who might well have not have your best interest at heart but if there's a chance of actually reaching across that aisle and in this case I don't mean the aisle down the middle of congress inherently although that's one of the aisles that we should be reaching across but any any aisle any any boundary which is to say anyone that is not you and you know in some cases like that that young woman you know within there are many people who are conflicted within themselves and have been told lies by the pharma and medical industry that they can become something they cannot become through technological interventions so be it a conflict within yourself or or conflict with others approaching with with grace but also just trying to be honest in the moment about what it is that that you feel and there will be a lot of a lot of moments a lot of times when you just don't know you just don't know and uh and then it may be incredibly difficult to say I don't know what we're doing here I don't know what I think uh I'm gonna walk away and that that is a better a better move than to strike out strike back um hit at whoever it is that is that's coming at you you know and all and of course it's just fundamentally different once you're talking about the online world because so much of what is happening there isn't isn't a real person that you're interacting and it is it is no good at all it is not healthy in any regard to engage with those things yes and in fact the confusion that comes from the online effect either by you being shown things that are you know effectively an edit on the full richness of reality or denied the view of things causes people to reach conclusions that are upside down and backwards and have no idea that they've done it and so on the one hand you see that with this young self-identified trans person right this person has been told things that are not true about what what she can do with medical treatments and Charlie is doing her the service of being honest with her right so he's filling in reality where somebody has put together some sort of a fiction but here's the other thing that makes this particularly tough the same falseness that is being delivered with respect to analytical topics like you know can you change your sex or you know are the shots safe and effective which we will get back to here at some point soon but that false portrayal is exactly the same as the false portrayal of Charlie in this case right if you listen and unfortunately it has been very difficult to avoid the the celebration of Charlie's death by so many people who completely misunderstood what he was who understood him to be a villain in a manner that just simply being present with him would have told you couldn't possibly be right and I really don't want to make this about me but I will say one of the reasons this feels personal is that you and I have experienced this phenomenon of being portrayed as something that is completely incompatible with what we actually are being villainized being villainized you know you become a witch in the eyes of people who will then go hunt you and I was reminded in seeing all of these discussions of Charlie and his views on this and that just all of this false portrayal that I mean I'm sure many of the people who are saying this actually believe that that's who he was and that's why they're having the reaction they are but the false portrayal thing is so devastating to our ability to even be a people that is true(...) however uh and I I didn't pull this up but there are those who are receiving only that slice of media that that gross uh miss portrayal of who Charlie Kirk was who still retain enough of their humanity to remember that this is tragic no matter what and I what I'm thinking of and I don't know if Jen you might be able to find it but uh Jamie Lee Curtis um was interviewed by someone um and Jamie Lee Curtis who you know proudly thinks she has a trans child uh and um and is I believe a sort of a blue no matter who Democrat breaks down in tears about what happened to Charlie Kirk and and in the middle of it you know she says I think I disagreed with everything he stood for and I think that's not possible I don't think you could disagree with everything that anyone like I don't think that's you disagree with a golden rule right like a particular person yeah I I doubt that's possible and so clear and so part of that is you know kind of a desperate virtue say don't like don't mistake me for having you know cryptic I don't even know what you know republican tendencies um but I think it it also felt like honest like she really did had bought in to the media portrayal of him as someone who was hateful and bigoted and yet despite that she is crying truly(...) so desperate tears of of anguish of horror that anyone could consider this(...) action and could consider this outcome a good thing and that that should remind all of us no matter no matter what you think is true you can still retain your humanity no matter no matter what else what you're being fed no matter how awake you are or not or how awake you think you are and you still have so much farther to go because don't we all we can all still engage with every single other human being as fundamentally another human being well and this event is a perfect opportunity to check your model right if you think that the world is better off without charlie kirk because homophobe transphobe racist whatever you've been told go find the evidence of that thing you're going to find it impossible you will find that he had very clear perspectives but you're not going to find that evidence and so you know jamie lee kurtis maybe is just barely getting the hint that there is another world that she can't see based on what subset she is in contact with many other people aren't getting that message um i wanted to show a clip from uh the early days after the evergreen meltdown that i was reminded of in hearing all of this nonsense about charlie this is from vice news and i will just set it up in the following sense(...) uh i was interviewed by i think michael moinahan in the immediate aftermath of evergreen so this is a little over eight years ago a little over eight years ago 2017 he uh very professional i enjoyed the interview apparently privately he was thinking this guy