Al Zone Media.
I'm not Robert Evans. I'm not going to start this episode with a horrible noise. Welcome to it could happen to hear a show about things falling apart with me today, Mio Wong, James Stout, I'm Garrison Davis.
We have never as a society been this Year's of lead paint as we are now.
Oh my god.
Yeah, it's not great.
Speaking of things falling apart. The lead paint in my room is crumbling. It's probably great things to my brain. Wonderful, love this, love this so okay.
Most a lot of this episode is going to be about the Charlie Kirk assassination and everyone's reaction to it
and everyone's sort of losing their minds. But I think that the place that we want to start is with a little bit about the concept of the years of Lead Paint, which was developed by friend of the show, Vicky astro Wall, to explain something I feel like almost i've once forgotten about, which was right after Trump got elected, there was that car bomb outside of a Trump hotel that was like a tesla that was a right winger who was trying to get everyone to like do the Purge, Yeah.
The cyber Trek, former Green Beret guy.
Yeah, And this is the kind of thing that you would have seen during the original years of Lead.
Yeah.
So for people who don't know what the original years of Lead was, because this is becoming a thing that people are using to understand what's going on now, and I think there are problems with that that we'll get to.
But the original years of Lead are this period from I mean that there's you know, you can you can start in a couple different places, but like roughly sort of like the sixties through the eighties, like early mid eighties in Italy that are this period of really really intensifies in the seventies is really really intense period of political violence in Italy. It is largely a right wing reaction to this massive series of uprisings in Italy. I mean, the whole the whole sixties in Italy are a time
of incredible sort of turmoil and left wing uprising. There's I mean, I think there's first factory occupations are like sixty five, but there's the fact there's the massive factory occupations in nineteen sixty eight, which are sort of a global phenomena. But then also the next year, there is an Evans called and this is literally the term for it, the Hot Autumn of sixty nine, which.
I'm not even gonna really a.
Nice great yeah, which which was this massive like a second series of like you know, workers taking over factories and starting like factory councils, and like, there are so many communist factions that, like the communist faction that's doing this stuff, they have mutated to a point where they're almost effectively anarchists. So this is what's called the autonomists.
And this has becomes like a major influence on like American anarchism later and in response to the fact that these people very nearly on multiple occasions, like very nearly, take Italy, a combination of rut wing fascist groups and organizations inside of and sort of parallel to the Italian government developed this thing called the strategy of Tension, which and I think this will to some extent sound familiar in terms of what's what's happening right now, which is
this strategy of using terrorist attacks and using political violence to show this like fear and panic and chaos that would cause people to turn to the state for safety and cause people to turn specifically to like a stronger, like more fascist and then eventually just a straight up fascist state that would permanently destroy the left and you know,
like restore the power of the Nazis, et cetera, et cetera. Well, I mean that's us selling these people Italian fascists, the og fascists, well, and also neo fascists too, because they're these people are very weird Italians.
Yeah, these people are Italians.
Yeah, yeah, he said, Kisses. One of the big opening things is that the Piazza Fontana bombing, which is this massive bombing that kills nineteen people injures an unbelievable number of people, and it is immediately blamed on anarchists. There's an anarchist named Giseppe Pinelli who he's among like eighty anarchists who arrested. Almost immediately, he like somehow falls out of a four story window of a police building while he was being interrogated.
Yeah.
The Italian state, which will go on to admit a lot of the shit that it did, maintains to this day that he just got tired and fell out the window himself. I'm gonna let you try your artus.
I think this guy died.
I mean a lot of a lot of anarchists are lazy. I can see, I can see it happening.
Yeah, there is a good play that I took part in during high school called Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Foe. Yeah, which you can enjoy.
This is the most like James backstory moment ever seen before. This is wild. Yeah, WHOA someone, someone update the icy HH wiki page James backstory. This is great. Yeah.
In my theater era, who did you play? I can't remember? It was tragic twenty years ago.
You should you should have remembered.
Oh, I know. It was very fun. We had a good soundtrack. It was very enjoyable for me and my friends, and I'm sure all eight people who watched it also had a wonderful time.
So in less fun times, So this bombing was actually carried out by a group called Ordine Nouvo, which is it's literally new order fascist groups only have four names. And this is a group that was aided by a combination of Italian intelligence and this thing called Gladio, which was this American netwill sort of stayed behind networking case with Soviet invasion that had all of these weapons, cashes, placed around the country that's eventually sort of repurposed into
these fascist terror cells. And they do a lot of these, right, They do a lot of bombings and they and they mostly blamed the left for them. Probably the most famous one is the Bologna train bombing, which killed like eighty people injured a huge number of other people, was done by a kind of like like another fascist group.
Right.
This is also a period where like there is real left wing violence. Right, the left is doing like like well, one of the things they kidnap bosses and have like show trials of bosses all the time. They love doing this factory bosses.
Just like in the Dark Knight Rises by Marxist historian Christopher Nolan.
God. I see, I thought you were gonna say, just like cancel culture.
But just like just like what the right's doing right now for anyone who posts about Charlie Kirk.
You know.
