The Charlie Kirk Shooting: America's Far-Right Cannibalism

A conservative activist was shot dead by someone even further to the right than himself, highlighting America's terrifying rightward shift toward extremism. The incident reveals how far-right ideology has become so normalized that prominent figures like Charlie Kirk are considered "sellouts" by even more radical elements.

• Charlie Kirk, 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was killed by a 22-year-old extremist who considered him not conservative enough
• The shooter, son of a Mormon pastor from a Republican family, represents the extreme right-wing fringe that has become increasingly violent
• Understanding the Overton Window helps explain how extreme acts can shift public discourse in dangerous directions
• The host shares personal experience growing up in an evangelical household similar to Kirk's ideology
• White supremacy isn't just a fringe element in America but is woven into the country's social fabric
• When opposing fascism gets you labeled a terrorist while promoting extremist views makes you celebrated, America has reached a dangerous point
• The concerning reality that America continues moving rightward, with no signs of moderating

Stay curious and stay uncomfortable.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Charlie Kirk's Death
• 4:27 Charlie Kirk's Controversial Statements
• 5:14 Who Killed Charlie Kirk?
• 7:22 The Host's Personal Connection
• 15:52 Understanding the Overton Window
• 21:34 White Supremacy in America
• 25:27 Final Thoughts and Future Concerns

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:34

Thank you, hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly podcast, where we speak plainly about things that matter. I'm your host, al Medicine, and in today's podcast yeah, you probably guessed it we're going to talk about Charlie Kirk and his shooter, murderer, person. Oh my, I'm already tired of hearing about him. I'm tired of talking about him. I recorded this podcast two days ago, the day that he got shot, and or the day after he got shot, actually and somehow it disappeared. It just disappeared off of my SD card, the one that I'm recording this one on. Somehow it just is gone. So, which is fine. It was a little too meandery and we didn't know much yet. So now we have Charlie Kirk, a conservative nutjob, who is now dead, and we have in custody the guy who shot him, apparently turned in by his father, not him, apparently turned in by his father.

Speaker 1: 1:44

Well, immediately, if you remember when Charlie Kirk was shot, charlie Kirk is a conservative think tank nut job. He is a young. He's 31 years old, I think was 31 years old, and he had been writing opinion pieces for conservative, fascist, white supremacists since he was about 16 years old. He started Turning Point USA when he was 18, and he had been all over my reels and shit for a couple years now, probably not the least reason of which is that I like Dean Withers and Dean Withers is kind of his antithesis. Dean Withers is a it's a liberal who is about the same age who often debates people online and obliterates everybody which Charlieirk was kind of famous for too except charlie kirk, like was really garbage. He, he. I watched his debates and he was well spoken, but he couldn't debate to save his life. He was a racist, sexist, misogynistic, transphobic piece of absolute shit. So for those of you who didn't know, you've probably heard a lot of the quotes from him by now. I'm just going to paraphrase them because I don't even care to bother reading them again.

Speaker 1: 3:17

He said that MLK was not a very good guy. He said he didn't want a black woman flying his plane or a lesbian surgeon working on him. He said that empathy caused a lot of problems, that it was a new age thing and it causes problems. He said that he hopes public executions certain ones, not all of them, and certain ones would be great. It would be really entertaining. We should bring back public executions. And he said that it's okay when people die because of guns. So we can have the Second Amendment.

Speaker 1: 4:00

And he said that in response to questions about dead children in school shootings. So it's not great that he got like shot in front of his daughter. But I'm glad he's gone, I'm glad he's dead, I'm glad he's out of the world, I'm glad he's out of the gene pool, I'm glad he's out of my like the. I'm glad he no longer has the ability to influence anyone. That's great. I think that's marvelous.

Speaker 1: 4:35

He was a piece of shit. I can't remember if it's 95 or 97. I can't remember if it's 95 or 97% of all of the like extremist terror deaths that happen in America a year, which is like a lot of them, but 95 to 95% of them ever, if you combine all of them up, are done by white male conservative extremists. Um, and guess who killed him? A white male conservative, conservative extremist? Um, I've, yeah, so the guy that shot him is a 22 year old kid who is the son of a Mormon pastor. They are gun-toting, bible-thumping Republicans and this kid shot him because he wasn't racist enough.