can't be telling it right it can't be accurate it's too bizarre and the next thing he did was he went to evergreen itself to see the story on the ground and he contacted me and he said i can't believe it it's actually worse than you were saying which is you know one of the things that is hard to believe if if it's sufficiently out of touch then it's very difficult for people to believe it's happening and so anyway in the report that he ultimately filed there's an interview with one of the students who was prominently involved in the protests and riots at evergreen uh talking about me now mind you this is a student like all of the others who burst through the door of my classroom this is a student that i had never met i don't care what happens to bret anymore he can go and be racist and be a piece of shit wherever he wants to do that hopefully long term we can just weed out people like brad now i don't even know what she thinks she's talking about certainly not responsive to who i actually am and no but it was responsive to the narrative that had been created by the activist faculty on campus about which even people who did know better none of our students but colleagues of ours who did know better were silent when they heard that yeah and uh i think one of the things this this kind of attitude this buy-in to false narratives that is then followed with effectively cries to violence has been going on for long enough in this country now that was eight years ago that one of the things that we are seeing in the wake of charlie kirk's death is no one is putting up with it and of course that's going in that's veering into utterly inappropriate responses right like with with you know with calls to restrict speech no no that's that's not what we do uh but um the ramping up the buying into false narratives and the fear that is used to keep people who we thought were good silent cannot continue yeah it can't continue you've just seen uh a profound example of an impact and i will talk a little bit later about why the impact is so great even beyond the loss of this person and the uh the death of a father and husband and found lost family there's a greater significance here as many many have spotted um but yes we can't allow that process which so easily picks up ahead of steam to continue because where it ends is unthinkable for all of us um which brings me to the next element here i've heard some of the people who are celebrating charlie's death specifically draw a connection that stops me on my tracks they say well charlie not only was he a supporter of the second amendment but he said a certain number of deaths was a an acceptable price um for the value and (...) and i have made that point many times myself i know exactly what charlie was saying and the idea that he was suggesting that those deaths are tolerable is preposterous what charlie was saying was that there is a value of the second amendment i believe he would argue that the value of the second amendment is that it backs up the first amendment it protects the republic on which we are all depending from tyranny so yes anyone who says that is accepting that they might be the victim of that but the idea that he somehow deserved to be the victim because he believed there was a much higher price that would follow from the loss of the second amendment does not suggest that he was callous about anybody's death and of course anyone who knew him knew that he was not callous about any such thing so hearing the shallowness on the other side um people refusing it's a kind of inadvertent sophistry i think in most of their cases they don't understand that they are refusing to engage the arguments that are being made at full strength and they have an obligation to do so um as you point out the rhetoric you know when you start calling people nazis and fascists and white supremacists you are deliberately invoking a category that breaks sympathy right the idea that somebody is a participant in fascism or nazism or white supremacy means that those people are callous and therefore not deserving of human compassion you couldn't come up with something that was more diametrically opposed to charlie's actual perspective which humanized everybody and sought to to find their humanity and to make a connection in real time you know how hard that is in front of an audience to make a connection with somebody who comes to the mic thinking that they're(...) your foe that is that's not an easy job to do and you know carly was a christian in the best sense of that term he really you know not only did he talk to talk but he walked the walk and has now paid the ultimate price for it and so to just close out this piece i guess the final thing that makes this feel personal is that all of the folks who are stepping across these lines and trying to heal the country trying to get out of the terminal spiral that we seem to be in feel a personal jeopardy there's a risk in speaking out and we don't know whether the risk is from somebody who will believe some false portrayal of what sort of demon we might be in will act based upon it or somebody who will find their fortune threatened by the truth we don't know but everybody feels jeopardy and i will just say that among other things this assassin succeeded in um raising that to the top level of consciousness for a large number of people i believe almost all of them will ultimately come to understand that they must not change their attempt to do what they're doing as a result assassins can't have that power over us as a people and we have to find our courage whatever it is but i think um that was a sort of galvanizing aspect of this in a most unfortunate way so i wanted to also spend a little time on why (...) charlie's tragic and terrifying death is significant and this is a tough one because(...) one of the things that assassins successfully do is deny us any ability to know what actually might have been i think many of us who met charlie saw something so unusual in him he's so articulate so good at crossing boundaries you know he's only 31 he's not even eligible to be president he's already this talented and poised and and capable on you know on a impossibly large stage and you know who knows what might what he might have been at you know 35 at 40 at 45 we will