Charlie Kirk became the latest victim of gun violence in America on September 10. And he wasn't the only person shot on a school campus that day, nor was he the only political figure killed this year.
Unlike Melissa Hortman and her husband, the motivation for Kirk’s murder remains unclear. That hasn’t stopped right-wing pundits and politicians from framing it as typical extremist left-wing violence.
In between calls for civil war and censorship, the ramping up of police-state authoritarianism, and painting of the slain Christian Nationalist activist as a noble martyr, anti-racist icon Ta-Nehisi Coates called out the strange reflex from some left-of-center figures (like Ezra Klein) to participate in whitewashing Kirk's hateful politics. Today we discuss what happened and what it might mean.
Show Notes
From Secular Activist to Christian Nationalist
Doug Wilson on Abortion, Gays, Women Voting
Meet The New Apostolic Reformation
167: Straight White American Jesus (w/Bradley Onishi)
129: White Christian Nationalism (w/Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry)
Stealing Democracy for Jesus
Blackpill Aesthetics: A Crash Course in Meme Extremism
Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
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Conspirituality 276, Inventing St. Charlie Kirk.
Thank you.
On September 10th, Charlie Kirk became the latest victim of gun violence in America.
He wasn't the only person shot on a school campus that day.
He wasn't the only political figure killed this year.
And unlike Melissa Hortman and her husband, the motivation for his murder is still not entirely clear.
But that didn't stop the immediate rush from right-wing pundits and politicians to frame it as typical extremist left-wing violence against a modern-day Martin Luther King Jr. who fought for truth, justice, and the American way.
In between the calls for civil war and censorship, the ramping up of police state authoritarianism, and the painting of a slain Christian nationalist activist as a noble martyr, anti-racist icon Tanahisi Coates called out the strange reflex from some left-of-center figures like Ezra Klein to participate in whitewashing Kirk's hateful politics.
Today, we'll discuss what happened and what it might mean.
So, as we all know, the 31-year-old conservative activist and Trump ally Charlie Kirk was killed on September 10th by a shooter perched on a rooftop around 350 feet away from where Kirk was engaging in his characteristic college campus speech and debate format in front of an estimated open-air audience of 3,000 at Utah Valley University.
As the manhunt for the killer was underway, pundits, politicians, influencers, and the U.S. president wasted no time declaring this an act of left-wing political violence and calling for government Crackdowns on speech, and even some calling for civil war.
In a copycat echo, seemingly of the United Healthcare CEO killer's style, shell casings left by the shooter were engraved with messages.
These were at first interpreted by officials and reported by the Wall Street Journal as anti-fascist and pro-transgender messages.
But then they later seemed to mostly represent nihilistic meme culture trolling.
Then commentators and some journalists identified social media posts that suggested groiper references tied to Nick Fuentes and his farther right feud with MAGA and Charlie Kirk.
And this dovetailed with the shooter's heavily Republican gun culture Mormon background.
Then, as the thing kept twisting and turning, it was revealed he may have had a transgender romantic partner.
So speculation about the motive for the killing have swirled.
And the shooter has been tight-lipped with authority so far since turning himself in.
Meanwhile, several people daring to besmirch the name of St. Charlie have been doxxed online, fired, often for just directly quoting the fallen activists' words.
And we have to point out, because it just happened this morning, the site that started to dox people got doxed.
So all the people who are uploading information, their personal information is now released online because they didn't take security into account when they decided to put up their doxing website.
Yeah.
I hate this timeline.
So also based on a mob boss-like threat directed at ABC by the FCC head, Brendan Carr.
You know, we could do this the hard way or the easy way.
Late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was pulled off the air for criticizing what he called, and I quote the MAGA gang, desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.
And then Jimmy Kimmel returned to her show again this week in part because of mass outcry from subscribers who were threatening to cancel their subscription to ABC's parent company Disney.
I'm gonna start today by sharing a couple clips from a young independent journalist I came across who has also suffered pressure and harassment for her coverage.
She goes by at Hey, it's Twig on Instagram, and she went on to cover at a vigil in the small town of Neptune Beach in Northeast Florida, just a few days after the killing.
The rhetoric at this event and how she's been targeted illustrates the incendiary cocktail of politics and religion at the heart of what Kirk and now his martyrdom represent.
Here's a snapshot compilation of what she posted.
Live sweet.
He brings it back to the cross.
I know that we would say it was a political thing, but it was much more than that.
He was on a campuses.
We've lost a couple of generations because cotton candy preachers won't preach the truth.
And what happens is we don't teach people that God made male and female.
We may teach the divorce rate in the church is as high as it is in the world.
But the sin, the soul that sinned shall surely die.
But Charlie Kirk died because of his stand.
It is good in evil.
It's evil that they want to kill babies in a room in a womb.
It's evil that uh about 70% of the transgender people are between the ages of 13 and 18.
70% of the transgenders in America are teenagers.
What does that tell you about indoctrination?
We have to be militant as a Christian.
In the old days, when you sing a song, I'm on the battlefield for the Lord.
We don't even go to church on Sunday.
Forsaking not the assembling together ourselves, even more so.
We say it's the end times, even more so seeing the day approaches.
Yeah.
So we could perhaps see that as a uh as a small-scale dry run for the massive event, the uh rally memorial that we had over the weekend.
What's wrong with cotton candy?
Is that it like I didn't realize that that's a that's a slur.
You know what it is?
It's a it's a um it's a watering down of candy ass.
Okay, got it.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, one thing that all of these people have to do is that they have to outconservative each other, right?
Because those comments are directed as much as at his fellow preachers as they are at, you know, the general public.
And that brings up these paradoxes.
Like he's he's complaining about how the divorce rate within churches is actually as high as it is in the general population.
Instead of taking a lesson from that, right, about what, you know, heteropatriarchy might mean or what Christian marriage vows might actually mean or what they do, it's got to be a sign that the corruption is coming from within.
So there's no escape for these people.
It's like, you know, the world is dangerous, but also the church is dangerous as well, unless we purify everything.
Yeah, there's always the need to return to a more fundamentalist commitment to these dogmatic principles.
Yeah, there wouldn't be any sort of activity without that.
Like if they actually got to the place where they were absolutely pure, I don't, they wouldn't know what to do, I suppose.
They wouldn't have much to talk about, right?
There'd be another schism.
Right.
Yeah.