But but there was also stuff like like for example, Lota Continua, which is a leftist group of staggering complexity, I like killed the police officer who was interrogating Guiseppe Pinelli. So you know, like there are left wing assassinations. A group called the Red Brigades kidnaps the former Prime Minister of Italy, Aldo Moro. See every other episode where I've
yelled about this. They had been heavily infiltrated and were sort of being manipulated by a number of intelligence organizations that if I started listening to them right now, you would think I was insane.
Yeah.
But the important thing about this period, right, and this eventually works, it does destroy the left. But the important thing about the structure of this in the actual years of lead, is that these are concrete groups, right. They are shifting, they are flowing, people move between them.
But actual organized factions anya a legitimate armed struggle.
I mean, the Red Brigade are literally organized in a military fashion, right, with like units and command structure.
But this is also true of like this is also true of the fascists, right, yeah, and it's also true of group I mean, you know, like obviously like autonomia and the sort of like anarchistic communist factions are looser, but like they're still they still are like organized, and they're rooted in a whole bunch of different kinds of struggles. And the strategy of tension is being deliberately managed by by Italian intelligence and by American intelligence and by a
bunch of other sort of like state groups. And this is not at all what we're dealing with right now, not even cla. Yeah, the Charlie Kirk assassination is neither a guy who was part of like some Marxist group, nor was it a guy who's like a CIA agent or something, right.
Like just a guy. It's a guy who got.
Reddit gamer and discord political violence.
Yeah, these are these are these, These are decentralized acts being fueled by sort of radicalization. But they're not like active intelligence operations.
I mean some of them aren't even fueled by radical Like even even the word radicalization here is sometimes in miscount. This one in particular is like not that really a degree.
It seems like a degree of like personal motivation based on his relationship with his roommate as well as this general like gen Z sort of nihilism that allows you to do a pretty wild act like this, I think specifically in this case, you know, it's like existential violence manifesting an incredibly political action from someone who otherwise isn't like overtly political. This guy's not a leftist. It's definitely not a groeper as I've been trying to argue for
days now. Yeah, but I mean what he did certainly is is political, even though he's not you know, card carrying, you know, communist or you know, an anti imperialist, like the guy who assassinated the tow israel embassy staffers was right, which is kind of the only arguably like left wing assassin we've like seen in the past, i don't know, ten years in the United States, is the guy who
killed the two Israeli embassy staffers. Every other assassin or attended assassin would not accurately be described as like left wing in orientation, including someone like Luigi Mangioni, who is very much which basically a teapot gray tribe libertarian.
Yeah.
Yeah, And it's also worth noting that like from the state end, these like this is not something that was like deliberately unleashed by the state, except in the sense of like.
Well some people would argue otherwise.
Yeah, but right there, if that's the issue, you know, like if like the last time we saw something that you could argue even sort of look like that is like there is genuinely something kind of suspicious about the way that a whole bunch of the most famous Black Lives Matter activists who weren't the ones in the NGO suddenly turned up dead. That's the closest thing, right, And that's not even a like, we know they did this, that's a like and that was and that was over
a decade ago. Yeah, right, that this is this is a long time ago. And you know, and and I would argue it's important in that it's part of the same series of uprisings that like all of this fascist stuff is a response to right and sense, it's a
response to Ferguson, it's response to twenty twenty. But like that structure, which is the structure that a lot of people are using to end is this of just purely in American years of lead doesn't really work because we're dealing with something way weirder, yeah, and way less concrete.
Which is why we're calling it something else, the years of lead paint, because these people are just like because it is not the result of this large scale like deep state orchestration, nor these legitimate organized fashions. Everyone is simply brain rotted.
Yeah.
Yeah.
To contrast, right in the twentieth century that the prevailing concept of how the left would change the world was through the violent capture of state institutions or in the case of the anarchists, I guess less so that you know, if we look at like this communist ideal of revolution.
Yeah, how's that anarchist revolution going, buddy?
Well, I mean, these guys are thirty years after the Spanish Revolution, right, Like it's some of them have seen anarchists hold whole cities and hold off the country's army. It's not out of the out of the realm of possibility for them. That concept of revolution. I mean, it
does exist. It exists with people with like anime Twitter abbatars still, but like, for the most part, that concept of revolution is not that relevant in twenty first century leftist political organizing and so like it cannot be the same because the nature of the thing, that's the struggle, it's not the same on the left.
There isn't even illegitimate left in the United States, like in any meaningful sense.
Yeah, I mean that there exists, Like I guess it's like, I don't want to call it incoherent, but like a lot of the left exists. The people going hardest on the left are going hardest on the internet. I guess this is what I want to say, And like this is nothing like post sixty eight Italy.
We've seen a nice, nice like resurgence stuff like union organizing and that's like the most realistic manifestation of the left, but.
And mutual aid organizing.
And I will also say we did have the So this band from twenty eleven to twenty twenty was like a really massive period of like really large scale street movement in a way that really terrified these people, Like twenty fourteen s petificlarly Ferguson and twenty twenty like really truly rattled the psychology of all of the people who who are like currently running this country in that it demonstrated that like, oh damn, there could be a world.