never know so the assassin whatever the explanation for that assassin is let's say it's a confused person acting you know out of a misguided sense that he is saving the world from someone evil um you know it could well be worse than that could be a patsy also who stands in for powerful forces and puts the blame somewhere where they want it but who knows whatever whatever the assassin thought they were doing they have accomplished a radical shift in history now it is always possible to look at somebody who's young and very talented and think oh they might have been president someday and of course maybe they wouldn't have been we have to assume any individual is not likely to attain that office but in charlie's case he had such unusual gifts that i think it was actually highly likely and you know i think the best case from the point of view of what this could have been is that it was just a lone confused individual but either way this assassin has achieved a veto over our right to choose charlie kirk and his compassionate way forward somebody has vetoed our ability to choose that they have spoken as if they had the mandate of some majority of the country and that is impossible so one of the things that has to be true is we have to have a system in which whatever needs to take place whatever security needs to be provided must be provided so that assassins don't have this kind of power because if assassins do have this kind of power we're going to get the dregs we're going to get what's left over after they have eliminated those uh who they truly fear maybe specifically because of their compassion and i i just find that if you try to imagine what the size of this loss was you have to factor in all the things that charlie would surely have accomplished and might have accomplished in the future right none of those things will ever be he accomplished a tremendous amount at 31 but 31 is awfully young yeah i i agree with all of that(...) except for the idea that we that we can uh make ourselves safe from assassins uh you know at rescue actually right um they had some speakers and they wanted all the speakers to be be behind glass at rescue the republic uh and i remember you and i both feeling like but that's um that's that's not the way to interact with people and you know you can argue that you know standing on a stage with a lectern and a microphone you're already not interacting with people but um it's certainly what uh you and i want to be doing and you know and we did we went out and and and talked with some people in the audience as well separately um but the you know do you live do you live contained safe protected read only right therefore actually unable to learn from people what their experiences are and maybe you only hear it from your staff and then you're getting their take on it and they are modifying their take over time to you know to not irritate you with some people's takes and so they you know they edit it and end it and then clean it and you know you have to actually interact with with real human beings many types um in order to to know what is what is true of us and where we're going and what what what the diversity of our minds include and to be totally protected from assassins uh you need to be in a bubble you know a literal you know bulletproof bubble yeah i'm i'm as i'm sure you know i'm not arguing that you can be perfectly safe but i am arguing that we need to have the structures that make it very difficult for an assassin to accomplish this and certainly so difficult for an assassin to get away with it that um that the idea would be essentially unthinkable what we have at the moment is let's say an fbi that most of us don't trust that most of us feel is compromised by the same sorts of forces that have captured our other regulatory agencies we don't you know i don't know what happened to the butler uh investigation or the assassin the other assassination attempt on president trump those should be uh matters of national soul searching what actually did try to veto a presidency that has now come to pass something did um maybe it was two somethings but we have every right to know what it was instead we have an fbi that you know has gone zombie and has started assuring us that jeffrey epsdine for example definitely killed himself because that's what it says in the fbi file which um you know even if he did kill himself we need to see an investigation that gets there organically we we we don't have the apparatus absent an fbi assassins have a kind of latitude that um they mustn't have and that's what i'm saying is that you need this the thing that it says in the brochure about how our system works has to be a match for what we actually have we have to have the protections that come from the structures that we're paying for rather than a system in which you know anything and everything is unhooked by who knows what what power but this i mean this this of course is one of the one of the key revelations of covid for those of us who um thought of ourselves on the left for our entire lives uh is uh frequent calls for you know obvious need for regulations um suddenly seem impossible in light of the perhaps you know definitely difficult and perhaps act actually unachievable goal of having regulatory structures that are not corrupt so you know get rid of the department of education when i first heard that i thought what what what well given the state of education and given that it's not actually about asking americans to be uneducated but hoping that americans can become better educated by creating more localism by you know sending departments of ed back to the states and hopefully more local than that okay maybe better than uh faceless federal bureaucrats uh you know the the whole doge attempt uh you know as badly done as much if it was uh was again an attempt to just unhook bad regulations and bad regulators from american agency well i think we can sum this up our system has been corrupted from one end to the other and it needs the equivalent of a reboot where we all agree that an uncorrupted system that is actually working in the public's interest is should be baseline for everybody it should be completely unifying there's not a person uh in the country who should be against that and frankly you know if i think