Speaker 1: 5:34

He literally said that the guy was a sellout, that Charlie Kirk was a mainstream sellout and he wasn't a real conservative and he created this group. He was a part of this group that went to Charlie Kirk's events and would basically just harass him. They would just go to his events and boo and jeer and try to set up people to debate him that he would lose which, by the way, dean Withers went to more than one Charlie Kirk event and tried to get Charlie Kirk to debate him and he wouldn't because he knew he would lose. So, yeah, I'm glad Charlie Kirk's dead. I'm glad he's dead. I'm not glad he died the way he died.

Speaker 1: 6:29

But I won't lie and pretend I have any empathy for him and I also won't lie and say I wasn't extremely impressed with that shot. My God, from 200 yards in the neck Wow, that's impressive. That's how you know it wasn't a liberal. That's exactly how you know it wasn't a liberal Like I can't shoot like that and I'm a liberal who can shoot. I can't shoot like that. Damn these motherfuckers be wild out here. So these motherfuckers be wild out here.

Speaker 1: 7:02

So yeah, this guy that shot and killed Charlie Kirk was a white extremist who basically said he wasn't extreme enough. How crazy is that? How crazy is the world that we live in? This is insane y'all. This is like for real, real insane. This dude got shot in the neck in front of a bunch of kids at a college campus, like for being not racist enough. What, what? I don't understand. Like Jesus Christ people, like the shit that he said about MLK and like a long list of women, and like that they never could have, never could have gotten to where they got on their own brain power, because they're black women, they're too stupid, so they had to sleep their way to the top. They had to find other ways. Oh wait, nope, they didn't. The only other way was D-E-I. That was it. We got to blame D-E-I. Well, I guess it's a good thing D-E-I didn't make it into the gun store Because that was some good-ass snipering. And now he's dead.

Speaker 1: 8:27

So in my last recording on this I talked a little bit about the Overton window and I even actually said I was like we don't know who this is yet we're assuming I'm even assuming because I'm hoping, I guess that it was some like leftist. But nope, and guess what? They're still blaming the leftists, they're still blaming us for being like fuck that guy. He was a piece of shit. Sorry, not sorry, he was a piece of shit.

Speaker 1: 9:05

I'm not going to have empathy for someone who thinks that gays are not people, who thinks that black people aren't as smart, who literally said that all cultures aren't the same and said yes, obviously, white Western values are superior. Obviously, western values are superior, obviously. He added the obviously twice Like what a fucking piece of shit. Oh, he's so dead, thank God. Thank God, I'm glad. I'm glad. I'm glad he's dead, I'm glad. I'm not glad he was shot in the neck in the middle of the day, because we have psychos running around who think people aren't, aren't racist enough, so they're running around shooting people. I'm not glad about that. But I'm glad charlie kirk is gone. He was an absolute waste of space. I do feel bad for his daughter being just taken from him that way, but also, you know, like fuck his dad, fuck his dad, fuck her dad.

Speaker 1: 10:03

And what's really fucked about this for me is I was Charlie Kirk. I was Charlie Kirk. I believed the same shit so fucking badly. I was kicked out of elementary school and my mom had to come and get me because I was running around telling the other third graders that Santa Claus was the atheist's way to get God out of Christmas and to get Jesus out of Christmas. In third grade, in junior high and into high school I used to have preachings. I went and bought a 10 by 20 like one of those pop-up vendor things and I went to the local Christian bookstore and asked if I could use their parking lot, because it was on what we called the strip in my tiny town, this one street people used to drive up and down. I went out onto the strip and I sat up and I had preachers from different denominations come use the soundboard that I bought to do preachings and have other musicians that I knew like from school and from church come and play songs about Jesus to convert more people Me, me. I did this. Why? Because of the influence of fucktards like Charlie Kirk. Because of the influence of fucking white supremacist nationalists like him and like my father. That is the world I grew up in. I grew up in Charlie Kirk's house.

Speaker 1: 12:10

If you don't understand what it's like because you've lived it to live in an evangelical, bible-thumping nutjobs house you have no idea why I hate Charlie Kirk so fucking much. You can't. You can't comprehend him. You can't or my hate. You can't comprehend how much I really don't like this motherfucker. I don't. I don't hate him. I can't. I hated seeing him on my screen. You have to love, I think, enough to hate. Maybe I do hate him, maybe I did hate him, I don't know, it doesn't matter Because he's dead. I definitely didn't like his ass, I don't think. No, he didn't. No, I didn't hate him. He didn't take up enough like real estate in my brain. I saw him and I just, and I just clocked him as an absolute piece of shit and and I'm glad he's dead. I feel like I've said that too many times, but it's fucking true, I'm glad he's gone.

