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Speaker 2: Thanks for having me, Pete.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, let's uh, let's get in to this. So
I think I didn't. My reaction last week wasn't to
write anything. Why. I'm written out too many years of
just you know, being a part of a blog and
having to write something all the time. I'm just I'm
just wiped. I don't want to write anything anymore. It's
like I sometimes I sit down and it's just like ah,
but yeah, I understand the impulse of that when something
happens that you sit down and you write it. You
know it was my impulse too, So yeah, I guess
when you know, with the anniversary of nine to eleven
last week, you wanted to talk about the towers coming
down and you know how there were bombs in it
and the planes were holograms.
Speaker 2: Right, Well, this is a funny thing. I also write
for my day job, or as much as the day
job as I have anymore. So I got one hundred
percent get it. And as part of making myself right,
I've learned the best way to do that is to
make promises. So I promised the guys at the OGC
like hey, I'll get you an article by this time,
and as you can imagine, it was I don't know,
literally twenty four hours before I had, you know, let's
just say, forty percent of an article done. And then
this happened, and it was like, okay, well we got
to talk about this. And normally I try not to
talk a lot about the current twenty four hour news
cycle on my show for a number of reasons, which
is one, you can find that anywhere. Two, it really
decreases the shelf life of your product. It's not worth
talking about. And so fairly deliberately. You know, this was
written about twenty four hours after the event. So in
the piece itself, Kirkshot Discourse Killed, which you can find
on the old Glory Club substack, there's some things there
that I said that were true. As of the time
of writing, they had not captured the shooter. There was
no motive as of yet known. We were just kind
of speculating, I will say, by waiting twenty four hours
and having certain baseline knowledge, all of the assumptions were correct, right.
You didn't need to be no strudamis to figure out,
you know, why someone went after Kirk and so there
are a couple things in that right. As you said,
everyone has written a piece on this, everyone has reacted
to it. But I think there are a couple things
really to examine when we're talking about this, which is first, okay,
what can we learn from it? Obligatory it kind of
provisos getting those out of the way. It probably won't
surprise you, Pete. I wasn't a big Charlie Kirk listener,
you know, he wasn't really in my feed. But from
everything I've heard about and he was a good guy,
a nice guy, and what I did see from him
was refreshingly honest. He got made fun of, he got
griped infamously over the past four or five years, and
it seems as if well he took it to heart.
He changed, he moved on certain issues. And in the
last hours of his life, what was he advocating for, Well,
he was going hammer and tongs for this poor Ukrainian girl,
Arena who was savagely stabbed. He was sticking his neck out.
He was doing something that other conservatives felt too cowardly
to do. And I admire his consistency when talking about
racial discrimination towards white people, something that is not particularly
common in the conservative movement, so fair enough. Also, I
realize you've got some kind of former libertarians in your audience.
Ross Olbricht, he came out after Kirk was killed and
wrote a very touching memorial piece where he said, look,
Kirk was essential to getting him pardoned behind the scenes.
Never came out and took credit for it. And again, look,
those are two in instances, but I believe that they
indicate at least a certain amount of this man's character.
But let's let's go back to initial reactions. Well, I
think the first thing I thought, and many others of
us thought, especially on the radical right, is wait, really,
Charlie Kirk, because from our perspective, well, Charlie Kirk is
a moderate right. He holds milk toast opinions. From our
perspective and in the grand scheme of things right, looking
at the full political spectrum, that is quite true. He
was not this kind of fire breather. He was not
this sort of guy that you would expect to kind
of stick in the libtard Craw. I hate to say it,
I think the guy's hilarious, But if this had happened
to Alex Jones, you kind of get it right. They've
hated him for a really long time. If it happened
to you know, Candice Owens or Marjorie Taylor Green, you
could kind of get it right. Not approving of it,
but just say, like, that's someone who says things routinely
that are deliberately kind of poking the progressive sensibility right
in the face. But then you think about it a
little more and you're like, Okay, well, Charlie Kirk has
the same politics that my grandma has, right, he has
the same politics that the relatively apolitical, just kind of
normal conservatives who I live around, they think the same
thing that Charlie Kirk does. And we'll wait a minute.
If he was a legitimate political target, if he was
someone who it is morally excusable to kill, well, what
does that mean about not only everyone who agrees with me,
my grandma, the people around me, but also anyone to
his right, anyone more extreme than that. And that was
one of the things that I brought up in the
piece is that one effectively this has shown you, listener,
what they think of you. That you are announced, you're
a fascist, you are a representative of the ultimate evil,
which our resume is designed to fight, and so killing
you is morally excusable. You see this in the reaction.
Look the biggest, you know, most prominent TV hosts. Of
course they have to do the respectable thing. They have
to say. Of course, we condemn violence. You saw Obama
say it, You saw you saw Joe Biden say it.
Of course they do. It's what you know, soul as
politicians do. But you go even two steps down to
someone like Destiny, who Okay, sure he doesn't have a
network television show, but let's be honest, he has a
bigger viewership than just about any network television show. He's
a multi millionaire, he's a very influential person in progressive politics.
And does he do it? Does he condemn it? Of
course he doesn't. He refuses to. He sets this sort
of absurd standard of well, if Trump does exactly what
I want only them, why condemn it? We know what
he's doing there, right, we know what he's doing there.