back to you know charlie never tried to convince me to be a conservative he knew damn well that i was a liberal and it didn't bother him at all and i think i know exactly why i think the basic point was well i mean exactly as i felt about him i can see you're a patriot i can see that you want things to be better for people all of them so you know we can differ over how we get there but we're on the same team and that really ought to be the overarching lesson um the second reason that this is so significant after the uh first reason being the radical shift in history that this assassination probably represents is that it also denies charlie the ability to grow again he was 31 years old and if i think back to what i thought was true at 31 and i think what i now believe to be true at 56 there's unbelievable amounts of growth have taken place in that time and i think not only was charlie growing but it is inevitable and you know in a world that is so confused by low quality low signal to noise ratio and false signal having somebody who their baseline was to try to get to the bottom of it no matter what it was and feeling you know courage to do that that's it's a necessary thing for us to have(...) uh and to be able to stop somebody in motion and freeze them permanently at whatever they thought at 31 is a kind of tragedy all all its own and it leaves this the third thing uh about why this is significant is that it leaves this incredible vacuum so charlie was you know on a trajectory he was doing things at a scale that almost nobody ever achieves and his sudden and unexpected death creates this vacuum which is going to be filled by other things and already i mean i'm not even saying that the desire to fill it is illegitimate but you know already we see you know uh jd vance (...) sitting in on the podcast and uh we see ben shapiro saying that he's going to pick up uh charlie's bloody mic and on the one hand i get it i think it's laudable to want to continue what charlie was doing on the other hand there's something about this that we have to think very carefully and i would say you know i was a bit troubled hearing ben shapiro say that he was going to pick up charlie's bloody mic because as i read the actual history charlie picked up ben's mic(...) right ben shapiro his thing used to be to go to college campuses and confront people across the aisle but he didn't do it in the way that charlie did it he did it in a very confrontational way it's not that i don't understand what he was doing and it's not that i don't even appreciate that he was willing to do it but it was done without the kind of generosity of spirit that charlie had and so it was also limited in the amount of good it could do for that reason(...) charlie took what ben was doing and reinvented it so that it was actually welcoming of anybody with the courage to get up at the mic and say to charlie what they really thought and so i do think the absence of charlie at the mic is profound and important and some of the people who lost something profound were the very people that charlie would have interacted with and would have revealed that there was you know a depth to what's going on on the other side that they otherwise would not be encountering it but i don't you know ben shapiro would have to recognize that he had been doing this in a much less productive way in order to pick up the mic meaningfully but on the larger point we are left with a vacuum that is unfortunate i don't believe the vacuum is going to be filled with with a with a proper replacement for charlie because there is no such thing we can set the goal of all of us leveling up in order to fill that vacuum and i think that that's a laudable a laudable objective and i hope we do it i do too um the fourth piece on the significance of charlie's tragic death is that it reveals something that you and i have been grappling with here for years now so the cartesian crisis the fact that we are starved for information that is trustworthy and that is causing us to not know what to believe and the problem is i don't think that that's a natural state that in general our ancestors have been able to assess the world mostly by looking at it and we because we are so dependent on information that comes through screens are now in a terrifying state where we know very little for sure and this is only getting worse with ai you know we look at the videos that emerged of you know the supposed shooter leaving the building um i assume those are what they appear to be but it's well within the realm of possibility to create such things and two years from now it will be child's play i would imagine i think um you have two things in interplay that are making each worse you have the cartesian crisis created um by um the fact that so much of what we think we know is mitigated through screens and therefore can be utterly manipulated ai making that problem much worse that's one thing um but you also have a social media circus uh a time horizon um that is(...) ever quickening such that you are required to have an opinion right now as soon as something happens uh if you are online much less wanting to speak to anything you need to know what you think even before you possibly could know what is true so there is on the one hand the problem that we can't actually know what is true unless we experience it with our own bodies and senses and on the other hand the demand ever more shrill and insane often not even from real human beings but too often also from real human beings to stake a claim state your position and then we can go from there and uh the the requirement that you know immediately say immediately and stick to your guns um all all three of those are in error uh we need to be able to remain in a state of agnosticism with regard to what we understand to be true what we think it means and uh how we therefore should go go forward and i think um and i think those of us who were watching this last week saw some evidence of that as um we became aware only uh that charlie kirk had been shot knowing nothing more about about it and um did not know how how to respond to it other than to be thrown by the fact that there was something huge happening in the world and that even if we had felt like oh we're gonna we're gonna you know pause for five