Speaker 1: 13:14

And this whole thing about the Overton window that I brought up in the last one isn't even really relevant in the way that I was saying it, but maybe, maybe it won't, but maybe it will be relevant in the opposite side. So the Overton window is what I talked about with Luigi, because when it happened with Luigi, everybody was like, oh, it's a leftist and it was a white, rich person. And because they were rich, people were like, oh, leftist, which that's really stupid. But he had like hooray for Luigi. If you didn't check out that podcast, go back and listen to that podcast. I talk about the Overton window, and so the Overton window is. It's a sociological term for the things that we kind of averagely discuss as a society, as a culture, and the things that we, because of what we discuss, we view as normal and acceptable. What's in the boundary of like my purview, given like my general day, like what's the width of my experience, and that's kind of the Overton window, and what happens when something extreme like this happens, whether it's on the extreme right or the extreme left and with Luigi it was because it was somebody being like healthcare, give us healthcare that's a left thing. So that was an extreme left.

Speaker 1: 14:39

This guy, trump, tried to pin it on the Democrats immediately. They were, um, the governor of fucking Utah literally said with tears in his eyes I hoped it wasn't one of us, I hoped that it would be someone else from some other state, from some other country who drove here, but it wasn't. And why? He said because it would be easier, because it would be easier to hate, because it would be easier to hate this person. That's why it would be easier to hate them if they were brown, if they were black, if they were not from Utah, which means not a conservative, more likely than not. Wow, that's disgusting. But his shooter wasn't on the left. He was as extreme right as you can get. We thought Charlie Kirk was extreme right.

Speaker 1: 15:34

This guy's extreme right and see, the thing is, is like the Overton window shifts according to hugely extreme acts, whether they're extremely on the right or extremely on the left. They're hugely extreme acts and what happens is we have our normal like oh, this is the normal acceptable thing, for here's what we can do, here's the resistance, these are acceptable. Now that response of what we can do and what we can accept and what our options are to retaliate blasted wide open and it shifts the window. And what has to happen, according to history, in order for a social movement to gain traction because of an extremist move rather than to be damaged by an extremist move, is the extremist move has to happen before, like hopefully just before, like maximum peak protest stuff, and that's important. Timing is really important. The other thing that is really important is when the extreme action happens.

Speaker 1: 16:51

Usually it's been the far left doing something extreme and the center and center-left, with Luigi, have to shun Luigi and say we don't support this, we don't support violence like that, and by doing that you separate the extremist and the entire nation's perspective shifts a little bit left. In this case it was another extremist right and I don't think that our country can shift its like at least our government can shift its views any more. Right, we are a totalitarian, fascist, racist, nazi Germany Like. We're not even like early 30s Nazi Germany. We're now in like the early 40s, almost Nazi Germany. It's gotten fucking bad, bro. So with the Overton window, the people now in the center-right have to be like no, that's not okay, that's bad. Otherwise, things are going to go more right. At least that's what the like history shows us in what successful social movements have done as far as their timeline and blueprint. So I don't know how this is going to go.

Speaker 1: 18:09

I really don't it like go. I really don't it like it's wild man. I really do feel bad that, like it was shot in front of his fucking kid, but damn, like the irony is so thick. I don't. I don't know how anybody really finds like that much empathy for this motherfucker. And if you do good for you, motherfucker, and if you do good for you, that's fine. Whatever, that's great, but also fuck you, because you are providing empathy for a person who had none, for a person who said that empathy was a problem and you know what.

Speaker 1: 18:44

Maybe that makes you a better person, but maybe that also just makes you virtue signaling. Maybe that also makes it to where you just want to feel like a good person. You feel icky because other people are celebrating about some guy's death and you don't want to feel icky, so you're just going to go ahead and take the high road and find some empathy for this trash person and then you get to have some more social currency. You get to have more social currency in the form of having those friends and going to the little candlelight vigils, which I think one of the few things I did. That was maybe a little too extreme, but I'm glad I did it. I'm glad I said it because that's my job was when there was a candlelight vigil going to happen in Port Angeles, my town.