We're like, we're not automatically the superior race and we're not like treated like that because it's betting bullshit and people were willing to fight for that. But also like, yeah, no, like we don't have the kind of like organization or logistical capacity that like any of these things had, and it's not clear to me that you like you won't yet things that look like that anymore.
Yeah, Like as much as like the right wing YouTube podcast Fear wants to make it the case. First of all, there is not like an organized revolutionary left in the US, not a serious one. And secondly, the organized revolutionary left that existed in twentieth century relied on a network that was international and that sometimes and not always had its roots in Soviet I guess foreign policy right. That also does not like as much as a YouTube world wished
to be the case. China is not sending people little yellow hard hats to go out in Portland and get mad at the Feds being there. That is not the case. Here's an advert for hard hats, which you have to buy in your own because China is not sending them to you.
We're back talking lead paint. Speaking of lead paint, and in some ways the conspiratory real elements of the years have led there is no shortage of conspiratorial thought permeating across the entire spectrum of American politics in ways that I've never really seen at this scale before, which isn't saying much, because you know, I'm not, however old James is.
But I have been.
Gris wo fuck me, but I have been. Monitor industry was politics for a decent section of time, mainly the past like seven years, the past like five or so years.
Professionally, We're gonna have to watch another video because of this whole second of the scarison. I have you known.
I'm actually multiple months later for my workplace harassment training.
I can see why.
My god, but it's it's it's it's pretty bad. Just the the total rejection of reality and the separation of
truth and reality as as coherent concepts. And we've seen this and some of people's responses across the political spectrum to the release of alleged text messages between the alleged shooter of Charlie Kirk and their roommate, which was released in the indictment that dropped on Monday, which shows the it lled shooter explaining to their roommate what they did and like how they did it and in part why
we'll talk more about this in Executive Disorder. These actual messages and like what they contain, but people's reaction to them, both on the left and right, have been pretty wild. Matt Walsh is arguing that these messages were scripted between the roommate and the shooter as a way to absolve the transgender roommate, referring to this strategy as being influenced by Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad is a television show, an
American television show released around two thousand and eight. I'm not going to explain Breaking.
Bad garretson do you remember that?
Oh my god, you.
Were like Matt Walsh's Matt Walsh is comparing this to to something that Walter White did during during Breaking Bad, saying that this feels like a strategy that these two people cooked up by watching too much TV, which in fact just shows that it is Matt Walsh who watches too much TV by the fact that this is the
first thing he thinks of. But it's not just Walsh. Communists, anti imperialists, people on the left are spreading a completely unfounded assertion that this text exchange between the roommate and the alleged shooter was quote unquote obviously written by an FBI agent. Posts like this are receiving tens of thousands
of likes cross platforms. Yeah, it's such a misunderstanding of how state craft works and how like the legal system works that people communists really think that this state of Utah could could orchestrate and convincingly, convincingly orchestra completely faked text exchanges like that's just simply not how our legal system works, and you have people like Hassan spreading this
sort of stuff. Yeah. Quote, half of the right thinks the messages are fake because it doesn't implicate the transperson. The other half thinks the shooter is a patsy because it was Israel that killed Charlie Kirk. I will say the text messages are too perfectly plugging holes for the investigators unnatural, like come on, come on, come on, guys. This is like I don't even know what to like argue with with, Like there's no way to argue against people who believe in this in any kind of real way.
Yeah, right, Like how do you someone who has rejected facts, Like, how do you bring them back?
They have to argue in court that the led shooter actually did the shooting, right, That's what they're trying to establish. Yeah, this is the evidence that will be agreed upon as as evidence. To introduce the text messages in court, the DA will have to prove their authenticity through chain of custody and metadata. The reason why they were released now is because they were included in the indictment laying out
the charges against Tyler Robinson. Robinson might use some odd words, but he was raised Mormon, and all of this just tracks at a face level to me. He's explaining his actions to the person that he loves and instructs them to delete the messages. He doesn't think that these are going to come back to hurt him. And this isn't just Betel's FBI saying this. This is the work of local police and State of Utah police in the State of Utah court. And this rejection of evidence, not what
the evidence argues, just the base evidence itself. Follows a week of debate regarding this shooter's political orientation, which me and Robert already discussed in an episode earlier this week. And I understand people's intensity around this issue, especially framing it in this years of led concept right of the right using this to majorly crack down on trans people and on the left, which yeah, they're been to tried
to do. But trying to argue at this point that he's a groyper is just so faulty, And trying to argue that these text messages are faked somehow, similarly, is just so faulty and is so detached from how this situation actually happened and how it fits in to the current dynamic of political violence in the United States. On that topic, a few days ago, Fox News is the Five was debating if they needed more information to definitively say that the shooter was on quote unquote the left.
Greg Gutfield went on about how high profile liberal and left wing figures aren't being assassinated by people on the right and wrote off the murder of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hartman and her husband.
We don't need more information, really, yes, we don't need it. What is interesting here is why is only this happening on the left and not the right.
That's all we need to know about that.
There was absolutely no call you want.