So of course, this comes as no surprise.
Turning point USA is not just a political recruitment organization for young people present on more than 3,500 high school and college campuses.
It's also a vehicle for Christian nationalism.
Now, it didn't exactly start off that way.
Charlie Kirk, who co-founded the organization as an 18-year-old in 2012, through 2019, expressed the opinion that imposing religion through government was morally wrong.
In other words, he kind of favored separation of church and state, with politics being prosecuted via a secular worldview that he was willing to beat up on college students to debate in public.
His initial focus on championing conservative politics and denying climate science actually reflected the agenda of Turning Point USA's advisory council members, like Independent Petroleum Association of America CEO Barry Russell and Supreme Court wife Jenny Thomas and GOP megadonor Foster Fries, who've all been involved somewhat from the very early days.
But something changed in 2020.
Shortly after COVID hit, Turning Point USA hooked up with a young evangelical preacher and singer named Sean Foyt and his Kingdom to the Capitol Tour, which proclaimed the imminent return of Jesus Christ at their revival rallies and gathered in protest against religious freedom being impinged upon by pandemic restrictions.
Kirk also in this period started referencing the Seven Mountain Mandate ideology that we've covered a lot on this podcast, which holds that Christians should follow an interpretation of Revelation 17 9, the seven heads are seven mountains, combined with Isaiah 2,
too, the mountain of the Lord's house should be established on the top of mountains, which obviously means that God wants the seven areas of business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family, and religion to be ruled over by dominionist Christianity.
How would you read it any other way?
I I know it's very, very clear.
We've covered white Christian nationalism a lot.
There'll be links in the show notes if you want to follow up on some of these references.
The Seven Mountain Mandate ideology is a kind of strategic initiative of the new Apostolic Reformation movement that is tangled up in our current White House.
And it had a significant presence at the Capitol on January 6th.
Just how tangled is this church state dynamic?
Well, both Paula White Kane, head of the newly created White House faith office and current Secretary of Defense, Pete Heggseth, are affiliated with this movement.
So, too, old favorite operatives we've covered here for years in the run-up to our current clusterfuck, Roger Stone and Mike Flynn and several others.
As we approach the 2024 election, many preachers popular online openly embraced the label of being Christian nationalist, as did elected officials like Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert.
The head of the church that Pete Heggseth is affiliated with, Dan Wilson, advocates not only for criminalizing homosexuality and abortion under all circumstances, but believes that women being granted the right to vote was a mistake and it should be rolled back.
Make no mistake here, this is an ultra-conservative, deeply reactionary cult-like movement that believes it can revive the gifts of the Holy spirit, like prophecy and laying on of healing hands, speaking in tongues and working miracles.
Preachers in this particular sect interpret worldly events through a supernatural lens.
They see the world itself as a spiritual battlefield in which believers are called to fight demonic forces, essentially operating through those demonic forces operating through their political enemies.
So I think we underestimate at our peril the status of Charlie Kirk, peace be upon him, as a literal martyr to millions of people who for years now have had their politics infused with fire and brimstone religion and their religion directed toward militant politics.
The red line of designating political opponents as literal agents of demonic forces in a holy war has long ago been crossed, which means the kit gloves of what a lot of moderates think of as Christian love have largely been removed.
Or what's been exposed is the complete absence of, you know, any other kind of Christianity, you know, involving the social gospel.
You know, there's this paradox I think they're going to have to deal with right off the top because I didn't realize that Dan Wilson was such a misogynist that he wants to roll back suffrage for women.
I don't know if he's having um brunch with Erica Kirk, uh, who's now going to be in charge of Turning Point.
But like, um, yeah, they're gonna have to sort out some stuff.
Um, but you know, what comes up for me is this question of whether Kirk was a builder or a burner, a destroyer of things.
Like I think he's had really huge influence because he's both.
Like, and he's confounding because he embodies both this fascist destruction and the veneer of fascist wholesomeness.
Like when he rolls into a university, he is there to basically destroy uh epistemology and you know, the intellectual foundations of of liberal democracy.
That's what he's there to do.
And I think that contradiction is what made him such a great absurdist South Park, South Park target, and why meme images from the left about him line up with depictions of Vance as this big baby with a lollipop who's also capable of sicking ice on you.
People have pointed out the obvious hypocrisy.
I'll say more about that in a minute.
Uh, about Kirk believing hate speech is protected under the First Amendment, which he was a big fan of, and the administration rapidly shutting down any speech they don't like after his death.
But Matthew, it turns out that Kirk was also a fan of his South Park character and making South Park being pulled from the air last week, even more eyebrow raising.
Yeah.
So I did not know about his South Park fandom until you mentioned it, Derek.
And I think that makes it even more interesting to me as a political operator, more unflappable because I can't think of another person who'd be lampooned like that who wouldn't be, you know, really, really triggered.
Especially on the right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Anyway, I'll get to some of that psychology later.
But um, the preview that I've got for that is that there are no right wing fingers, uh, figures, as you're saying, who maintain that type of composure.
Um, he was really focused.
But what I wanted to mention was that there were a few days in there after the IDing of Tyler Robinson that you mentioned, Julian, where there was a lot of reasonable speculation that he was under the thrall of Fuentes and the Graper movement.
We were hoping we were really hoping it was true.
So yeah, some people, some people were.
I was.
There was a picture of Robinson and the squatting Slav pose.
The shell casings were etched with these pretty hackneyed memes and irony scrambled references to the antifascist satire game, Helldivers II, which I clued into right away because my kids play it.
Uh, and people neck deep in that culture pointed out that Fuentes found Kirk from the right to be unacceptable, uh, to be unacceptably liberal and often called him a fascist for some reason in, you know, that he could rationalize.
Yeah.
Now, as it turns out, and and fitting for this new category of nihilistic extremism that I think is emerging in the picture of Tyler Robinson, those connections just haven't found enough evidence to stick.
And we we don't really know that much definitively about the motives here.
Yeah, I mean, it went back and forth in its world as I was saying, and and things that we thought we knew turned out not to quite be what they seem to be.
The thing that seems to have stuck is that apparently he was in some kind of close relationship with a trans person, but ultimately everything's gone quiet.
Um, so we don't really know how how it all shakes out, right?
One important thing that came out of this little eddy of discussion about motives was I think the growing visibility of meme experts.