And then you go beyond that to normal people, right
to progressive soldiers, to progressive doctors, nurses, teachers, and what
do we see cheering it on? You know, I'm sure
you've seen the kind of ghoulish displays, you know, mocking
Kirk's death, and you realize these people they hate you,
they hate your grandma, to be blunt about it, they
hate normal conservatives, and they view them as acceptable targets
for political violence. And that's a very disturbing thing. I
think that's why, obviously, other than the dramatic, gruesome footage,
other than the obvious sensation of a political assassination, why
this is stuck with people, Because it's a realization that
the sort of radio Rwanda propaganda we have heard for
decades at this point, well, they took it seriously. It's
sort of a miracle that this doesn't happen more, because
again and again and again in every op ed, in
every song, and every kind of awful Instagram infok graphic,
the buried premises people like this are acceptable targets for
political violence. What do you do you punch Nazis? What
do you do you shoot Nazis? It's not a dramatic
rhetorical jump, So that's a big part of it. I
think another layer to this, obviously, is that well, if
we're all Nazis, what's the point in playing or there,
except like, why why do we play to them. Why
do we accept their moral judge judgment? Why do we
want their approval? Because if Charlie Kirk is worth getting shot, well, okay,
isn't everyone? Why are you playing in their framework? Because
the moment you depart from it, and even as mild
away as Charlie Kirk does, well you're on the chopping block.
So to be honest, why moderate? Why play to their sensibilities?
Because but if you ever are a threat to them
in even a minor way, well, they understand that you
were an enemy. And from their perspective, which is not mine,
what do you do with a political enemy? You shoot
them in the neck. This is me reading their actions.
I don't believe I'm acting unfairly putting words in their mouth.
So what's another conclusion we can take from this? Well, honestly,
as you can tell in the sort of pithy title,
a discourse doesn't work because what did Kirk do? Well,
Kirk did exactly what you were supposed to do when
we were in high school civics class. How do you
change people's ideas? How do you change the direction of
the country, Well, you talk to people, you engage in
the marketplace of ideas, you go to college campuses, hypothetically
sit down for an open debate and throw ideas back
and forth, see if you can convince them that you're right.
And then as popular wisdom goes, people will look at
that say yeah, that makes a lot of sense and
adjust their voting habits accordingly. That's how you change things,
That's how you do politics correctly. Well, how was Kirk
rewarded for playing the game as he was supposed to?
Did he win? Was Charlie Kirk the king of America?
Did he turn the country around? Did he turn us
back to a nineteen fifties version of America? No? He
was shot. He was murdered in front of his children,
and four K video extremely gruesome, I might add for
engaging with the process as he was supposed to, doing
everything how you were supposed to playing the game by
the rules. And when we look at this in total,
I should say, if you listen to Tucker Carlson talk
about Charlie Kirk, and let's be honest, Charlie Kirk took
a lot of flak for continuing his friendship with Tucker
Carlson took a lot of flak for featuring him at
his events, well, how did Tucker describe his friend. Well, one,
he said that he wasn't particularly conservative, at least at
the end of his career. He understood that con inc
Had sold us all a bill of goods. So fair enough. Again,
he has moved. But when I call him a good conservative,
I don't mean to say that he is a house conservative,
like he's owned, he's on the plantation. What I mean
to say is he was playing the game by the
rules as set out for all of us, doing exactly
what you're supposed to do well, and again he was
shot for it. So those are the big conclusions, at
least initially, and I'll throw it back to you after
this peet that I take from this, which is one,
we're all Nazis, Two a discourse doesn't work, and three
we were sold They told us the wrong rules to
the game, right, that the correct way to do politics
was never supposed to result in anything other than them waining.
And obviously, you know a great deal of sympathy for
Kirk's family. It seems as if his widow is a
fiery woman who is going after these people looking for blood.
She's already intonated that she is interested in suing Jimmy Kimmel,
which good. I hope she takes him for everything he's worth.
She said that she wants to continue his fight. And
I think it's also important to note Charlie Kirk wasn't
talking to us, so I think we miss a lot
of his impact. But Kirk was incredibly popular with young people,
and when we talk about the shift of young men
to the right, you can't talk about that without mentioning Kirk.
And look, I am not a conservative. I am not
someone who really has a lot in common with conservatives
like Kirk. But let's also be honest. We're all on
a journey. None of us, at least not most of
us started uber based out of nowhere, just popped out
of the womb, you know, with Schopenhauer in one hand
and you know, a bust of the Austrian painter in another.
We started somewhere. And when I look at people like Kirk,
I see someone who, in very good faith, was trying
to move the Overton window to the right, was trying
to normalize discussion about anti white discrimination, normalized discussions about
things that just a few short years ago, three five
years ago, would result in you being kicked out of
polite society. And we've got to understand, Pete. Look, if
you and I are the narrow end of the wedge,
well there needs to be a wedge behind it. And
that was men like Charlie Kirk. And look in sort
of a dark sense, and forgive me if I'm out
over my skis here, but there is sort of a
dark irony in the name turning Point USA, because even
if his organization during his life was not a turning point,
his death certainly was. It feels as if one of
those many before and after moments where obviously, you know,
we were kind of joking about nine to eleven when
we started rolling, but it's always well where were you?