To talk about Melissa Oorsman. Did you know her name before it happened? None of us did. None of us were spending every single day talking about missus Hortman.
I never heard of her until after she died.
Matter, And don't play that bullshit with me.
You know what I'm talking.
What I'm saying is there was no demonization amplification about that woman before she died. It was a specific crime against her by somebody who knew her. The same thing you can bring up Josha Piro, but then you will not bring up, for example, that that.
Was a pro Palestine person. So don't use your what about this. The fact, the fact of the.
Matter is the both sides argument not only doesn't fly, we don't care.
We don't care.
About your both sides argument that shit is dead. For one thing, there is no cognitive dissonance on our side. On your side, your beliefs do not match reality. So you're coming up with these rationalizations like.
What about this or what about that?
We're not doing that because we saw it happen. We saw a young bright man assassinated.
And we know who did it.
So if you look at like left wing violence or violence targeting right wing figures, even just like the past two years, right, there's the two attempted Trump assassinations, which the right frames as left wing violence. Though the first Trump shooter did not have left wing politics. They had more of the psychological profile of a school shooter who was looking to do something to get into history books and came from a conservative upbringing. This person was on
a leftist right. But this is still targeting a right wing figure, so it's framed in this same conversation the United Healthcare assassination. Similarly, right, this wasn't a left wing person who did this, but targeting a CEO on a healthcare topic associates it with the left or with progressive stances around healthcare. There's the arson against Jos Shapiro's home. The guy who did this had a mixture of like
approach Trump background, but with pro Palestine motivations. The most clear example would be the murder of two Israeli Emacy staffers and now the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
With the healthcare stuff, like, we should probably point out that Trump also ran on like medicine is too expensive, right, it would cost too much to get the pills you need to stay alive. Like that has been a cornerstone of his platform too. It can be framed as like a populist sentiment of populist stunce, yeah, yeah, not necessarily a leftist one.
So that's the political background that these people on the right are coming from, right, Like, that's how they see see this. That that's like this spike and loft being violence that they're seeing refers to this collection of acts. Now. For Media has reported that a few days after Charlie Kirk's assassination. The Department of Justice removed from their website a National Institute of Justice research study showing a white supremacist and far right violence far outweighs any other type
of terrorism or domestic violent extremism. Quote. Since nineteen ninety, far right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far left or radical Islamist extremists, including two hundred and twenty seven events that took more than five hundred and twenty lives. In the same period, far left extremists committed forty two ideologically motivated attacks that took seventy eight lives.
So this study has been scrubbed from the website to follow in line with Trump and the right's general talking points about this spike in left wing violence. I think in part, the right would view explicit white supremacist, neo Nazi linked violence as like separate from like, you know, conservative even some like far right violence. They don't understand the linkage from you know, explicit white supremacist mass shootings
and you know, make America great again. Right, That's something that they would like reject as a legitimate coupling.
In Congress today cashpitel that claimed to have no idea who did? Then Rufe was correct and like what he was about.
A lot of them just aren't aware of this stuff. And it's not just this National Institute Justice study. These findings are incredibly consistent across multiple studies. The notably not left wing Cato Institute found very similar results in their analysis of six hundred and twenty politically motivated murders since nineteen seventy five, excluding nine to eleven, most political violence
comes from the right. They counted three hundred ninety one murders from the right and sixty five from the left. Can link that below to get a better look at their actual methodology and what they count as right wing what they count as left wing violence. But these stats
simply don't matter to the right. In a lot of cases, many average rightists will just reject these results altogether, say that the study is faked or had faulty methodology, But others might frame it as even if this data is true, it doesn't match the current trend of escalating left wing violence, specifically targeted left wing violence, not just mass shootings. Here's another clip from Fox's The Five.
I Understand why people are saying what about this?
And what about this?
Because if you have to face the underlying fact to this, your life is going to fall apart because you're going to realize you're not the good guys. If you sat around and you defended the mutilation of children, you're not the good guys.
If you sat six hundred seven.
Hundred cases of harassment against Republicans and you said, but what about this?
What about this?
And then you see this murder after calling somebody a fashion you fascist, you realize maybe I'm not the good guy. That is a hell of a realization to deal with. So therefore, therefore you have to grasp at rationalizations.
You don't have to do that, Jessica. They do. I don't believe you're part of that group.
But why the hell do you have to mimic an echo that.
Crap to us? He was a patsy. That guy was a patsy.
He was under the hypnotic spell of a direct to consumer nihil, the trans cult. And you know that if you can decide that biology is false, you can agree that that murder is okay and that humanity is expendable. How you cannot see that.
Alone and see that for what.
The evil it is without having to attach all of these other things is beyond me.
His explicit claim that we should just like flag is that it's not He's not necessarily talking about leftists as a whole. He's specifically talking about people who accept the trans people are people of being and like that the existence of trans people leads to this nihilism.
I guess, well, yeah, I mean they see the existent trans people as like a result of this nihilist culture, right, yeah.
Well, he seemed to put the cause all hour the other way though, in that he seemed to suggest that the nihilism comes from accepting trans people.