Like I came across uh a woman named uh Cy Contarell on TikTok who pointed out that the meme heavy violence is usually rooted in this black pill hatred for anyone willing to work within institutions at all, even conservative institutions to build something new.
So for them, turning point USA and every attempt at MAGA integration dulls the blade of pure rebellion.
Ergo Kirk was a sellout because he wanted to build electoral power.
He was a builder, in other words, and Fuentes is a burner.
Now, so even if none of that ends up sort of patching onto this incident, I think it's good for us to be aware of that dynamic within conservatism.
Yeah, I I actually went back and started reading L. Reeves' book, Black Pill as well, which is a good reference point.
But listening to your your review of our work on white Christian nationalism, I'm reminded that Kirk and the Seven Mountain people only nominally work at building things, like beyond market share and recruitment numbers.
They do have this fantastical vision of a post-liberal post-secular America that you know looks like illustrations from Sunday school books or Star Trek or a mixture of the both.
But for the most part, I think they're nihilists as well in relation to institutions, in relation to the courts or democratic norms or or the definition of debate.
Like I don't buy it that Pete Heggsith really wants to build anything or has the imagination to build anything besides monuments to himself, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So for me, the important thing to remember is that the new apostolic reformation is post-millennialist, which means they believe that establishing a Christian dominion over the world for a thousand years or so.
That's the millennial part, is necessary before Jesus can come back, right?
This is different than the apocalyptic types where like we must be bathed in fire and then Jesus can return.
They believe they have to install this kind of Christophascist vision.
And with that kind of divine directive, they're willing to destroy a lot, as you're saying, in the name of getting us there.
And they see anyone who opposes them as serving a demonic agenda.
So yeah, they're willing to work within a political frame.
They're willing to stack the court, they're willing to uh ignore their uh theological differences with Catholics in order to do so.
But once they get into power, they're absolutely clear about what their agenda is.
And it has nothing to do with democracy.
Hey, isn't the rapture today?
The rapture is today.
That's why we're still here, guys.
And now we've got to figure out how to carry on.
Well, I wonder how many listeners we lost.
Jeez.
So this aggression and this um willingness to just destroy things that you're identifying, Matthew, and the hostility towards anyone who gets in the way.
This is something that the young woman I referenced before, hey, it's Twig, also found out very quickly.
So just for posting the clips that she shared earlier, she just recorded them and posted them after attending one of literally thousands of vigils that were happening around the country has turned her into a target of what many would classify as distinctly unchristian sentiments.
Hey, it's Twig.
And in the past few days, Charlie Kirk supporters have doxed me, reached out to my family, reached out to my previous employer, as well as made several violent death and grape threats to my inbox.
One of the more notable threats being that a man said, Where are you so that I can find you, grape you, cut you up, and put you in a barrel.
They're trying to dox a job that I do not have because I am self-employed.
They have reached out to family members of mine.
They have stalked and harassed me, my friends.
Um, but I'm not going to be silenced.
So I I just wanted to make that clear.
The whole doxing website that Charlie supporters have come up with, and all of these ex-accounts that are blasting Progressive commentators and trying to get us fired or doxxed or physically harmed.
Um I'm not going to be one of those, baby.
You're not going to shut me up.
You tried to intimidate me.
You tried to silence me, and all you did was give me a megaphone.
Because I'm about to be so much louder and so much more obnoxious.
And now I'm just going to dig deeper.
I hope so.
I also hope that they keep safe.
I just want to say that, like, I've got this book coming out in April.
It's got anti-fascist data on the cover.
And, you know, with I'm in I'm in contact now with, you know, the publicity team and the publisher about like, okay, well, what do recent statements from the White House actually imply about, you know, the safety of the publisher or my safety or things like that.
And I have a whole sort of group of people that I can discuss that with.
But if you are an independent content creator on TikTok or Instagram doing that sort of thing, it's incredibly vulnerable.
It's very, very atomized.
I mean, I think that speaking bravely as she's doing is really positive.
Uh, and I also hope that she has people around her, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hey, it's Twigs.
Stay safe, stay safe.
We're we are admiring your bravery and concerned about the realities of what you're going up against.
So all of this underlines a strategy I've I've been describing over the last year as retroactive justification.
It's when you falsely accuse the other side of having previously done the very thing that you're now doing, as if to say that turnabout is fair place.
So whatever the story ends up being with the shooter in Utah, he wasn't part of a large organized, well-funded group engaged in hateful ideology that justifies violence.
Those who say he was are more likely describing themselves.
He's not an example of left-wing hate speech creating stochastic terrorism.
That language has been co-opted, ironically, but unsurprisingly, based on how the media correctly described a spate of bomb threats at hospitals and then armed right-wing militia presence at schools and libraries a couple of years ago, in response to false and inflammatory rhetoric about gays and trans people being groomers, which is essentially code for them being pedophiles.
That's when stochastic terrorism really entered the mainstream discourse, and now it's being flipped as if somehow openly calling out authoritarianism and fascist leanings in the current administration is a way of dehumanizing people, and that that's what led to Charlie Kirk being shot.
Right.
So now the category of hate speech is reframed as doing exactly that.
And the spate of recent loan shooters who've mostly been right wing is somehow flipped as a stochastic outcome of less left-wingers sounding the alarm via the very free speech protections that the right was proudly standing up for until literally two weeks ago.
Ann Applebaugh made a great point on this front that this isn't really about free speech as being criticized from the left, i.e.
cancel culture.
This is clear government suppression.
Expecting the right to understand they're being hypocritical hypocritical, it's just not gonna work because they don't care about that.
It's purely about power and whatever means are used to acquire more power are more important to them than being labeled hypocrites.
I want to ping Sam Adler Bell and Patrick Blanchfield in a Know Your Enemy podcast episode called Freud in Politics, where they speak exactly to this.
And they say that when you call a mega person hypocritical and think that that's going to work or it's gonna score points, or it's effective and explanatory, it's not just that they don't care about it, but it's not going to sort of mesh with the fact that for a Trump supporter, hypocrisy is just baked into the way in which the person is living.
It's like it's not hypocrisy, for example, for a Trump supporter to say that they value Christian sexual morality while they vote for Trump who's uh, you know, a predator.
These are symptoms of internal conflicts between wanting to be seen as moral while grappling with their own sins.
Uh, and Trump gives them permission to solve that tension.
So they're not hypocrites.
They can't conceive of themselves that way.
