Tim Pool reacts to Moon's analysis of Charlie Kirk's September 10th assassination as a potential tipping point for US civil war, citing USC research on a 4% annual conflict risk and noting that 43% of Americans fear imminent violence. Pool clarifies legal details regarding suspects Luigi Mangione and Tyler Robinson while contrasting modern polarization with historical precedents like Bleeding Kansas and Yugoslavia's collapse. Highlighting how algorithmic bifurcation creates distinct moral universes where 80% of citizens disagree on basic facts, the discussion underscores a surge in political violence to 150 deaths this year, leading Pool to acknowledge his past "Looney Tune" predictions while preparing for potential escalation by moving to the country. [Automatically generated summary]
I have been correct on so much of what I've predicted.
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And I have not always been correct on everything.
I am not clairvoyant, nor am I a super genius.
I just read the news.
So often, vague predictions come true.
That is to say, the example I've given as of recent, because it's an old one, was that in September of 2020, I said on my morning show and on Timcast IRL, if Donald Trump loses in November, his supporters are going to storm the White House.
Vaguely, not directly, but this person said, we kill Nazis and you're a Nazi, which it's a threat of death.
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A man then physically attacked the lady.
The temperature's not coming down.
And there is no reality by which anyone is going to effectively simmer down two distinct moral worldviews.
And so I look to Moon and I will hear what he has to say.
And I will offer my commentary as that civil war guy.
Famous for bringing open Charlie Kirk's assassination is a tipping point in America.
Because Charlie was famous for bringing open, unfiltered debate to college campuses.
He was in the midst of one of his signature prove-me-wrong sessions with his wife Erica and two children being present when on September 10th, a sniper assassinated him.
Just days after a Ukrainian refugee was also savagely murdered on a bus in Charlotte during a race-motivated attack.
And all of this a year after Trump's attempted assassination, just around the 24th anniversary of 9-11, an attack that united Americans.
And yet now these attacks are dividing America more than we've ever seen before.
While most people were shocked by this, thousands also expressed their joy over his death.
Some of the media even smeared him.
Charlie Kirk is a divisive figure, polarizing, lightning rod, whatever term you want to use.
And even the House couldn't agree to have a moment of silence for him.
Which is why this politically motivated terror attack might just be the one that tears America apart.
As it seems, a line has now finally been crossed in the country, as his death is a window into how far American political discourse has traveled from division to something far riskier for the entire population.
It's why around 43% now believe a civil war is at least somewhat likely in the next 10 years.
As we see yet another young 20s politically radicalized guy trying to take down open discussion with bullets, whether it be Luigi Mangione, Thomas Matthew Crooks, and Tyler Robinson.
And making Martier out of one of America's most famous commentators is only going to radicalize everyone so much more.
I will clarify, first and foremost, Luigi Mangione is still on trial.
And that's an so there are allegations as of now, and this is an important distinction.
He became one of the most recognizable faces in the modern conservative movement, building Turning Point USA at the age of just 18 into a massive operation by the time he died, with $55 million in annual revenue.
In fact, the last reported revenue, I think, was for 23, as they're probably finalizing their 24 taxes now, was $81 million.
But I'm going to jump ahead a little bit, because I want to hear his argument on civil war.
...had it coming because of his views, and many even saw this as a win for the left, or they just straight out used his death for some other point, all while those on the right demanded total war against the left.
Then things became even crazier, when people soon realized when those taken into police custody were just decoys.
The first was the 71-year-old George Sinn, a local activist with a decades-long history of showing up to political events across Utah.
Witnesses captured videos of police escorting Sinn away from the scene.
A uniformed officer was then heard saying on the video he said he shot him, but I don't know.
He told the cops he shot Charlie in an order to give the real shooter time to escape.
Involving federal, state, and local agencies, the actual shooter remained at large for some 48 hours until an extraordinary development.
The suspect's own father bravely turned him in.
1820s Civil War Fears00:07:55
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Tyler had confessed the shooting.
So this, I look, with respect to Moon in this video, I don't want to play his whole thing.
He's doing a great breakdown, everything.
I want to get to the civil war arguments specifically.
And it looks like so far he's just giving us the general breakdown at the beginning.