And it seems as if there was a before and
after COVID the same thing, and with Kirk, it seems
as if again there is a before and after a
turning point, if you will. But I've been going for
a while, Pete, I'll throw it back to you.
Speaker 1: Well, let me ask you this check the well, I
don't know if I even have a question. I just
wanted to point something out. You know, when you talk
about discourse being dead, I think we you and I
both know that it's been dead for a long time,
and when you you have to realize how far gone
it is and how far how deeply it seeded into
the regime, when people who celebrated this openly and publicly
basically start losing their jobs. And I'm not talking about
like the people who do the TikTok videos of them
melting down just so that they can get views. I'm
talking about the people who are genuinely like, well, you know,
I just lost my job, and you know, I don't
know what I don't know what's going on. These are
people who believe that they are so right. When it
comes to call it the zeitgeist. I know a lot
of people just hate that term because it's been so
fucked up. But according to you know, the spirit of
the age, that of course I'm allowed to celebrate the
death of a Nazi and nothing is going to happen
to me. You know. It's like I know that I've
gotten I know that I've gotten people this I'm speaking
in the third person for them. I know that I've
gotten people fired from their jobs because they have Republican views.
But that's all right, that's the spirit of the age.
That's what we are. How am I getting fired now
for this. This is like I mean, and I mean,
does this escalate because you see people getting fired? I
mean you, I mean, at least from what I've heard,
there are groups that are targeting right now because they
just don't have the manpower to do it. Forty to
fifty thousand people to have to lose their jobs.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So look, if we were in an ideal situation,
you know, if if we had Jesus Christ himself as
the King of America, would we want cancel culture? Probably?
Speaker 1: Not right.
Speaker 2: It's not cool, as Sam Hide said, it's kind of scummy.
But fundamentally, this didn't come out of nowhere. It's not
like right wingers woke up in the Year of Our
Lord twenty twenty five and said, hey, guess what, We're
going to start calling people's jobs and getting them fired. Uh. One,
we're really late in this. I use the example, you know,
speaking on the good Old Boys, saying like, look, if
you're if you're in a professional wrestling match and you're
a jobber, right, you're the Brooklyn Brawler, and you know
you're getting beat up, and then all of a sudden,
you know you're wrestling a partner pulls out a switch
blade and stabs you in the gut, like, wait a minute,
this isn't what we were supposed to do. And you
can choose two ways to react from that, which is
one you can complain and say, well, this isn't the rules, right,
this isn't governance, this isn't politics as I was taught
in civics class. Or you can basically say like, all right,
like we're going to have to fight. Then then this
has become existential. You have threatened who I am what
I am. And when we talk about that reaction, when
we look at the left and the way they talk
about Nazis and an existential threat to our democracy, that
is implicitly a call for political violence, because what they
are saying when they call you a Nazi is they're
saying you are an existential threat to democracy, to me,
to our nation. And look, you don't have to be
a legal genius to figure out what you're supposed to
do to an existential threat. Like if the crackhead with
a switchblade comes out of the ally Ali is an
existential threat to you, you are justified in mowing them down, right,
that is what you do to protect your existence. If
you will. And so if we find ourselves in that position,
if we find ourselves in a position where we are
being threatened and have been threatened first economically and now physically, well,
to be honest, man, turn them out is fair play.
We are we understand the stakes of this game. And
I think that this is a very encouraging sign when
we look at the right for my entire life really
before Donald Trump, and I don't want to kind of
give the man too much credit, but I think it's
fair to say the right has been the designated loser
of politics in America. That the game, the system as
it was assumed that progressives would ultimately get what they want.
The joke is right, Conservatives are merely progressives driving the
speed limit. They would get in power, pull their foot
off the gas, but keep going in the same direct action,
and ultimately they would faithfully, again like you know a
job or in wrestling, lose and take their pay day.
Their pay day was whatever they could collect from Red America.
That was what they got for playing. The mark for
getting beat up is they got to, you know, live
out their life comfortably off of the spoils of the
other parts of America. Well, look if you're going to
actually turn that around if you say, no, we're not
playing to collect the consolation money after we lose, but
we're playing to win. You've got to understand this becomes
an actual fight then, right, this becomes this becomes a
real wrestling match, right, not one with you know, shoots
and ladders and you know a fire extinguisher. It's an
actual fight, and that, I think is what is what
is happening in politics. So we look at this, right,
we look at cancel culture and we say, well, guess
what we can do that too, And some of it
is nakedly political. Right, you're going to take a hit
for this. You took one of our guys. We're going
to take you out. Another element of this that can't
be overstated is I don't actually want someone who thinks
it's cool to dance on someone's grave, operating on me,
enforcing the law, teaching my kids, even making my food. Like, really,
do you trust someone who is that cracked, who is
that morally depraved, to handle your sandwich? It is quite literally,
and you may have heard this phrase before. You may
have freedom of speech, but you don't have freedom from consequences. Sorry,
someone decided that was a cool way to organize society.
Someone decided that's what we were going to do. We
were going to bring a shank to this match. And
guess what. As you know many have said in condemning
Charlie Kirk, you live by the sword, you die by
the sword. And in an ideal society, in a society
that had a certain element of moral consensus, in a
society that had a culture that was in some way unified,
we probably wouldn't need to do this. But here's where
we are. Someone some half of politics decided we were
going to play revolution. And this is the consequences of
those actions. And when I say escalate, I'm not one
of these you know, boogaloo seventeen seventy six will commence
again civil war types. But I think you'd have to
be an idiot to look at American politics and say,
I think things are going to cool down in the
foreseeable future. I think we're going to return to normal.