What they're doing is that they're managing pretty painful contradictions.
Yeah, I would say too that they're to some to some extent here, not really beholden to earthly democratic principles or any logic that challenges their emotional conviction.
No.
Because they've largely been conditioned to see the left as hypocritical, dishonest, hateful, and possessed by communism or Satanism or both.
So this is where he's ended up.
And the right wing response to his death is a strongly religious one, whether devout or performative in its religiosity, authoritarianism is opportunistic and ruthless.
We're watching the continued dismantling of firewalls between the government and the press, the DOJ and the presidency, the military and party politics, the education system and political activism, and even the sick combination of conspiracies and capitalism that is destroying our medical science agencies.
And each one of those firewalls is maybe the subject of a previous episode this year.
As for Charlie Kirk's legacy, well, his podcast had downloads as high as 750,000 per day before his death.
And that's an audience JD Vance was all too willing to tap into by broadcasting to its feed from the White House on September 16th.
And since then, other right wing superstars have been willing to step into that limelight, like Glenn Beck and Michael Knowles and Meghan Kelly.
In the wake of his murder, Turning Point USA has reportedly been flooded with requests to start official chapters at new educational institutions.
And if all of those requests were to move forward, it would weigh more than double the number of those chapters nationwide.
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100% of the people who are excited and happy about a young father and husband's death have gotten the COVID vaccine.
100% of them have been Jabbed a number of times.
And it's been long predicted that this um this shot had can rip the humanity right out of people.
In fact, there's a study I'll post that my friend Dr. John Kim sent me about how it does increase the risk of schizophrenia, bipolar and aggression.
Now, how does this tie into things that I do in real life?
In homeopathy, the reason people, the emotional reason people have herpes viruses is grief, which begets rage.
So in Dest Bioshomeathy kit, the first month you treat with grief as an emotional remedy, the second month, rage.
So that's Jess Petros, a former hospitalist turned functional medicine and Gershon practitioner who never lets a good conspiracy pass by unnoticed.
For this segment, I want to look at some of the wellness influencers' responses to Kirk's death, because there's been a lot.
And we've covered Dr. Jess before on the podcast.
From that clip, she goes on to discuss how vaccines and herpes are related, as well as linking to a lecture on the emotional nature of herpes that she's giving.
And if you're wondering if she sells a boatload of supplements and homeopathic products, you are absolutely right.
She was the first I saw that was grifting off Kirk's death.
And shout out to Mallory DeMille, who's going to return next week.
We're going to be doing an episode with her on nicotine.
She sent me that video because Dr. Jess blocked me a long time ago.
The first wellness influencer, as I said, to monetize Kirk's death, but certainly not the last.
And it kind of makes sense that big wellness love Charlie because Charlie loathed COVID vaccines and mitigation efforts.
He was early in COVID as a medical freedom champion.
He basisly claimed that max mass vaccination would cause extensive fatalities.
He regularly criticized health authorities and vaccines, saying they were all part of government overreach.
In 2023, Kirk crossed paths with Swifties by mocking COVID and Taylor in the same breath when he wrote, What would break Kelsey's heart first?
The COVID shot or Taylor Swift.
Swifties were not happy.
And yes, Kirk regularly promoted Alt Med products.
His show's sponsors included supplements manufacturers like the wellness company, who I've covered often, Balance of Nature and Bio Optimizers.
Rough Greens was a sponsor, holistic dog food, uh wellness to prepper crossovers like medical emergency kits and food ration buckets also made their way onto a show.
Can I just say here quickly that the herpes reference is really, really fascinating?
And it's giving big like grinder crashed during the Charlie Kirk memorial service vibes, right?
That she's it's almost like she's recognizing, oh, there that this is a market for me.
There's a lot of people here engaging in illicit sexual activity and have a lot of shame about their STIs.
And I can somehow link it to all of this, you know, conspiratorial right-wing nonsense and then sell them my products.
That's astute.
I don't think she's that smart, but who knows?
Uh, because she's been doing this a lot for a while, herpes is kind of her lane, but she might have definitely noticed it's that's a that's a really good point.
I I'm also not surprised that grifters would capitalize on Kirk's death because he spoke the same pseudoscientific language.
The wellness company sent out a memorial email, which to their credit did not include any affiliate links or product placements.
They did paint Kirk in the same light as we've been discussing today, though, as a free speech champion, bringing old school debate and critical thinking to college and high school campuses, which he definitely was not.
So that's Dr. Jess.
We also have Mickey Willis chiming in who posted a strange and meandering video on Facebook that's over two minutes long.
I'm gonna play about half of it.
Noting that the last 15 seconds are stitched in.
I included it because it parallels the body as society metaphors.
He poorly misused in the brief that Julian, you and I covered a few weeks ago when Willis was trying to relate toxins attacking the immune system to immigrants attacking America, which he then used in an attempt to sell his own immune boosting supplements.
So here's Mickey.
If you want to see the light at the end of this very dark tunnel, listen closely.
Like you, my heart is filled with sadness and rage.
The reactive part of me wants to unleash hell on every radicalized activist out there.
But the wiser part of me.
The side that understands the vast difference between reacting and responding reminds me to take a deep breath and to remember.
Reacting is exactly what they want us to do.
They need us so emotional, so enraged that we look away from the evidence now emerging.
Evidence that exposes their crimes against humanity.
Whether it's newly leaked emails proving that Dr. Fauci lied under oath, the bombshell study comparing the unvaccinated to the vaccinated, the long-awaited disclosures from the Epstein Files, or the countless other exposes now being dragged into the light.
They want us distracted.
They want us to dominate the news cycle with hateful rhetoric and physical acts of revenge.
Do not take the bait.
We are entering the Great Purge when that which is poisonous to the human organism is puked into the sewage where it belongs.
In the same way, your body rejects consuming toxins.
We are collectively ridding our bodies of the poisonous programming we've been ingesting for decades.
So Willis isn't selling anything in this video except his idea of what freedom means.
I'm saying he's not selling a product specifically.
It's like, he's not being a good fascist player because...
Because of course you're supposed to be get angry over Charlie Kirk's murder.
So I don't know, with with him, there's always somebody else in the background that he has some sort of insight into.
But then also there's this incredible passivity, right?
Don't take the bait, don't respond to this, don't respond to that.
But respond to me.
Respond to me by doing nothing, except maybe here's my pills.