I guess I don't fully agree that that's how he's saying it. I think they view it as it's both caused but also a symptom. I think they play it kind of both ways and showing how it's it's more so just like the result of this like breakdown in like a moral fabric, right, which is then breaking down this like notion of reality, which is right, like you know, transness is such an existential threat to the right wing
worldviewing like many senses. But that's another topic. I do find it interesting how quick these people are just completely discount right wing mass shootings, right, And I think one key difference in talking about, you know, left wing violence is right ring violence, it seems, and almost all their examples here they're talking about assassinations targeted against specific people.
Most right wing violence in these like statistics from like CATO and the National Institute of Justice are are mass shootings, right that the number of individual people might not be that different, but the kill count for right wing and specifically like white supremacist attacks are so much higher. I don't think it's the actual numbers that matter to these people, it's their proximity to being the recipient of such violence
that really freaks them out. For these commentators, the likelihood of them being in a black church when a white pharmacist mass shooting happens is slimtonon right, Like, that's never gonna happen to these people, But being the victim of targeted violence against a high profile figure is to them it seems like an increasing possibility, and that really freaks them out. Like obviously this type of attack directly affects their political class in a way that a far right
mass shooting does not. I think that is influencing the way that they're talking about this, you know, quote unquote spike in left wing violence. We're gonna go on an ad break and then return to talk about Jed Vance's temporary takeover of the Charlie Kirk Show and how his rhetoric is affecting this general debate on political violence. Okay,
we are back. On Monday, September fifteenth, Vice President jd Vance hosted The Charlie Kirk Show from his office in the White House Complex, the Vice President sitting down hosting a private citizens radio talk show. The show's intro has clips from Charlie's studio with signs that read big Gov socks warning does not play well with liberals. To introduce the show, Jade Vance says that, quote, we have to talk about this incredibly destructive moment of left wing extremism
that has grown up over the last few years. We're going to talk about how to dismantle that and how to bring real unity unquote. His first guest was Stephen Miller. Ben said he wanted to talk to Miller about quote all the ways we're trying to figure out how to prevent this festering violence that you can see from the far left becoming even more and more mainstream.
You have the crazies on the far left were saying, Oh, Stephen Miller and JD. Vance, they're going to go after constitutionally protected speech, and we're going to go after the NGO network that fomens facilitates and engages in violence that's not okay. Violence is not okay in our system, and we want to make it less likely that that happens.
Walk me through at a high level, like what you and I have been working on, what the whole administration has been working on to try to make sure that we don't reward and promote this craziness.
Yes, so it's an excellent question. I've said this before, but there's repeating. The last message that Charlie sent me was I think it was just the day before we lost him, which is that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the lefting organizations that are promoting violence in this country. And I will write those words onto my heart and I will carry them out.
The NGO network.
Yep, Yeah, this has been a thing with them for a while.
Yes, there was supposed to be a series of executive orders that were drafted earlier this year, specifically targeting Democrat funding platforms like Act Blue and environmental NGOs that it was reported that Trump was about to sign and then they kind of disappeared. This was around like April to May. And this has been something that they obviously have been wanting to do, but for one reason or another, haven't
followed through on yet. But now are are talking about this as an impending policy that the Trump administration is going to enact.
I think some of their fascination with NGOs comes from the Trump administration's first term, when NGOs were very successful in bringing suits that delayed or prevented some of the policies that the mill of faction of the Trump administration would have liked to implement.
Yeah, and then I think the other angle of this is just a pure idy Semitism mango that partly when they're saying NGOs they mean NGO's and partly when they're saying NGOs they mean Jews. And it's great.
It's very often this specific focus is on he s right, highest Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Who I mean, we see this in the Tree of Life shooting for instance in twenty eighteen. Right, this has been with us for some time on the right.
I'm going to play another clip where they outline more strategies for clamping down on left wing violence.
And we are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks. So
let me explain a bit of what that means. So thirty seconds, it'll be quick stephen the organized docs and campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people's addresses, combining that with messaging this design to trigger inside violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out facilitate the violence. It is a
vast domestic terror movement. And with the Goddess my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.
It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name.
So in their discussion of taking down this big doxing network, they also inadvertently and ironically describe the doxing campaign that the right is currently doing at a far larger scale and with way more institutional backing than any antif for left being, doxing has looked like targeting people making posts in support of Charlie Kirk's assassination or people making jokes about Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination, with
a doxing website listing thousands of quote unquote Charlie's murderers, which are actually just people who have made posts about the death of Charlie Kirk. This is building off the Canary Mission strategy used against pro Palestinian Act savists, which has been adopted by the State Department for Immigration Enforcement and judging visa applications. This is the actual, like organized, state backed, institutionally backed dosing campaign that exists right now
in this country. It's not your average torch Antifa chapter doing this at scale now. It's the right with the mechanism of state encouraging them, backing them, and tons of money being funneled into an organized operation to actually impact state policy on who gets allowed in the country. On that note, Mark Rubio has talked about denying visa applications for people who celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk.