minutes and come back after we have informed ourselves that would have been the wrong move because you can't you can't trust(...) what your brain tells you in the immediate aftermath of learning something strong emotionally strong even even if you have high confidence that it is true you need to let yourself settle we are almost all of us living in this like constant state of high emotional alert and it's not safe it's not sane and it does not create the best uh decisions um nor does it create coherent narratives and then once people have made a state to claim to what they think is true then they feel that they must stick with it and that's an error too but it's much harder to just not say anything for a bit than to undo what you've already said it also creates a vulnerability for us which(...) i have a feeling we will have to wrestle with this further at another time but if you think about just imagine the following we have uh enemies in the world and they may look at us and think they'd prefer a world in which the United States for example did not continue to exist but there's nobody on earth who can safely go to war with us so you might imagine that one play would be well invest instead in getting you to go to war with yourself in other words the cartesian crisis leaves us starve for a narrative that makes sense of the world and what i increasingly think is true is that you have two narratives neither of which two narratives neither of which makes sense but are satisfying to different groups and the existence of those narratives you know the narrative in which charlie kirk is some kind of nazi that satisfies one group and they reacted based on that story in the aftermath of his death and that meant that a lot of us got to see it up close you and i had seen it before targeted at us you know white supremacists what on what planet um so anyway point being we are definitely being fed material that causes us to reach certain conclusions in the most benign cases we are being fed information because the algorithm wants us to stay on the platform and so it creates a narrative that we think we need to keep paying attention to effectively it has us rubbernecking some particular you know would be car crash that it's portraying to us again and again in the worst case somebody decides to set us against each other for their own purposes because they benefit from us hobbling ourselves right how much better is it to get you to go to war with yourself than to go to war with you right so if that isn't happening it is going to happen and we need to become upgraded in our our skepticism of that which we see that causes us to say yes that's what i think right anything that reinforces our pre-existing biases needs to be thought about very very carefully and maybe that your pre-existing bias is right you know i certainly think that a lot of the stuff that we conclusions we've arrived at are true they're hard won many of them are reversals to things we used to believe which is part of why i believe them with some conviction but anytime the screens are feeding you what you want to hear you've got to be skeptical and anyway you know we definitely in the aftermath of charlie's death are on some kind of precipice where we're trying to you know it's very hard to have liked charlie and thought highly of what he was doing and not feel something just awful at those who are cheering and cackling and all of that stuff if they're even real how do i know right i'm sure there are people celebrating are some of them copycats celebrating based on portrayals that are fictional that somebody ceded into the zeitgeist so that people would cheer i don't know but let's put it this way in this case we do know what charlie thought because he lived it and we have who knows how many hours of him crossing the divide and trying to heal it and again what we saw him do over and over again was gently with due respect to the human on the other side of the interaction disagree yep he pushed back he was willing to push back in a way that too few people in any position of authority with young people parents teachers employers are willing to do anymore and i i know i know that when we were professors sometimes early in a program i would have a student come to me and say no one has ever given me critique before and sometimes that would come with some frustration and anger what what do you mean i'm not worthy i don't deserve critique if i deserved critique i would have heard critique before well no because the world has become soft and stupid and unwilling to make anyone uncomfortable even in the moment even though that is how you grow and so we saw charlie kirk over and over and over again in so many of these interactions i don't know how cherry picked they are i don't know if 90 percent of his interactions were sort of lovefests between him and the people coming to the mic i doubt it but i don't know you know i haven't i don't pretend to have surveyed most of you know a majority of or even a large number of the interactions he had but the ones that i've seen almost always involve him pushing back a bit offering what is effectively critique from which that person at the other side of the interaction can then learn can then take that back and say ah okay i have i have something from which i can become a more useful human being more interesting more whatever just something more than just (...) look around for people to congratulate me on already having arrived well i think we do know um that they were not heavily cherry picked in this regard because the whole approach was prove me wrong it was deliberately inviting people to tell him what he had wrong and then doing what he did so well which is you know uh sight evidence while leaving the person on the other end of the interaction uh perfectly humanized i've seen cases in which the person on the other end made that impossible sure but in any case where the person left that possibility open charlie did it and um so it was a beautiful thing but the other thing that is raised by your point here is there is something also marvelous i'm not sure i even knew this until after his death but charlie did not go to college so he was started turning point at 18 right he started turning point at 18 he's a beautiful demonstration of the