I think it's going to be just like it was,
you know, right after the Cold War ended. Things are
just gonna be hunky door like. Clearly not things are
heating up. And let's not forget that before you know
Kirk was killed, there was another example of that Ukrainian
refugee arena. Well, when she was killed, what was the reaction.
Was it just that charge Kirk was such an execrable
political figure who was so hated that people wanted to
dance on his grave. No, this poor Ukrainian woman was
stabbed for the crime of being white. And what did
we see, effectively the exact same response, which is either
I don't care or good I got a white girl.
To quote aspiring astrophysicist De Carlos.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the uh what people? I don't think what people
are realizing? They don't the more so arena than Charlie,
or maybe maybe equally, but at least there is a
picture of it. The picture of that. Is it a
subway car? Is it a tram? What the hell is
it that she's in?
Speaker 2: They said it was like light rail, So I guess
like a street car. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Okay, so light rail, let's call it light rail. You
see a picture of who she surrounded by, and what
you realize is that the people who could have came
to her aid all look like the person who perpetrated this.
And you realize that the people who could have come
to her aid didn't identify with her. They identified with
the guy who did it. So not only do you
have this group of what Thomas calls you know, and
I'm leaving the whole Israel thing out of this because
I'm gonna need to see a whole bunch more evidence,
you know, I'm before before I go down that road.
And if I'm saying that, yeah, but when.
Speaker 2: You're saying infamous fan of Israel quanonas.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes. What Thomas said last night when we
recorded the episode we dropped last night was basically, you
have a group of people who everything surrounds their genitals.
That's what the gay lobby, the trans lobby, all these people,
it's just the abortion lobby. It all is around their
genitals and it has to do with sex, and they're
willing to kill people who say, you know, it shouldn't
be all about that. There's actually some other things out
there that might be important. Then you have a whole
nother group that we see who it's all about their identity,
it's all about their skin color, and it's all about, hey,
that guy looks like me. He may have just done
something really messed up. He may even just killed that girl.
But I'm not stepping into help. I'm not stepping into
help at least until it's too late. And the question is,
when you see Charlie getting killed and you see Arena
getting killed like that, and you can focus on two
groups within your society, how do you go forward as
a society when everybody when when people are literal enemies,
when they are literal enemies who are willing to not
only kill, but to you have a group around you
that is going to that is going to surround you
and go, yeah, you know that person, the system failed
that person. You know it's because of four hundred years
of slavery and they, I mean, how there's no way
to go forward. If there's anything that we've learned in
the last ten days, it's that we have warring factions
in this country who are literally willing to kill and
nobody's going to stop them because they have radical in
group preference and they're in groups are numerous and in
some cases politically powerful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that when we talk about why the
Conservatives are ultimately losers, it's because they see a path
forward of using the established rules of a functional version
of our system to fix the current problems. They assume
that well, if we simply act like things worked, they
will start working again. It's really not the case. This
is actually, weirdly enough, a problem you see both with
people who are into peaceful parenting and libertarians is that
they seek to act as if their desired end state
is already achieved. Well, I'll act like I live in
a high trust society that will produce those results. Clearly
that is not the case. And that's the problem when
you have no moral consensus where there are two diametrically
opposed factions. And this is really what we see when
we talk about politics, like what is capital p politics, Well,
it's when you have two groups where they cannot both
live life as they see fit. The classic example I
stole this from Wade Stotts, who's a very talented rhetortician.
He talks about if you're Amish and a gay land
developer wants to put in, you know, a gay club
in the middle of your community, Well, all of a sudden,
you have politics. Those are mutually incompatible goals. You cannot
both have an amish community and a thriving gay nightclub. Right,
one must give. And it's a silly example, You know,
I bring it up because it gets laughs. But either way,
that's what we have on a societal level, that you
cannot have both of these visions. And look, that's been
the case for a while. Let's be honest. The two
stories of America that you can read about in Yarvin
have existed for a very long time. But if you
have that conflict, but it is being sort of worked
out between a winner and a paid off loser, well, okay,
even if those two parties don't technically agree on the
ground level, it doesn't really matter. There's no real struggle
for control, simply a debate over how long it takes
for one side to win. But the moment that the
loser looks around and says, well, honestly, man, like, why
do would I keep taking this deal? You're going to
drive me to the end of my rope and leave
you with nothing. I think I'd like to win for once. Well,
all of a sudden, that becomes a real deal conflict.
And I think that's what we're seeing is people are realizing,
especially normal conservative people, that the terms of the game
are not simply the kind of negotiated defeat they are
used to. But it is a genuine existential struggle. It
is genuinely if we don't win, we will be treated
like this. This is how this is what our life
will be. We will not be They will not extend
the same gracious attitude that conservatives had often in victory
quote unquote victory if you will. And so I think
that's why so many people are disturbed by this as
they are realizing the stakes of politics. And look, it
didn't have to be like this. It was a it
was a series of choices. It was a series of
human actions that led to this situation. But looking at
the situation, looking at the situation, the state of play
as it is, you're one hundred percent right, there is
no compromise on this. One side will have to be defeated.