We are not in the business of inviting people to visit our country who are going to be involved in negative and destructive behavior. Okay, so why should if I invite someone? If we invite someone to visit the United States of America as a student, as a tourist, as whatever, then they have a different The standard they should be held to is very high. We shouldn't be bringing people
into this country. We should not be giving visas to people who are going to come to the United States and do things like celebrate the murder, the execution, the assassination of a political figure. We should not And if they're already here, we should be revoking their visa.
So now there's an organized campaign to not only try to deport and revoke visas or deny visas to people quote unquote celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, but also get citizens here fired from their jobs and disrupt their life. Just two years ago, Elon Musk tweeted, quote, if you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform Twitter, we will fund your
legal bill, no limit. Please let us know unquote what's different about the right use of these tactics is the merger of like the right wing non government organization like activist apparatus with the ruling conservative government. Like the Dems in the left, have never done this before. There's never been this coordination between the actual democratic establishment and like the far left. That's never happened. Like Palestine crackdowns started
under Biden. Biden's DOJ prosecuted many twenty twenty, George Floyd uprising cases, federal assistance, and the domesti terrorism investigation into
cop City started under Biden. As for quote unquote organized riots and street violence, right wing street violence has been encouraged and coordinated with Trump and the Trump administration stand back and stand by to stop the steal protests leading to January sixth, which Trump played a large part in making happen, and then Trump pardoned all the participants.
Yeah, it's it's pretty clear.
The mayor of Minneapolis taking a knee is not on the same level as Trump pardoning all the January sixth quote unquote insurrectionists. At the end of Vance's two hour long episode, he reiterated on the topic of doxing and harassment, campaigns and political violence. Here's another clip.
I wrote a story in The Nation magazine about my dear friend Charlie Kirk. Now The Nation is in a fringe blog. It's a well funded, well respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American Civil War. George Soros's Open Society Foundation funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement.
The writer accuses Charlie.
Of saying, and I quote, black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously.
But if you go and watch the clip, the very.
Clip she links to, you realize he never said anything like that. He never uttered those words. He made an argument against affirmative action as a policy, He criticized a specific Supreme Court justice as an individual. He never said anything about black women as a group. He made an argument for judging people of all races and backgrounds by
their own individual merits. The very evidence she provides, this hack of a writer shows that she lied about a dead man, and yet she wrote it, an esteemed magazine published it, it made it through the editors, and of course liberal billionaires rewarded that attack. Now, of course, even if Charlie had uttered those words, It wouldn't mean that he deserved his fate, But consider the level of propaganda
at work. Charlie was gunned down in broad daylight, and well funded institutions of the left lied about what he said so as to justify his murder.
This is soulless and evil.
But I was struck not just by the dishonesty of this smear, but by the glee over a young husband's and young father's death.
Quote.
She says he was an unrepentant racist, transphobe, homophobe, and misogynist. The Nation wrote, who often wrapped his bigotry in Bible verses.
There's a lot to break down there.
Yeah.
First of all, the president of the Nation, not the Country the magazine. The Nation magazine has stated that they, in fact, do not receive money from George Soros or the Open Society Foundation. Vance's gesturing two left wing billionaires carries three parentheses around that term. Second of all, let's play the actual clip of Charlie talking about brain processing power.
Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sila Jackson Lee and Catangi Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks. We would have been called the BIS. But now they're coming out and they're saying it for us. They're coming out and they're saying, I'm only here because of affirmative action. Yeah, we know, you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.
So he just happens to be talking about three black women and state that they do not have the brain processing power to do their jobs and that they stole a white man's spot, yet in the position they are in now. An opinion writer for The Washington Post was fired this week for sharing this quote on Twitter, which replaced the names of the three women's talking about with just black women.
Did she share it like in between quotation marks if it was a direct quotation.
She did share it as if it was a direct quotation.
Okay, I see.
So I'm going to read this from the email that they sent this writer firing her. This writer is a black woman. Among other requirements, the company wide social media policy mandates that all employees social media postings be respectful and prohibits postings that disparage people based on their race, gender, or other protected characteristics. The policy also mind's employees that everything they post is reflective on the company and should
not affect the integrity of the post journalism. You're posting some blue sky which identify you as a post columnist about white men in response to the killing of Charlie Kirk, do not comply with our policy. For example, you posted refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face and performative morning for a white man that espoused
violence is not the same thing as violence. And part of what keeps America violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espoused hatred and violence. So this is explicitly a a They think that reverse racism is real, and that's saying that and talking about white people as a class of people in the US that are responsible for things is
in fact racism. That is, that is the argument that the post the Washington Post is making in the email where they fire her, which is like that reverse racism shit, even like three years ago was like a pretty fringe right wing like like that was a knot. It was originally like a Nazi thing, right And this is now being used by like the Washington Post to fire their own writers for writing really incredibly reasonable things about Charlie Kirk.
To close Charlie Kirk's episode, and to close our episode.
JD.
Vance talked about before we can have any national unity, we must, like Charlie, tell the truth.