fact that college is not where you become smart right i'm not saying a good college experience can't make a person smarter but it is not the thing that makes you smart education isn't education is a supplement and charlie was very very smart uh and in fact wise beyond his years without college and yet he was going to college to talk to these people who disagreed with them which you know that's a just a marvelous model um okay um i guess i had a couple other points i wanted to to make here uh i'm still i think it's fair to say literally stunned by charlie's death i don't feel that i have been myself since last week when this happened during our stream and right after just so you know right after it became clear i saw the video of what had happened to charlie(...) and i was shocked as many people were and there were reports that he was still alive he still had a pulse i can't imagine that that was true but nonetheless uh 20 minutes later it was announced that he had died and the whole thing was just a little bit of a shock and i was

shocked because i was shocked that he was alive and i was shocked that he was alive and i was shocked(...) the whole thing i know i haven't you know i haven't been myself for many reasons lots of stuff that i'm usually good at is fallen by the wayside i hear lots of people grappling with what they're feeling i must say i've taken the most solace from megan kelly i thought she's done a particularly good job of um grappling with her own emotions including profound(...) and totally understandable anger i must say i i think i haven't gotten to anger yet maybe it's not going to hit me but i think maybe maybe i haven't gotten to anger yet because i don't even know what it was it's very different yeah if this was a lone confused or deranged person then somebody who found charlie inconvenient and decided uh that the threat was too great of leaving him at the microphone and we may not know yeah we may not know and i and in fact this is one(...) thing unfortunately the state of our system is such that i think the evidence so far is strange(...) maybe it would be no matter what maybe the strangeness of the evidence means something but i think we can be pretty sure that this is going to be yet another event in which we americans can't even agree what happened um and i i struggle to even explain how bad that is for a population not even to share the same factual narrative of what brought them where they are right every time that happens it is like a jolt that shatters our collective sanity and i can't believe we're dealing with it again we have to learn how not to do that um and i don't even know what to do because you know the evidence the cartesian crisis is going to make whatever quality of evidence we get that much more suspect um with each passing year i i i think even the parts of history that we thought we knew are being unraveled so the idea that new things that happen will have clarity it seems like an impossibility and you know simultaneously an impossibility and utterly necessary for us so how do you how do you how do you reconcile an impossible necessity(...) i don't know yeah well i would say one thing is true and i think again the interactions that i had with charlie tell me that this is something he would resonate with the thing that made it very easy um to interact with charlie despite coming you know not a christian evolutionary biologists i'm a lifelong liberal but the simple fact that it was quite clear to both of us that the other was a patriot who wanted the best for people that's a huge platform to build an alliance on we need to build an alliance collectively on the idea that whatever happened whatever happened we should all want to know we should all want to know who decided to intervene in history and if that was a lone lefty who thought charlie was a transphobe let's find out and if it was a conservative who was confused about his conservatism let's find out and if it was something larger than an individual let's find out we should 100 of us be interested in knowing who did this and what their purpose was because at some level they have had a hugely disproportionate impact and we have a right to neutralize it okay um the final piece of this puzzle is something again i apologize for over personalizing this but i posted something on x yesterday saying that charlie wanted the mrna vaccines removed from the market and that we should get it done in his name and i got a bunch of pushback which i stupidly did not expect and which really kind of and which really kind of threw me for another loop the pushback was essentially how dare you words in charlie's mouth effectively or uh where exactly can i see these comments of charlie's blah blah blah you know effectively like people assumed the worst of me they assumed i was um using charlie for my purpose which maybe most weeks that wouldn't be a big deal to me but this week that really hurt so that leaves me with a predicament the predicament is this i have in this case i am lucky to have perfect receipts on charlie's perspective on this issue receipts that nobody else has and they are in the form of a text exchange that he and i had unfortunately i can't ask him if it's okay to show them obviously he's gone and under ordinary circumstances i would not be showing private text messages of somebody least somebody i cared about (...) to the public without their permission so i've wrestled with whether or not to show people this and i've come to a pretty unambiguous conclusion one i put myself in charlie's shoes let's say that the shoes were reversed and i had been shot and charlie wanted people to know what i thought on this issue which was for some reason not as well known as it might be would i want the text messages out there and the answer is so unambiguously yes it's a hundred percent yes so golden rule which i know is something charlie believed deeply in i'm doing this because i believe charlie would have wanted it because if i was in his shoes i would have wanted it that works for any version of the golden rule i've ever heard of and there are multiple evolutions of the golden rule the second reason i'm doing it is because it is about a very concrete objective we are not going to know what charlie would have thought about many things but