And when I look at people like is Stephen Miller,
who is is impressive to cram so much rage into
such a small man, going just hard in the paint, saying,
you know, the West must be saved. Burn these people
to the ground, you know, going after these groups with
rico charges, basically saying we will prosecute these people to
the fullest extent of the law. I see someone who
realizes what time it is I see someone who realizes
the threat that this sort of violence presents to to
be blunt about it. And on the other hand, if
we want to talk about old the old style conservatives,
the beautiful losers, as Francis would describe them, well, there
are a few better examples than someone like Bondie, right,
someone who is saying just this kind of incoherent nonsense
about hate speech and how we really want to secure
people's rights to printing out photos of Charlie Kirk. It's like, well,
this is one a horrible misdirection. This is really not
what anyone cares about. But also you're missing the stakes
of this game. You're missing that this is not simply
my ability to go to Pop Copy and demand they
print whatever I want. But this is a blow struck
at the core of what it means to be, let's
be honest, a sovereign niche. If you do not have
the monopoly on violence, if you cannot say extra judicial
killings are inappropriate, they are sanctioned, they will be pursued
to the end degree or are you really a government anymore?
And to me, I think that those two figures signal
the divide between those who realize that they are in
a real deal political capital p conflict, or those who
want to go back to kind of sleepy, humdrum version
of DC politics where conservatives, where right wingers simply bide
their time until they're out of power, raking in donations
from from flyover America and fiddling while Rome burns.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the whole thing, would Bondy really just that triggered me.
It triggered thoughts in my mind about just how how different,
how many different factions you have, even within people calling
themselves maga. You know, I made the point on Twitter
today that the Bondy puts hell, I don't want to
take this in an opposite direction and just point out
how out of the game a lot of people are.
The Bondi and Patel are clearly Desantus loyalists anything you
could see, because they it seems like they're working to
destroy the Trump White House. And yeah, I also make
the point that Desantus is obviously a big friend of Israel,
and then someone says, well so is Donald Trump. It's like, yeah,
there can't be factions. It's not like there could be
actually factions within those things working against each other. You know,
like there could be some that have certain interests because
ignoring Stephen Miller, you know that his background and everything,
he seems to be the most base person out there
who's saying the right things, who's in in the administration,
and you're right, Miller is speaking the language of what
Sam Hide said. And Sam Hyde, you know, is another
one who I can't believe that Thomas had to address
this last night that there are people who were saying
that Sam Hyde was not sincere in his sentiment towards
Charlie Kirk, like that his tears were insincere. It's like,
if you think that you really shouldn't have anything to
do with politics, you've either been doing this too long
and you've just you've lost your you've lost your humanity,
or you you know, we live in the age of
total politics. There are people who are paying attention to
politics who don't have don't have the temperament for it,
don't have they don't have the constitution for it. And
that goes for people who've been talking about commenting on
politics for a really, really long time, like people on
our side of the Great Divide who celebrated Charlie Kirk's
death because Israel, because that's the only thing that they
can concentrate on. That is there one thing that they
don't that they I'm going to go down a path.
But the what Sam Hyde said was, and when he
said it, I agreed with him. You literally have like
two weeks of momentum and if there isn't if steps
aren't taken to basically go full And I hate to
say this because it was a failure, you know, rooting
out terrorist cells like Iraq or Afghanistan here at home,
where there are people who know where they are. Local
law enforcement knows where these people are, knows where they're
hold up. If they're not willing to go and do that,
and if you're not willing to see anything within the
next two weeks, even if it doesn't accomplish anything long term,
it's pretty much done. And this administration is pretty much,
in my opinion, to be ignored. And you know, maybe
there's some people in the administration who are doing good work,
but the administration as a whole, there's no real points
to support it, to support anything they're doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that there, I get it right. A
Rico case takes a long time to put together one
hundred percent understand but also from my perspective, I feel
like I've given the Trump presidency the benefit of the
doubt a lot. I'm not one of these reflective Trump haters,
and so in a situation like this, where it is
a I mean, as awful as the event is, it
is about the best political opportunity you could hope for
being given to you on a silver platter, where it's
Trump's would be gold in that case if you fumble that, look, man,
I'm not going to give you, as we did in Charlotte,
your fifteenth chance. You know, sorry, man, I could notice
a pattern, and it's especially frustrating for a man like
Donald Trump, who sort of built his media reputation on
firing the wrong people and hiring the good ones, for
him to be so unwilling to fire these incompetent members
of his own cabinet, right BONDI, who has been largely
shooting herself in the foot for oh, I don't know
about the last nine months, just over and over and
over again. At a certain point, I'm not being cynical
when I say that this seems like, if you were
not taking an action, this is part of the plant.
From your perspective, this is a feature, not a bug.
When we look at these organizations, we've understood people like
you and I. I'd also recommend the work of Mike Shelby.