And and that video is worth commenting on too, right?
The way that it's it's it's lit very intensely.
He's kind of leaning forward, he has a cap on.
It's like that there's a whole way that he's showing off his bone structure and those intense eyes.
Like he's very much selling himself in this video.
And it's very reminiscent of Brett Weinstein essentially saying, you know, that that uh claims of Biden being dead was it was was uh was a deep state kind of double fake, and you should not take the bait because everything is like layers within layers of conspiracies.
And you can hear the silence in the vocal.
Like that's intentional.
He has reverb there because he wants you to hear that silence.
Like he's a very he's very keen on how to present himself in these situations.
To your point, Matthew, yeah, he leans heavily on pronouns a lot there because who is the they that he's going through?
First off, the Trump administration is in power right now.
Exactly.
More and more media organizations are towing the MAGA line as billionaires buy up outlets.
This is huge right now.
MAGA is the deep state, yet he's pretending nefarious agents are working behind the behind the scenes.
And if he thinks that Trump and RFK Jr. are gonna purge us of toxins, my God, I have a new supplement for you.
Speaking of supplements, Mickey's buddy JP Sears also never lets a good conspiracy go unmonetized.
He has posted a few videos about Kirk now, including one that trails the Candace Owens Deep State Israel conspiracy theory that Kirk's weighing allegiance to Netanyahu, who we should note has published a number of videos in honor of Kirk since his death, is very suspicious.
Theia's livestream genocide is starting to land with her followers, But then sort of balancing that against everybody's bone-deep anti-Semitism, uh, but then also guardrailed by their loyalty to Trump's department of war.
Like, you know, it's a real mess.
And when you have no morals, like the calculus is pretty complex for these guys.
Yeah.
Well, let's listen to the dizzying pivot of Sears' video here.
Well, that's it for today's news.
And remember, the best way to honor the life of a great man is not to worry about truth and justice, and just take comfort and the certainty that comes with our lung gunman end of story narrative.
Good night.
And sincerely, rest in peace, Charlie Kirk, you'll be forever loved and missed.
Hey, did you know there's one phase of sleep that almost everyone doesn't get enough of?
And this one phase of sleep is responsible for most of your body's daily rejuvenation, repair, boosting energy, weight loss hormones, controlling appetite, and so much more.
I'm talking about deep sleep.
And the big reason why many people don't get enough of this most important phase of sleep is because they're magnesium deficient.
Over 80% of our population is.
Okay, so like we've covered Candace Owens a while ago, going from deep state to her sponsor.
And that I just wanted to play that example.
Sears is promoting biooptimizers there, which, as I mentioned, was also a Kirk sponsor.
You might find this hard to believe, but 80% of Americans are not magnesium deficient.
Come on.
The percentage who don't consume enough recommended daily allowance of magnesium is about 50%.
But the actual clinical deficit is about 10%.
But never let statistics you don't like get in the way of selling products.
Using Kirk's death to further spread conspiracies around vaccines in the deep state, is one thing.
I want to do one more because Mallory sent me a Substack post by a Florida-based functional and integrative medical doctor named Leland Still stillman.
And oh boy, strapin.
I posted part of it on our Instagram last week, and then Mallory made a video of him.
But let's recrap.
Let's rectu, yeah, yeah.
Let's recap because the grift runs really deep state here.
It's titled, Who Really Killed Charlie Kirk?
And he uses the man to denounce the radical left, which he calls completely nuts.
Why is the left completely nuts?
Well, he writes the human brain cannot remain rational in a world full of constant stimulation from artificial light, artificial electromagnetic radiation, EMF, processed food, heavy metals, and food additives, just to name a few.
We should point out that Stillman is in Florida, uh, because that does play in here.
Like Dr. Jess, he puts our inability to empathize on vaccines and so much more.
He then states what he really does at his medical practice.
We help men be as masculine as possible.
We help women be as feminine as possible.
We help children be as childlike as possible.
We help them grow up to be as strong, smart, and tough as possible.
And as people get older, we try to keep them as tough and strong as possible for as long as possible.
We do this by purging the body of the toxins that turn people into radical nut jobs.
Medicine is politics.
Well, it sounds like he's added two genders there in children and old people, but I want to see his what are their pronouns?
Masculinometers, the femininometers, and the child ometers.
Like, where's the data still, man?
Where's the data?
Show me.
Oh, Matthew, you've always talked about how you don't understand science.
He's bringing science here.
Yeah, right.
Remember, this is all a supposed memorial to Charlie Kirk, this article.
But then he reveals what actually killed Charlie.
As far as I'm concerned, Charlie Kirk was killed by artificial light at night, heavy metals, particularly those in vaccines, pharmaceuticals, particularly psych drugs, processed food laden with toxic herbicides and pesticides, industrial chemicals and toxins, particularly endocrine, disrupting compounds, artificial electromagnetic radiation that have collectively rotted out the American mind to the point that there are adults who use terms like chest feeding and pregnant people.
Now, don't get me started on genital mutilation, masquerading as medical care.
So are they trying to say that it's only people who don't vote for Trump who are consuming all of these food items and using vaccines and like what are they saying?
No, no, not in this case.
And and he his pronoun is definitely he, if you want to correct.
I think he makes that very clear.
Uh, what he's saying is that this is something that affects everyone because if he didn't, he wouldn't be able to sell to them because he specifically targets conservatives in his practice.
He says mostly conservatives go to him because they are most concerned with their health, but they're going to be more aware of the things you just identified, and he's trying to help them.
But if they're not going to him for help, those things are what create the radical left nut jobs, which then do out which then go out and do things like murders.
Not only that, your kid, even if you're from a good MAGA Mormon family, could end up becoming One of these nut jobs because you haven't protected them from all of these toxins.
Yes.
I guess what I'm confused about is that he seems to be suggesting that he has a huge practice, that he's actually fixed a lot of people because there's a lot of people who aren't, you know, political nut jobs that aren't committing violence, right?
Like it, I the numbers seem to be problematic here for me.
Welcome.
There's that, there's that.
And then there's this whole other level, which I don't want to get too into, but his son was home birthed late last year.
Uh, was almost still born, like was not in, like almost died, and they had to bring him to an actual medical hospital.
And he's turned that into a crusade of like selling artificial light therapy to help children who are almost dead when they're born.
It's very weird.