we can know in this case what he thought should happen he was very explicit about it and we can get it done in his name and so let me show you the go ahead just before you do i think you've made it very clear but i want to reiterate that responding to trolls be they people or not online does not make sense you have the reasons that you have laid out to want to share your exchange with with charlie on the subject of the mrna shots but part of why we are in the madness that we are in is that people people respond to bad faith actors and it can be impossible to tell a bad faith actor from a good faith actor and so people feel honor bound to respond to all of them less less they miss some of the good faith ones i think you know certainly my my bias but i think a healthier bias in general is to is to not be responsive so i want i want you to put these out here in a way that is explicitly not responsive to to to push back because that's not that's not what this is okay but i'm going to push back slightly here because i don't know if the people who pushed back on me are real people i never do no sometimes sometimes you do let's just say okay if they're real people you're probably right but there's a substantial chance that either they aren't real people or they are real people responding to something that is inorganic right in other words whoever it was who took me to task for my saying that charlie wanted the mrna shots removed from the market was working for those who want the mrna shots to stay on the market in this case these are people who are working for those who would callously allow others to be injured and to be killed and my feeling is(...) they've earned this whoever they are even if the intermediaries are just suckers who are believing some online portrayal that's nonsense so again would you put up the text exchange so this is part of a larger conversation that charlie and i were having of course um so charlie in the aftermath of my being on his show to talk about the reason that the mrna platform itself cannot be made safe says we made great progress getting the shot removed for kids and pregnant women now it's time to get them removed totally from the market i say absolutely and congratulations charlie most of the kids and moms will never know but you and i do let me know how i can help with the next step or it's the last step he says we are doing holy work together with two exclamation marks and a smiling emoji and he says i would love to have you come to phoenix this summer for a long form multi-hour podcast so hope is that that will put any question of what charlie thought about these shots and what he was working towards to rest this is what he wanted he wanted the shots removed they should be removed and he was working towards that goal so in this case i believe it is perfectly fair to say we should get this done in charlie's name in charlie's name all right i guess the last thing to say is how do you get that done in charlie's name well one thing is to realize as we discovered or discussed on the podcast a few weeks back there is a well organized well resourced campaign to get bobby kennedy out of hhs we know this because the memo was leaked robert melone reported on it we reported on it and the answer is given what charlie clearly wanted keeping bobby in that office and in fact emboldening him and empowering him by showing that he has us at his back is the right thing to do(...) i feel very good about that as an approach um and i would simply say that should be among our top priorities in the aftermath of this terrible tragedy all right i guess um the last thing here is we obviously as the living always do have to figure out how to move on irrespective of how(...) terrible a loss is life continues that is its nature um if it had been somebody else charlie would be in the position of having to figure out how to do that and so we i will say we're lucky(...) um we at the point that charlie was killed you and i had plans to go uh to a an event out east and i feel like it was the right place to be to to process this um terrible turn of events and anyway you wrote about it this week and you wanted to talk about about the experience yeah i want to abbreviate what i was going to talk about um and just share a very little bit i wrote about it on natural selections this week and i want to share just the beginning and the end of that piece um i encourage you to go read the rest of it but um but by way of introduction um before i read the beginning and end of that piece which i do think comes back to um many of(...) the things that we have been speaking about with regard to charlie kirk and his his unifying role for people um this was an event put on by the brownstone institute of which you are a fellow the founder and president of which is jeffrey tucker who has just um written another book he's written many called spirits of america on the semiquincentennial i believe i got that right um which of course is coming up next year um and this is a this is a beautiful little book it's really it's i say a little not um derisively but it just it's a small book um and i i'm quite inspired by it he in turn was inspired by a book called the spirits of 76 uh written by eric sloane published in 1973 in which eric sloane this is a book that is out of print and which every tucker doesn't imagine it'll be in print again um identifies several fundamental spirits excuse me spirits of america including respect work frugality thankfulness agronomy time more a pioneering godliness um and on each of these subjects jeffrey tucker uh expands um rev revises and expands those themes and then he adds a few of his own uh things like enterprise physicality localism and forbearance um and um so you've been going to brownstone events for a few years now this is only the second um that i've been at uh and when we were invited back in the spring to go to this one i had no hesitation at all even though it was um it turns out that it would come just a few days before a big trip um that that we have planned and so the timing was not perfect for us but the invitation said simply um you know brownstone conference at poly face farm and uh for those of you who don't know poly face farm it's in the shimandua valley of western virginia and joel salatin is