You can find him on Twitter, who tracks Antifa. These
organizations have been around for a very long time. They've
organized in public on places like red it around, you know,
the SRA, the Socialist Rifle Association, the John Brown Gun Club,
and others, but also on Discord, which, again, if we're
talking about living in the greatest you know, digital panopticon
the world has ever seen. The fact the administration cannot
do something to discourse a discord rather is absurd. So
let's examine discord. A lot of people use it. It's
sort of ubiquitous as a chat app. When I was
in high school. Is the way that you organize playing
games with your friends. It's still predominantly what it's used for,
but for those who aren't familiar, it lets you have
your own private group chat on a server, right, you
can make channels. People use it for work. Most people
just use it to hang out. It has sort of
taken over what forums were in a previous version of
the Internet. And also in addition to that, Discord is
the center of not trying to be grotesque here, but
of child exploitation and grooming on the internet, so much
so that a Discord moderator for people under about thirty
is shorthand for a pedophile is It's almost a hackneyed
joke at this point, every joke that you know, my
parents' generation made about Catholic priests, their children are making
about people who spend a lot of time on Discord.
And in addition to that, obviously you have the you know,
the grotesque crimes against children, but you also have a
large portion of the trans community. I realized that as
a Venn diagram that might just be one circle. But
point is, there's a lot of trans stuff that goes
on there, much of it connected to grooming. But also
these antifook groups, right, these violent terrorist organizations, many of
whom are doing things that are incidentally very illegal anyway,
And well, what is to be done? It seems as
if the administration, the previous administration, has largely done absolutely
nothing about Discord. And look, you could say, well, it's
not really Discord's fault. Look at all the crimes that
are planned over the phone. Maybe they just don't know,
all right, Well, how does Discord treat the problems they
do care about? For instance, dangerous right wingers. Are you
in a private group chat with your friends dropping the
hard r instant ban You're done forever? Are you organizing
a right wing event? Well, just mysteriously accidentally, we didn't
do it on purpose. All of your names and identities
have been linked to the press. So they do have
the ability to do that. They do have the ability
to act and to take things down or to forward
them to the authorities. And so again, even if it
was not deliberately endorsed, was not planned by the staff
of Discord, well, it certainly has their tacit approval because
we've seen that they can act when something violates their
internal moral code, and they have not acted in this
case or in many others. They have not acted against
the you know, the shadowy you know Discord groups connected
to you know, passing around like gore and stuff films
or you know, footage of child sexual abuse, any of these,
you know, horrible things. But when our friend Thomas creates
a discord, it's down in two days. And look, you know,
Thomas's fans can be a bit rowdy, but I doubt
they're doing anything like that. Again, it's clear that this
is another institution which is completely and totally ideologically captured.
And if you are the regime, if you are the president,
if you are the most powerful man in the world,
and you allow a company, even a big company, to
thumb their nose at you and to say no, I'm
not gonna do anything about it. No, the terrorists, the
violent lunatics killing your young fathers in public, I'm not
gonna do anything about that. Well, are you really president?
And it seems as if no, because you don't have
the monopoly on forced you don't have control. And again,
I think it's important to say, when we're talking about retribution,
we're not talking about violence, right, We're not saying that
people who wish death on Charlie Kirk should be you know,
dragged out into an alley and beaten. We'll go with that.
We're not saying that because look, let's draw a distinction
between force and violence. Violence is basically force in a
state of failure. If you have control, you don't need
to get violent. Sure, ultimately, you know, if someone is convicted,
there may be you know, a form of corporal punishment.
That's not what we're talking about here, effectively, what we
are asking for what ought to be done. The just
thing to do is for these people to meet righteous authority,
to meet the consequences for their actions, either in coordinating
for this murder, either in celebrating this murder, or in
when I think this is very important, I included this
in my piece for creating the conditions for creating the
rhetoric which led to this climate of violence, which led
to someone feeling that Charlie Kirk was a fascist, that
Charlie Kirk was so dangerous to his community of button
married freaks that he needed to be shot with a rifle.
And again, this is not this is not you know,
pie in the sky thinking. We're not asking for something
that hasn't been done, We're not asking for something that
isn't reasonable. What we're asking for is simple justice, the
kind of justice that rulers from time in memoriam have understood,
which is that if you are to be in control,
you must be the final decision maker, you must have
the monopoly on violence. And sadly enough, it seems as
if the administration, it seems as if Trump is unwilling
to stand up and accept that responsibility. My only hope
is that he changes his mind.
Speaker 1: Well, not only does not going after the disco, going
after Discord and their servers and these people specifically, Yeah,
what it does is it lends them legitimacy. In their
own minds. They they're like, oh, well, these people who
these geniuses who started this platform, you know, and who
are becoming rich off of it, they're protecting us from
the government. And in their ssri addult freak show minds
they're like, oh, wow, no, because this because these private
people have here, this private business which they're not supposed
to like, protects us and is giving us cover. That
means we're the good guys. That means we're the legitimate
ones and everyone else isn't. And that is people don't.
People don't understand that how important legitimacy is in the
minds of everyone that's alive. People you instinctively still you
hear something, You hear about a story somewhere, and you're like, Okay,
where's a good where's a legitimate source that I can
get this from, you know, And that's just it's what
we look for. And people have no idea that by
not taking down, by not taking down these networks, not
only discord by not taking down the networks, by not
taking down anti fib By not taking down at this point,
looks like the DSA is involved. By not taking them down,
you're just legitimizing them, and their members feel more legitimized
by it. Now they could become radicalized if you take
it down. But I mean, how much more radical can
they get than they are now? They're fucking shooting people.