Like this, these are all of his previous posts before this.
So he's actually turned his son who almost died into a crusade that he is now grifting off of.
So that's the level of character of this person, just to be aware.
Well, I also think it would just be more effective if any of these people had insight into Robinson's purported online world.
And maybe they could speculate about how his Mormon purity got scrambled by memes as if they were red food dyes, because you know, this guy's talking about chemical chaos.
And I think that's a lot easier to erroneously link uh to violence than black pill culture is.
And I wonder if subconsciously his market is going to make that link, because when you really get into the weeds of online nihilism, the data points are like just ambivalent.
You know, it's also like chemistry, where each slogan or meme can have agonist or antagonist effects.
Like chemistry doesn't have any intention.
And likewise, it's impossible to sort out the intentionality of the black pilled world.
That is one of your most astute scientific observations.
I'm not I'm being totally serious.
Chemistry does not have an intention.
And the but the way that they present it as it always is if it did.
Yeah.
And that's that's really dangerous.
And that's what ropes a lot of people in.
He concludes the email by writing that he wants to help ensure that the next Charlie Kirk grows up even stronger, tougher, and smarter than the last one.
It's like the biotic man.
I have to admit though, you know, I like to be fair.
Stillman gets one thing right when he writes, you probably have never thought about medicine in this way.
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Okay, well, the Kirk Memorial was something else.
I mean, we've seen white Christian nationalist pastors praying over Trump.
We've seen Paula White speaking in tongues.
This was the whole cabinet leaning into incredibly vapid and repetitive praise music and the triumphalism of the evangelical Jesus with their full chest.
Even Hindus like Gabbard are leaning in and the non-believer in chief, Trump.
We look forward to it.
It really is.
We want to look at it as a time of healing, a time of whatever, that something like this could have happened is not even believable.
The time of whatever.
Meanwhile, have you seen the beautiful ballroom we're building?
So I don't think for any of us there's there's anything surprising about the instant hagiography machine running on this evangelical gas and thrown into gear by the MAGA transmission.
It's a really predictable storyline.
And, you know, we've seen parts of it before.
Like there are Reichstag echoes that this is that crucial moment when a Dutch communist torched the legislature in Berlin and that triggered brutal Nazi repression.
There's the ghost of Horst Vessel that people have been referring to.
He's the brown shirt propagandist who was murdered in in 1930 again by two communists, who was elevated by Goobles himself to be the first Nazi martyr.
And even there's a you know poem that became their hymn.
What's notable about Kirk becomes clearer to me when I try to imagine the response to the murder of any of his colleagues, because on a functional level, the MAGA response to Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Jesse Waters, or Jack Pasobic getting murdered would be just as opportunistic, but I don't think it would have the same emotional punch.
And I think that's because Kirk embodied the affect that all of these guys aspire to, like he was unflappable.
From what I've seen, if he chose to be an asshole, he usually did it with a smirk.
I think the most obvious example that floated around Blue Sky last week was talking about how, well, there are no tall buildings in Gaza anymore, so they can't throw homosexuals off to their death.
And he smiled as he did that.
He didn't project fragility.
He could even get his ass beat in those staged debates.
So there are clips from Oxford Union floating around where he never loses composure even when he's beaten.
What he does is he sort of puts his eyes down and he looks at his notes and he just waits for the next debater to show up.
He doesn't respond.
He he knows how to turn himself off.
He knows how to not get triggered.
He knows how to not mimic the social justice warrior stereotypes that are thrown up by the MAGA side of the culture war.
He was saintly.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think what you're getting at in terms of his unflappability is part of why he was actually able to have those debates not really be staged.
He's willing to take all comers.
He's willing to hear their best arguments.
And when they do beat his ass, which they couldn't if it was scripted, uh, he's actually really good at maintaining his composure in that moment, right?
I think too that uh right-wing Gen X pundits and politicians who met Charlie Kirk when he was a teenager and then watched him turn into a powerful, successful, influential man with a wife and kids who became more religious as he matured.
I can only imagine that they were very proud of him, that their emotion in response to this is, you know, a completely understandable human response in terms of what he represented to them, which was the future of their movement as much as we decry it.
Yeah, he really was a savior to them.
And he grew up almost made for the role, although he made some interesting choices.
He grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh, and you know, his politics flow pretty much from that well.
But then, you know, with all of the opportunistic add-ons that are dictated by the rise of MAGA.
But he also added three winning ingredients.
And, you know, firstly, I'd say, you know, it appears to be that he had legitimate Christian commitments.
He had a broader affective range.
Uh, he was better emotionally.
And uh, he had a baggage-free image, as far as we know.
So he came off as disciplined and dignified.
And he had this just broader emotional palette than any of his competitors.
He was even able, I think, to con people into thinking he was really listening to them during debates when what he was actually doing was really masterful predatory listening, waiting for any opening to wedge in his talking points.
So when we look at the sort of, I don't know, uh, the the spectrum of figures, Shapiro, Walsh, Waters, Alex Jones, everybody seems to be more like a single note archetype.
And my guess is that they kind of work together like a kaleidoscope in the cultural production of MAGA.
And in that each plays to a distinct personality type or need, they don't really have to perform any other role.
But I think Kirk was much more fluid.
I would say, even gender fluid, uh, given how much cross gender support he had through turning point and how he was obviously straight and tall and handsome and hawking wellness products, but he wasn't exactly a ripped gym guy.
And I think this allowed him to appeal to a broader personality spectrum in the red states.
Like you could hang out with truckers and barstool guys and Mormons.
He could pull off cosplay as a Jehovah's Witness knocking on doors.
And of course, Fuentes hated him because Fuentes has spent his life boxing himself out into this minority demographic defined by distrust of everyone.
You know, he's the one who's cursed to stand out of CPAC and turning point USA conventions for the rest of his life, because ironically, that's exactly where he wants to be.
That's where his power comes from.
So Kirk also, I think was cleaver family clean, or at least presented as such.
Who knows, you know, really.
But I I haven't heard any negative about his personal behavior.
TP USA faced complaints about sexual harassment at events and not sufficiently protecting against it, which is not a surprise, but I don't, I don't see any personal behavior complaints about him, unlike many, if not most of those in his sphere.
Now, I think the key is is that he mimics another generalist who's able to appeal to a diversity of demographics and bring together a diverse coalition through a fluidity of affect.