Speaker 1: 19:26

I made a post and was like hey, I heard there's a white supremacist gathering. Because I'm sorry, he was a white supremacist, he was a full-on white fucking supremacist. And if you're going to the vigil of a white supremacist, you're probably a white fucking supremacist, even if you're a white supremacist lite, even if you're a white supremacist mini, even if you're a white supremacist undercover and you don't quite fully admit it or realize it, which I believe is the majority of white supremacists. Because the thing about white supremacy in America is it's not a thing in America, it is America. America was born and bred in white supremacy. America, its entire social fabric, has it woven into the threads of the fabric. White supremacy is not white in America, white supremacy is just America. White supremacy is like bread into all of us, the white people, the brown people, the black people, the Asians, the everybody's. Why? Because white is right. White in America had power.

Speaker 1: 20:40

White in America is really good at presenting power the way that Charlie Kirk was really good at presenting power. He was really phenomenal at like sounding like he knew what he was talking about and being so self-assured. This guy was more self-centered than a fucking gyroscope and he was so self-assured and you could see it in his body language, you could hear it in the tone of his voice when he would speak. He was so self-assured. It inspires confidence and this is why conservatives like him.

Speaker 1: 21:18

Conservatives tend to like authoritarian figures because they don't want to be bothered with the details. They don't want to bother to reappraise, which is a thing that I've talked about a lot on here. When you go into the neurology of conservatives versus liberals across cultures, not just in white cultures, not just in America, that's like the biggest neurological difference is conservatives, self-listed, regardless of what your politics are in your country. Conservatives are more likely or I guess I should say conservatives are less likely to reappraise disgust. They just don't do it. When they feel a sense of disgust, they go that's good enough for me, it's wrong, I don't like it, and they don't want to put any more thought into it, which is why there are more liberals in cities. Cities create liberals because they force you to reappraise what you find disgusting, because there's people from different cultures, people from different backgrounds, people from different places in the world, different histories, and you have to learn to deal with that. So conservatives are not good at second-guessing their stuff and they don't want to think about anybody else's reality. So when they find somebody who says that White is right and they do it eloquently and most of the time he's not being a venomous psychopath then it makes sense to like him. It's the same reason I believed my father so much. He would say things with such calm and such rationale rationale and such self-ownership that you just believe it. You're just inspired to believe it, and that's what's so dangerous about people like him. So I'm glad he's gone.

Speaker 1: 23:08

I don't know what's going to happen with the Overton window now. We can't really shift anymore, right? Well, oh, fuck. Oh, I said it, knock on wood. That's not even real wood. God dang it. Oh, my guitar. I'll knock on real wood because we might be going more far. Right, that's okay, because I start college here pretty soon. I'm going to use the last of my GI Bill, stack some cash and probably get the fuck out of this country, because it's only getting worse, and I'm not going to stop my fuck fascists, anti-Trump, anti-fascist rhetoric and that makes me a terrorist in this country.

Speaker 1: 23:46

Saying that you are anti-fascist, that you don't like fascists, literally makes you a terrorist in this country. I'm not being hyperbolic. It's Antifa is literally on the terrorist watch list and that's not an organization. It's just a bunch of people who are like fuck fascists, that's it. But in America, if you don't like fascists, you're a terrorist, which literally tells you that this is a fascist country and it was fascist before Trump got in. It was fascist before he came in.

Speaker 1: 24:17

He's just taking all of the wool. He removed all of the wool in the first couple of weeks and now he's taken the chains, he's removed the chains off the fascists. Now we're all fucked and Charlie Kirk's dead. It's crazy, but he's dead. He's like dead dead and as much as that, really fucking sucks for his daughter, I'm glad he can't influence anybody else anymore. I really, I really am. I'm glad he can't influence, but I really, when I actually think about his daughter, I actually get sad.

Speaker 1: 24:56

And I think that's a good thing, cause I was a little too gleeful. I think I was a little too gleeful. I think I was a little too gleeful at the beginning of this and I don't feel bad about that. It is something that I will actively plan on tempering more but because I didn't quite realize how gleeful I was at the beginning. But that's what happens. When you're an absolute piece of shit and you've made a career out of ridiculing, talking down and convincing young people to be fascist neo-Nazis, then, yeah, people are going to celebrate your death.

Speaker 1: 25:39

No one mourns the wicked. Fuck them. So fuck Charlie Kirk and fuck that nutjob right-wing idiot who shot and killed him too. I mean, whoever trained you to shoot, well done. Whoever trained you to think, not so much. Anyway, if you made it this far in the podcast. Thank you, I hope you got something out of it. I hope you at least learned my perspective. I'm sorry that Charlie Kirk got shot in the neck by an even more racist, even more white supremacist, even more neo-Nazi. But I'm glad he's dead. And remember stay curious and stay uncomfortable. Thank you you.