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's important to mention that obviously this
is a dramatic escalation in violence. But you know, let's
look back what six weeks ago to the ambush on
an ice facility in Texas where ten Antifoo aligned shooters
basically set up an ambush and a parking lot. I
was talking to our mutual friend Clay about this, and
he said it was about as perfectly planned not executed
as you could hope for. You know, in a situation
where you have rifles, you have optics, and you're attacking
guys with handguns. Well, they stuck them in the middle
of a brightly lit parking lot at night and sat
one hundred yards away, right too far to reliably hit
under pressure with a handgun unless you're really talented. Where
you have a perfect rest, you can see them, they
can't see you. You've got ten people there. Okay, fair enough.
They weren't that good at it, you know, they hit
one guy, didn't kill him, and then seems to have
lost their nerve, ran off and all got captured. Okay,
so it wasn't the most successful thing in the world.
But that is a major escalation from anything we'd seen previously,
you know, going from you know, throwing a piss bottle
at a cop or maybe a molotav at a platation
up to you, a ten person l shaped ambush like
guess what, bucco, we're in Vietnam. Like, that's a major escalation. Similarly,
when we're talking about legitimacy, there are a couple things here,
which is one and I think Hyde made this point,
and Hyde's show on this was excellent. I consider it
required viewing for any of our guys. I am a
fan of his stuff and have been for a long time.
But even if you aren't, check this out. It's hided
as best unusually serious and very poignant. But one of
the things he was talking about is that, look, obviously
the person who did this needs to be punished. And
after I make this point, I'll return to why I
think he should be punished to the fullest extent of
Utah law. But it's almost more important that the person
is caught quickly and competently, right, that they understand that
if you try to do this, there is no chance
of you escaping, where in this case the FBI seems
to have sort of fumbled the back. They've bumbled, they
didn't what they were supposed to, and so fair enough,
I guess it took less than two full days for
the guy to be brought to justice. But how was
he brought to justice? Well, basically it seems as if
his dad and maybe a pastor or a priest were
not entirely sure recognized the photo and said, hey, Bud,
you got to turn yourself in. This is not exactly
a no knock rade. So because why does that matter? Well, one,
it's a show of force, certainly does that. But also
you've got to understand that when these people imagine themselves
in that position, they say, well, he almost got away
with it. I bet I could, especially if what seems
to be the case is the case, which is that
this was coordinated, that were multiple people involved. If you
look at it and say, well, if he had a
better driver, or if he had done things a little different,
I bet I could get away with it. That is
going to encourage copycats. Whereas if it is an immediate
response that no, you will not get away, the FBI
will hunt you down and find you wherever you are.
That's a deterrent. Similarly, when we talk about punishment, Utah
does permit capital punishment. I think it They have, you know,
one of two methods, lethal injection or a healthy dose
of thirty thirty to the cardiothorastic cavity. But either way,
this man deserves to face the full consequences of the
law for a couple of reasons. One, the blood of
the innocent cries out for justice, right is Christians and
you know, men of the West, we understand this. But
another one is that, look, we've got to understand that
it seems as if this guy was a bugman loser
keeping him inside for the rest of his life, especially
given his sexual proclivities. Is I mean, is that any
different from how he lived? Let's be honest, and again,
we don't want to make this man into a sort
of an uncle Ted figure, right, a guy we can
you know, look at in Supermax and sort of view
as our our lovable uncle. He needs to face the
consequences for his actions. And one of the bizarre injustices,
the bizarre indignities of modernity, is that even if convicted
and you know, given a life sentence, it's likely to
take ten to fifteen years and you know, two to
five million dollars of our money, Pete, to make sure
that he goes out the way he ought to. This
is a topic I realize it's probably a little dicey
to talk about on the internet. I believe in the
law exactly is written in the state of Utah. I'll
leave it at that.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, people need I think we've gotten to the
point where people want finality. I think a lot of
people are hungry for you know, just come out and
say it's hungry for blood. They are. I think a
lot of people are at the point where they don't
care if things are in a certain way anymore, if
they're done in a legitimate way. And yeah, I want
to see things done in a legitimate way at least
when it comes to this, when it comes to everything,
I want to see it done in a legitimate way,
but that legitimate way is going to take will and
you know, to go back to the fact that you
still have these networks out there, these networks are still operating,
and you know, according to Mike Shelby, he doesn't really
see them escalating, not yet. This could be something a
reaction to it could be something you just never know.