And that's Donald Trump, who is a tycoon, a grifter, McDonald's eater, you know, deals in crypto and real estate.
He's a wrestling mogul.
He's a darling of Saudi princes and oil rig roughnecks.
But everybody amongst them, I believe, whether they're in MAGA or not, I think probably has some understanding that Trump is cruel and petty and a criminal, a liar and a cheat, who they're willing to tolerate if he scores for them against their enemies, even if it's only through like posting bullshit on Truth Social.
Yeah, I mean, in a way, Kirk was everything MAGA's desperately project onto Trump, eloquent, yeah, ideologically consistent, even though I dislike his ideology, principled in terms of like really sticking to what he's saying, religious in shape, masculine, handsome, and he has an actual pompadour.
Right.
Yeah, there's a real feeling of uh he was too good for this world that came out of that memorial.
So, you know, likewise, uh, Julian, when I hear Kirk Mourners say he was going to be my president, I think the grief is related to the feeling that Kirk was a standout unifying figure on the right, like Trump with none of the criminal baggage, and a cleaner and purer Trump than Vance could ever be.
And I think this is why the MAGA and especially the Chris Christian response has been so devotional to the point of emotional coercion, because I'm hearing all kinds of stories about evangelical pastors are getting canceled if they don't praise Kirk sufficiently from the pulpit.
So in the shadow of Trump, I think MAGA really needed Kirk.
He would have provided them with some sort of redemption arc, even if it was performative.
You would never have to be secretly ashamed of Charlie Kirk.
And all of these qualities contributed to the way in which his national tours seemed to have a truly national, as opposed to nationalist or like shitposting vibe to them, i.e., you know, Milos, uh, and why he was so effective at fooling People into thinking he was an American optimist, that he was that the MAGA answer to Obama.
He was also one of the most successful Republican fundraisers.
And, you know, I can't help but feel that there's a shock doctrine level power grab for all that collateral.
And that plays into his lionizing.
Oh, what you're saying is the more you praise Charlie Kirk at this particular junction juncture, the better your your positioning in is in the lineup to the trough.
Yeah, because like even just looking at all of the guest hosts on his podcast that Julian ran down before, like they're all part of that lineage and they're all grabbing off pieces of the audience as they go.
You know, the last set of comments I want to make is is that like how Kirk fooled people, um is you know, not just related to the the MAGA base or to red staters, but it seems that he also fooled some key liberals as well, who in the rush to process the murder came out with some masterpieces in delusional bootlicking, you know, to be honest.
Like Ezra Klein has been dragged, including by me, on my TikTok account, uh, for lines in an op-ed called Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way.
And I hope that these lines will haunt him to his grave, lines like, I envied what he built.
And uh then in response to the dragging, he issued another um essay before or introduction to his interview with Ben Shapiro.
Uh he went on to say, but I find myself grieving for him because I recognize some commonality with him.
He was murdered for participating in our politics somewhere beyond how much divided us, there was something that bonded us to some effort to change this country in ways that we think are good.
So Tun Easy Coates ran down Klein and other examples of liberal commentators engaging in stuff like this.
And his closing point I thought was excellent, which was that Klein didn't actually quote Kirk at all, which I think raises a question of how much these folks are missing in the effort to go beyond condemning really destructive political violence and into fawning postures of warmth and respect and and possibly guilt, uh, or you know, don't target me.
And I think the problem is it won't work.
Like you can't emotionally appease fascists because that's more blood in the water.
We have Stephen Miller just declaring the entire Democratic Party as an extreme leftist organization.
I'm like, like, cool.
Well, maybe act like it just like a little bit, 10%, maybe.
That's interesting.
You know, I heard other more left-leaning media figures like Haslan Piker and Kyle Kalinski, alongside John Favreau from uh Pod Save America, expressing something kind of similar.
Like they reflected on how Kirk was a colleague, meaning they moved in circles with him, they debated with him on stages, they'd interacted with him as a person.
And so they thought, shit, actually, given the circumstances, that could have been me on that stage taking a bullet.
And then on top of that, they were clear about how they opposed his politics.
Yeah, that's good.
I mean, understandable sentiments for sure.
I haven't actually seen one commentator praise Klein for that column yet.
Uh I'm sure some people appreciate it, but I actually just across the spectrum, I think he got dragged harder than than most I've I've ever seen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
To me, the the measure of that is like how he responds and then the follow-up before the Shapiro interview, I thought he just pretty much repeated what he felt and added a little bit of color.
I don't think he's moving from that.
No, I don't think so either.
There's a really dark Marxist critique of why stuff like this happens.
And it kind of goes like this that historically liberals and centrists tend to navigate power instead of challenging it.
And the reason they do this, supposedly, is to maintain social position and access to capital.
So it's an I got mine position.
And on my more cynical days, uh, I that resonates with me.
And when I read Klein saying I recognize some commonality with him, I add in my head, well, of course you do, you know, the commonality of class and income and the social position of influencer.
And you don't want a target on your back.
And so now you're gonna phone up Ben Shapiro and play Peacemaker.
I want to circle back because I've heard this critique before, and I think it's a good time to unpack it a little bit.
You know, we talk a lot about building coalitions, especially on the left, which has basically been getting trounced in elections for some times.
And internally, the three of us, we have disagreements on how to do that.
I think we all agree that it matters.
So that that keeps us going, and that's important.
Yeah.
So when I hear that Marxist analysis you just bring up, I wonder how alienating it is to people who consider themselves liberal.
I don't, I don't know a lot of pure leftists.
I don't run in those circles, but my my circles range from center right to liberal to progressive to where I am on the democratic socialism or social democrat side.
But within all of that range, I don't know many people who think I got mine.
I do know a ton of people who are just worried about surviving and paying their mortgage or their rent or their car payments or caring for their children.
And, you know, when I'm in discussion with them, most of them aren't as a lot on, aren't as online as I am in my work.
So they don't think much about distinctions between affiliations, like, you know, when we analyze politics, we think a lot about it.
I would imagine hearing that sort of analysis comes off as pretty off-putting.
Yeah, I agree that it's stark.
I think it can sound accusatory.
I think it can sound paranoid.
I think there's an art to not sounding like that.
And I think a lot of people don't pay attention to that art.
But I want to mention something about coalition building.
I would say that it's Democrats that have been getting trounced in elections.