Unity Real unity can be found only after climbing the mountain of truth. And there are difficult truths we must confront in our country. One truth is that twenty four percent of self described quote very liberals believe it is acceptable to be happy about the death of a political opponent, while only three percent of self described very conservatives agree.
Three percent is too many, of course. Another truth is that twenty six percent of young liberals believe political violence is sometimes justified, and only seven percent of young conservatives say the same. Again to high a number in a
country of three hundred and thirty million people. You can, of course find one person of a given political persuasion justifying this or that or almost anything, but the data is clear people on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence.
This is not a both sides problem.
If both sides have a problem, one side has a much bigger and malignant problem, and that is the truth.
We must be told.
So these stats are from a recent you gov survey where twenty four percent of very liberals to say it's okay to be happy with the murder of a political opponent, and twenty six percent of young liberals to say sometimes political violence is justified for two seven percent of young conservatives. This study also found that Democrats and Republicans are more likely to say that political violence is a big problem
after attacks on members of their own party. Of course, this polling is going to be heavily influenced by whatever recent events just happened. That's going to change people's stated opinion on these questions. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, sixty seven percent of Republicans so that political violence is a very big problem. Fifty eight percent of Democrats agreed. After the assassination of Melissa Hartman, fifty six percent of Democrats said it's a very big problem. Only forty four
percent of Republicans agreed. After the assassination attempt on Josh Shapiro, forty four percent of Democrats, thirty seven percent of Republicans.
Wait, just Shapiro wasn't assassinated?
Right?
They tried to ban his houseing. Yeah, they're counting that as an attempt assassination.
Oh okay.
After the attendive assassination on Donald Trump, fifty one percent of Republicans said political balance is a very big problem, forty six percent of Demi democrats, And after the attacks on Paul Pelosi, fifty three percent of Democrats said political violence is a very big problem, compared to thirty one percent of Republicans. These stats are very fluid and absolutely changed depending on whatever current events were current at the time,
whatever just happened. We're going to talk about this more in a bit, but I think the way that we frame cheering on political violence also massively varies based on what you count as political violence. Is a police killing count as political violence? If so, that's going to majorly affect the way we think about this question. Here's Vance again talking about Trump's assassination and the pyramid that supports political violence.
Now, any political movement, violent or not violent.
Is a collection of forces.
It's like a pyramid that stacks on top one support on top of the other. That Peermid's got a foundation of donors, of activists, of journalists. Now, social media influenceers and of course, of politicians. Not every member of that pyramid would commit a murder. In fact, over ninety nine
percent I'm sure would not. But by celebrating that murder, apologizing for it, and emphasizing not Charlie's innocence, but the fact that he said things some didn't like, even to the point of lying about what he actually said, many of these people are creating an environment where things like this are inevitably going to happen.
Benson goes on to talk about how people yelled at him and his family when he visited Disneyland, and discusses how after Charlie's death, one of his friends and a senior White House staffer had left leaning operatives in his neighborhood, passing out leaflets telling people what he looked like and where he'd lived, and quote encouraging neighbors to harass him
or God forbid to do worse. While he was mourning his dead friend, he and his wife had to worry about the political terrorists drawing a big target on his home. He shares with his own children. Are these people violent? I hope not? But are they guilty of encouraging violence? You damn well better believe it. We can thank God that most Democrats don't share these attitudes, and I do.
While acknowledging that something has gone very wrong with a lunatic fringe, a minority, but a growing and powerful minority on the far left, Vansk goes on to state that he seeks no unity with the far left.
There is no unity with people who scream at children over their parents' politics. There is no unity with someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order to excuse his murder.
There is no.
Unity with someone who harasses an innocent family the day after the father of that family lost a dear friend. There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination. And there is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers, who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father, deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words with which they disagree.
Did you know that the George Soros.
Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie's death, Do you know they benefit from generous tax treatment. They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer. And how do they reward us by setting fire to the house built by the American family over two hundred and fifty years.
On September thirteenth, Fox and News Morning host Brian Kilmeade endorsed youuthanizing homeless people with quote involuntary lethal injection or something. Just kill them.
Billions of dollars some mental health and the homeless population. A lot of them don't want to take the programs. A lot of them don't want to get the help that is necessary. You can't give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we're going to give you and or you decide that you got to be locked up in jail.
That's the way it has to be now, or involuntary lethal injection or something.
I just kill him, Jim, Brian, Why did it have to get to this point?
Right?
I would say this, we're not voting for the right people in North Carolina.
Wake up.
Just kill them.
Geez.
A Fox News host advocating the killing of homeless people, and he didn't get fired from this. He apologized a few days later, but he's not getting fired from his job for this openly advocating the death of homeless people.
Yeah, murder, And I think it's worth noting whatever we're having a discussion about political violence, that two days after Charlie Kirk was shot, Ice just killed a guy in Chicago who was driving away from their attempt to detain him. He was driving away pretty slowly and there's video of it.
Now.
They pulled out their guns and they killed him. And you know, all of these people, who are the people who ordered Ice into this city, right, who are directly responsible for the deaths of this man who was also a single father. Actually well, no, Kirk was not a single father, but this guy was and was just murdered in cold blood by Ice.