the uh is the farmer there now along with his adult son and many others and i first i first came to know about poly face farm in this extraordinary book uh on which i've taken off the dust cover so you won't be able to see it very well written by michael paulin in 2006 called the omnivore's dilemma a natural history of four meals and um i would love to spend some time with this book with with you uh our audience but um i want just to say on page 125 um joel salatin to michael paulin in 2006 called himself self-described quote christian conservative libertarian environmentalist lunatic farmer which now having met the man um i think i you know i i don't see him as lunatic at all but i see that many other people do and um and i just i love that description this book is extraordinary and um let me just let me just read a little bit of of what i wrote can you see my screen you can it's a miracle okay back to the land on generating self-worths in the shanandoah valley of western virginia poly face farm is a beacon joel salatin the proprietor has created a farm so vital the land itself seems to breathe unlike much modern agriculture which relies heavily on capital electricity and infrastructure poly face farm relies primarily on people poly face farm has beckoned me since 2006 when michael paulin's the omnivore's dilemma came out and i like so many others fell in awe with joel salatin and his farm i was a professor at one of the country's most liberal colleges then and when i signed paulin's book to my students they too fell for the promises therein that we can and we must remember what we have been what the earth is what we are all capable of and grow our food and communities with attention to ancient and actually sustainable ways back then salatin reports about 80 of the visitors to poly face farm were on the left politically tree huggers and granola eating hippies back to the land types who if push came to shove were hoping that the government would solve their problems these were people who were vile corporations but trusted the government now the ratio was flipped about 80 of the visitors to poly face farm are on the right homesteaders and homeschoolers and hunters back to the land types who are more likely to push the government away than invite its help in fact there is much in common between the two groups a hunger to return to the land our roots our home a desire to connect with self community and all of humanity the differences emerge when we start talking about who ultimately should be in charge of our fate am i responsible for my choices and must i deal with the consequences no matter what or ought there be a safety net protecting me from some consequences and if so how many when does a safety net become a security blanket in vandalizing in its comfort preventing adulthood and self-worth from ever blooming i then talk a bit about the farm in my uh in my family's history and that salatin his keynote posed the question how do we generate self-worth and his answer was successfully accomplish meaningful tasks i speak more about this again i encourage you to read it but to go to the end of the piece i wonder why the people who are showing up at poly face farm were of a different political bent than they used to be some people on the right who never trusted the government but were a little too eager to believe in promises from the private sector were once tech optimists and anti-agrarians in the chapter on agronomy and spirits of america jeffrey tucker writes that for much of his adult life he couldn't understand why anyone regretted a move off the land before exposure to ample critique of industrial food and big agriculture his thinking was what's wrong with corporate farming it's feeding the world and we would starve otherwise we need big companies huge machinery oceans of pesticide and fertilizer and consolidated supply chains we simply cannot and should not go back he's changed his tune since then but there's that but i also wonder if those of us who showed up 10 and 20 years ago and called ourselves liberals aren't many of the same people who show up now we're not democrats anymore though we're politically homeless or maybe we even call ourselves conservatives or libertarians now(...) we haven't changed or not much just as many on the right have woken up to the problems of big ag and big food in light of what happened to us all during covid many who thought of ourselves as being on the left have woken up too we appreciate the second amendment more now having seen some of what the government is capable of and we are more wary of regulations for the same reason (...) but we're still fundamentally interested in conserving the earth and its inhabitants people included we prefer our food real and the moneyed interests far away problem is real food has become ever more difficult to source and discerning who and where the moneyed interests are has become a devilishly hard game don't we all every last one of us feel the tug to be more connected to ourselves to other people and to the land itself work brings us together much has been said of the lack of work ethic among the young now but i believe that this is always said of the young perhaps more mothers and fathers need to be telling their sons and daughters that it's time to build fences because again we generate self-worth by successfully accomplishing meaningful tasks right on target and um i i think you've uh you've hit on a profound theme there is something fascinating and heartening frankly in finding this um i don't want to call it a center because yeah centrism is nothing but it's a it's a coming together it's and it's a it's a reshuffling right yeah joel salatin is a radical environmentalist and a person of faith and a believer in science and one of very few people who is a deep believer in science who i trust to understand the implications of a complex system and i say that having you i mean you see(...) how his use of science has transformed a land that when his father bought it in the 60s was a rocky ruined landscape it is now a fertile grassland on which he is growing cows and pigs and turkeys and chickens he calls himself a grass farmer because that's that's where it is well and and what he's really done and i i want to say something aesthetic after this but