But if these networks aren't destroyed, we're we're looking at
living in a situation like Italy's Years of Lead. I
just re released an episode I did on that a
couple of years ago. We're looking at like the early
nineteen thirties Spain, where people are just people are just
taken out, where you're just it's it can get to
the point, unfortunately, and especially when the country is so
divided and you have so many groups that have just
closed ranks, that somebody gets taken out and the only
group that cares about it is that group, the group
that that person belonged to. And yeah, it's comes a
time when you have to look at certain groups and
they have to be legitimately targeted and legitimately their power
has to be absolutely destroyed from the top down, and
their worst elements have to be dealt with in a
very legitimate way by state actors. And you know, I
just don't know whether we have people who have the
will to do it, mostly because the system has been
set up up until now that these people drive the
narrative that these people are the coddled ones, that these
people are the golloms, that these are the people who
you know, Uncle Ted talked about in the systems need
at trick about that they just basically become the state
where they can do as they please and get away
with it, and or you know, you can invoke San
Francis and you know, talk about a narco tyranny. But
until a narco tyranny is destroyed and is looked down
upon as much as you know, you look down upon
child molested, you know, anyone who's promoting that, is promoting
child molestation or anything like that, we're we're in chaos
and we're basically headed toward. Yeah. I wouldn't say a
mass civil war, I don't think that that's possible anymore,
but definitely skirmishes like the Haymarket riots or like the
years of Lead or you know, like the troubles.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I just want to say mutual friend of ours,
Carl dol wrote a very good essay you can find
it on substack called it often rhymes but it doesn't repeat,
comparing our current moment to the run up to the
Spanish Civil War. I highly recommend that he's been on
both of our shows a number of times. Read that essay. Look, man,
I think you're one hundred percent right, because you've got
to understand actions produce consequences. It's very basic. But when
there is a rampump in political violence, it can and
often does. The number of events that you've mentioned lead
to a cycle of tit for tat violence. You hit
one of ours, we hit one of yours, and in
an immediate sense, on the balance sheet of a conflict,
that makes sense. You could say that those actors, within
their bounded rationality are acting correctly. But look, man, we
live here. We don't want to devolve into political violence.
Lady of Shalot Rip she did a great episode talking
about growing up during the troubles, what that was like
for young girl, and look, I liked her, she was
a friend, but I wouldn't wish that on anyone, especially
not a countryman of ours. We don't need to do
this it's something that can be prevented. It just requires
a decision. It requires a leader. It requires someone to
like Alexander, step up to the Gordian knot pull out
their sword and chop in half, say the buck stops
with me. We are this is no longer acceptable. We're done.
That's what it takes. As we've been, you know, memed
into oblivion. You can just do things, and this is
something that can be done. Not to say that it
isn't difficult, not to say that you won't face a
pushback from within your own institutions, but to say this
is a problem that can be fixed. There are people
in power right now who can fix it. The idea
that this is beyond the scope of human possibility is
it's absurd. It's so clearly not the case, because just
like with Discord, we've seen what the FBI, with the DOJ,
what our massive, absurdly large security apparatus can do when
it wants to, when it wants to make someone's stay miserable,
when it wants to pull an organization apart, it can
do that. And if you don't, not only are you
massively increasing the likelihood of you know, the kind of
civil conflict you were talking about. You were deciding I
don't care enough. You were deciding it isn't worth the effort.
You were deciding that it's not worth pursuing justice, isn't
worth it. And if that's your answer, fair enough. But
you've lost my loyalty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't know that
there's much more to be said right now because there's
nothing that you and I can do. We can scream
as much as we can into these microphones, but we
don't have the power to do that. Maybe there's someone listening.
We know there's people listening. Come on, please just step
up and do this, because we're not going I mean,
this is not going to be a place where you're
going to want your children and your grandchildren raised in.
You're going to be it's going you're going to be
like South Africa, where you are going to have to
build gates and electric fences, and you're going to have
to protect your house, and you're going to have to
bulletproof some things, bulletproof your house, bulletproof your vehicles. I mean,
that is the direction we're heading in. If these people
do not step up and eliminate I mean eliminate these people,
and I don't care what that is. Just do it
under the do it under the legitimacy of the state.
And if you don't, first of all, you're not gonna
you're not gonna have the support of the people. You're
going to lose the support of the people, and you're
whatever legitimacy you have is gone. And two is just
it's not going to be safe for you. I mean,
Charlie Kirk, who who's next? Who's next? I mean it's
I mean, I'm not saying if they can get to
Charlie Kirk, because Charlie Kirk doesn't have secret doesn't have
secret service, but you.
Speaker 2: Know a lot of it who does have secrets.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but a lot of the people in this government
love the fact that they can go out to nice
restaurants and they can go out and they can be
in public, and that they can be whatever side you're on,
you're sacrificing that for the future. You're you're looking at
not being able to go out, or not being able
to go out with an armed presence, not being able
to go out with armed Yeah, with armed security, if
you don't already have it, If that's the way you
want to live, okay, then fine, go ahead. It's going
to affect you. It'll affect you less than it will
than normal person, but it's still going to affect you.
And nobody's going to nobody's gonna give you, nobody's gonna
take you seriously. And that's all these people care about
is being taken seriously. And that's that's where we are.
It's just the word. We've talked about a lot, and
this is legitimacy, and things need to be done legitimately.
And that's gone. That's gone after this. If you don't
destroy these people, it's it's done. It's over right.
Speaker 2: It's a it's a simple binary. There are two paths forward.
Either you acquiesce, you roll over, you bite the pillow,
you take it, or you decide we want to win,
we want to exist. And it's that simple. There. There
are two paths ahead of you, and for those in charge,
they are the only ones who can make that decision.
Speaker 1: All right, Jay Burden, tell everybody, Shill, tell everybody where
they can support your work and find your work.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the article we've mentioned is over at the
Old Glory Club. You can find them on substack. They
publish a great many fine articles, but my main output
is The Jay Burden Show, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, anywhere you
listen to podcasts. If you want my episodes early in
ad free, you're gonna have to throw me a few bucks.
You may be familiar with this business model. I shamelessly
stole it from Pete. So if you think what would
Pete do? But slightly worse, it's the Jay Burden Show.
Check it out.
Speaker 1: I didn't a response to that. All right, Jay, thank you.
I appreciate you.
Speaker 2: Sure thing man,