And my view is that this is mainly because they punch left in the attempt to appease the donors and capture this kind of like Clinton-era middle class that actually isn't there because it's been gutted out by neoliberalism.
And so that's why they put down every whiff of Sanders type populism populism that they encounter.
So from where I stand, coalition building against Trump has to be honest about stuff like that.
And I think that's why the Mam Dani campaign is doing so well.
And I think it's doing so well as a tribute to how skillful they are at something very difficult within leftist politics because it's diverse and contentious, right?
Like there are multiple schools.
There are competing ideas on how capitalism has changed and how fast it should be changed, or how fast it could be changed, competing values on who should be centered, you know, do we center feminism, indigenity, climate?
But what is unifying, I think is two things that everyone wants systemic change and no one really wants power over anyone else.
And I think the right is better at organizing.
We talk about this a lot.
Like, why are they better organizing?
I don't think necessarily it's because they're smarter in my view, or better at compromise.
I think that the power struggle over Kirk's successor is showing how much they actually personally hate each other.
They win, I think, because their overall goal is simpler.
That, you know, they want to maintain and retrench current hierarchies.
They want to wield total authority over them.
I think the perfect expression of that is the Seven Mountain mandates, as you're describing, uh, Julian.
But I think Klein thinks that he shares with them the dream of a better country for everyone.
I agree with that part about uh being guided by neoliberalism.
I mean, I wanted Bernie in every election.
Like I, that's where I caucused or, you know, uh voted in the primaries.
I appreciate what Mamdani is doing.
I personally feel like New York City is probably the one of the few places in America where he could win.
Right.
Uh, I would like to think it could be beyond that, but just having lived there and being from that area and knowing national politics, I don't see him scaling.
Although I would like him to to be clear.
Yeah, I mean, I also want to say here, by way of closing, I I think some of the rush to characterize liberal response to this as is a little bit exaggerated.
I mean, for example, Tanahisi Coates is is going after Klein.
Klein really put his foot in it.
I interpret that kind of charitably as him having messed up, but you know, he's repeatedly in in the last several months made content sounding the alarm on authoritarianism.
This is not normal.
He's been imploring The Democrats lately to essentially defund the government to engage in a government shutdown to stop Trump from being able to enact his agenda.
And then Coates reference Jenkins, and if you click through, it's it's a six-word tweet.
Um, the newsome references about uh an official statement as governor, which is, you know, gonna be what it's gonna be as a politician in that kind of position.
But you know, I look across the spectrum, I see Roland Martin and Joe Walsh, hardly major leftists coming out and saying we shouldn't whitewash this guy.
Uh Elizabeth Spears, Jeff Charlotte, I shared on our Instagram feed.
Obama, AOC got up and made a very, very rousing speech, the effects of, you know, this is crazy that Congress is shoving through this memorializing of this guy who was an open racist and bigot.
And 58 Democrats voted against that congressional uh uh whatever you want to call it, uh uh designation.
60 either voted just present or abstained altogether.
So that's more than half the party in Congress refusing to go along with it.
The 95 who did, uh I don't know what their political reasons are, they may just want to move on.
And then Jasmine Crockett goes on CNN uh and talks about why she voted no.
So I see a pretty robust rejection of the whitewashing of Charlie Kirk that you can kind of say Ezra Klein was was susceptible to for a moment.
Yeah, I mean, it's good.
Um, but to your question, uh, Derek, about like who would be put off by that historical analysis.
I I think that any sort of reasonable historical read of why liberal centrist philosophy doesn't beat back fascism, is just true and it's worth airing.
I try to be tactful and I think about the difference between pundits, politicians, and citizens.
Like you're not in the pundit class, and so there's no point in soft pedaling things with you.
But if we went out for beers with your friends, um, and the subject came up, uh, like for instance, if someone said, Well, I think Klein was right that Kirk was doing politics correctly, uh, I would smile and say, Well, I don't think baiting college kids into embarrassing social media clips is good politics and then instigating January 6th.
And you probably would too, right?
Like we'd both probably smile and say that all fine so far.
If there's a follow-up exchange about why Klein or others take that position uh or make the mistake of trying to be friends with bullies or to launder what they do, you know, there's where we might have different ideas.
Like I would keep my comments focused on stories that impugn the powerful, because you're right, most regular people aren't plotting out how to cling to their power in spite of everyone else.
And I think about my dad, uh, who is trained as a Russian historian, studying Stalinist repression and forced famine in Ukraine.
And nonetheless, he held socialist views because he didn't confuse socialism with Stalinism, like all of his American education wanted him to.
And he held those values while working with liberals and conservatives his entire life.
And he didn't make social enemies because he was good at telling bird's eye view stories.
So we're at beers, and I would say something like, Klein reminds me of how British leaders and pundits in the 1930s had this instinct to praise and appease fascists because fascists obviously could inspire the youth and rally them back into pride and productivity after the nightmare of World War II.
Like the parallels here would be because, you know, Charlie Kirk was getting people involved in in politics, especially after COVID or something like that, or after 9-11 or whatever the disaster is.
But these people were also happy that Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini were cutting off the other attractive response to that war trauma, which is collectivization.
And they were doing that by killing the communists in their midst.
Like nobody in Europe wanted the basic rules of economics to change.
Now, Trump is not at the street murder stage of fascism yet, except he is vaporizing random power boats in the Caribbean.
And Klein never praises Trump.
But I also think it's easy for people who have substantial power to not fully grapple with how violent fascists are.
And, you know, especially if that violence doesn't impact them directly, you know, they don't, they might not see it.
So I think there's a naive tendency to hope that Charlie Kirk would be reasonable at the end of the day.
And then I put my beer down and then what do you think, Derek?
Like, is that alienating?
I think it makes all the points, but it casts blame upwards.
It depends on how many beers we've had.
No, wait, wait, we What you've described, you know, is like, and I've said this for a long time.
Most people that I'm aware of would not react in the same way to conversations in real life as online.
Now, there are certainly people who will.
So what you've just laid out, I think, is really reasonable and empathetic for people sharing beers or in an actual conversation with one another.
And to be fair, that is how I framed it.
So that was, I think, a really nice response.
I think it gets a lot trickier online when you don't have that affective voice.
You don't have the ability to talk things out or talk through things with people nearly as much.
Most people will drop out in the comments.
So I think in that medium, it would be a lot more difficult to see that analysis written out and then to create nuance.