Right.
This is not considered political violence by sort of either liberals or conservatives, right, because they don't think that political violence can be done by the state. And this is also part of how you get to the situation now where you can be like, well, the states should just murder homeless people and that's not considered political violence because it's the state doing it and because they don't think homeless people are people.
Yeah, I mean to broaden that statement slightly or take a different angle on it, right, Like there is a complete bipartisan consensus that we should kill hundreds of people a year acrossing our southern border because that supposedly serves as a deterrent from other people coming, which it doesn't. But that is not seen as political violence.
Now, they just murdered three more people on a boat like leaving Venezuela a few days ago.
Yeah. Yeah.
Events ended the Charlie Kirk Show episode. He advocated that listeners find and call the employers of people celebrating Charlie Kirk's death to join a TEPA USA chapter or to run for office.
But I promise you that we will explore every option to bring real unity to our country and stop those who would kill their fellow Americans because they don't like what they say.
But you have a role too. Civil society, Charlie.
Understood this well, is not just something that flows from the government. It flows from each and every one of us. It flows from all of us. So when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out in hell, call their employer. We don't believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility, and there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.
The idea of the fusion of the state with civil society is really notable there, Like, that's not what civil society is, right, That is a concept that is inherently totalitarian, that civil society should flow downstream from the state and the movement.
It's this fusion between the two that the right has deployed so successfully, Yeah, which has increased their ability to actually like rule.
Yeah, I mean that's that's what fatism does, right, Like that that's yeah, Franco, that's Hitler like, like that is textbook.
That's like the point of the brown Shirts, yeah.
Or like the Women's movement in Spain. Right to give a more civil society example, they're not like they're not like a state police agency. There are a civil society organization explicitly run by the state for its agenda.
So to return to the years of lead Paint idea that opened this episode, what I'm observing right now across the political ocean is this flattening of tactics. As I discussed on the show before in the Blue on episodes, the right trojan horst political conspiracism into acceptable political discourse, which the left is now embracing. Liberals and the left, and you can see this with people's reactions to the Charter assassination and theories about the alleged shooter. So the
left is embracing conspiracy theories. Meanwhile the right is adopting and accelerating political cancel culture style docsing. The key difference here is on the right, these actions have state backing and coordination, or serve to maintain state power. For example, there's types of political violence that get cheered on by the right, such as deportations and the cheering on of police after officer involved shootings. Back the blue keeps alignment
with state power. Same thing with cheering on or encouraging violence against BLM protesters that supports the state structure and advocating or celebrating the deaths of protesters gets viewed very differently than the targeted assassinations that have happened the past year and now the past few days, Trump has discussed once again designating Antifa and other groups as domestic terror organizations and bringing RICO charges against Code Pink activists who
screamed at him at a restaurant in d C a few weeks ago.
Do you plan on designating Antifa finally a domestic terror organization.
Well, it's something I would do, Yeah, if I have support from the people back here.
I think would start with PAM, I.
Think, but I would if you give me, I would do that one hundred percent.
And others also, by the way, but Antifa is terrible.
There are other groups. Yeah, there are other groups.
We have some pretty radical groups and they got away with murder.
And also I've been speaking to.
The Attorney General about bringing RICO against some of the people that you've been reading about that have been putting up millions and millions of dollars for agitation.
This is these aren't protests.
These are crimes what they're doing where they're throwing bricks at cars of the of Ice and Border Patrol. I want to close by. You know, we've seen the sort of repercusions that people have had, not even for like celebrating Charlie Kirk's death, but for like being like, wait, this guy fucking sucks and this whole you know, this whole argument about civility. And I mean that, I mean the Vice President of the United States is making right. I want to read this quote from Matt Walsh as
we're recording this This is from Tuesday, September sixteenth. This was left wing LGBT terrorism. There was never much doubt. Now there is none at all. All left wing terror networks must be crushed, all of the terrorists and their helpers and funders must be arrested, prosecuted, and put to death. So and there have been absolutely zero consequences for again Matt Walsh calling for this whole network of people that
he imagines exists being executed. That's their endgame, right, It is to destroy the concept of free speech in order to preserve quote unquote free speech right, in order to sort of quote unquote end political violence. They want to carry out, you know, mass political killings of their opponents, coordinated at a state level with state resources.
Yeah.
Yeah, and the state involvement makes it okay, That makes it a moral action, not the actions of some like unhinged terrorist.
Yeah. And this is a really significant problem for the way that we think about political violence, because this is something that's true for both liberals and conservatives that they think that the state is the appropriate arbiter for this kind of political violence, which is how Obama can do a drone strike on a sixteen year old American citizen and kill him in cold blood because Obama had political disagreements with his father, right, and how this is some
treated as something that's fine by a huge portion of liberals. And this is one of the things that's going to allow if these people are successful, and I don't know that they will be, but if they can be, that's going to be.
Why well, that is how we at the show understand the years of lead Pain, or the current twenty twenty five Timber era of the years of lead Paint. There's phantoms everywhere, there's conspiracies everywhere and nowhere, and the specter of political violence is around every corner.
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.