So let's jump to this portion where it gets a little bit more interesting.
Democracy, the danger zone where countries are vulnerable to political violence.
Now, people will always naturally disagree on when this started happening and which side of the political spectrum is primarily to blame.
And it's no secret that the U.S. political system swings like a pendulum from Democrats and Republicans.
But research from the University of Southern California indicates that each side is now further apart than the early 1900s.
In fact, America has been more polarized for a longer period than any other major democracy on the planet.
In the kind of conditions the U.S. might be heading for, evidence suggests that the annual risk for civil war conflict reaches 4% per year.
That's That seems low at face value, but consider that's a compound risk of 40% over 10 years.
And suddenly it doesn't look so small anymore.
So let me give you an example.
In the 1820s, there was conversation about the possibility of a civil war breaking out in the United States.
The reason I say a conversation about the possibility is that it didn't, and it wasn't that serious.
But the conversation between the states was obviously the issue of slavery being hotly debated.
You see, the founding fathers actually did not want slavery.
Thomas Jefferson wanted to include in the Declaration of Independence that the crown had taken other people from across the world and brought them into the U.S. and used them to levy war for like to create this system that they did not want.
However, Jefferson ultimately decided to remove that from one of the initial statements in the Declaration as Georgia and South Carolina risked, it risked those states, those colonies at the time, leaving their 13 original colonies.
Thus, they would not have the requisite manpower to go up against the crown for independence.
Now, admittedly, they didn't to begin with, and it was the French intervention that ultimately helped the United States win.
But another important factor is when we refer to the original 13 colonies, there were more than that.
Quebec was given the offer to join as the 14th colony as it was a colony under the crown, and it opted not to.
Thus, it is a part of Canada.
And the 13 original colonies were just the 13 that said, ain't no thing with Joe Kang.
So, when we talk about civil war in this country, 1820, it didn't happen.
It took until 1861, but still what many people don't realize is the bleeding Kansas period, which was a seven-year period before the beginning of the Civil War, where in various territories, but mostly centered in Kansas, abolitionist and pro-slavery forces were massacring each other.
What you need now is a large group of listless young men with no jobs, no purpose, and no families.
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And fortunately for us, we don't.
Uh-oh.
We have absolutely that.
That's what's terrifying.
Now, we may be, as it is 2025, in a similar situation to the 1820s, where the conversation is emerging, but does not reach that level of hyper-polarization.
In the United States today, I've lived in California, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Virginia, West Virginia, New York, New Jersey.
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I've lived all over the place.
And I don't consider myself Illinoisian.
Most people don't.
You had your home and you lived there and you died there.
That is a major difference.
One more compounding factor to all of these details is social media.
More and more people are online talking to each other at lightning speed faster than ever before.
So in the 1820s, news traveled by horseback.
That meant that you would be sitting on your ranch tending to your chickens and cows and you wouldn't hear back about whether or not there was an escalation in political violence or rhetoric for months.
In fact, it was years because for the most part, Congress in session, they got to travel back news over whatever Congress was doing wouldn't even make it to your town for months.
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Newsmen would bring newspapers from DC or New York and travel the country for money to read the news from three months ago.
That's how news traveled.
Get this.
When the Declaration of Independence was actually signed, which one could argue we call it a revolution, could have been considered a civil war in a sense that you had under one crown these warring factions, but a revolution in the colonies is a better way to describe it.
So the war already broke out, Lexington Conquered.
And that was a year, just about before the actual signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The founding fathers got together and they said, we hereby declare with that Declaration of Independence.
It was then put on a boat and it took like three months to make it to England, to Great Britain, to the crown.
Then Parliament and the Crown go over it and they're like, what's going on?
When the statements are made with lightning precision, everyone knows, which means though we are in perhaps an 1820s period, the hypere escalation of rhetoric and threats of violence is rapidly expanding, much faster than we saw in the 1820s.
So perhaps the killing of Charlie Kirk, one could say, this is bleeding Kansas.
Because sometimes when they classify political deaths, they say things like, a racist guy stabbed a black guy or something.
And you're like, was that really political?
But online, the rhetoric is rapidly expanding.
Let's continue the video from Moon.
And I always want to give a shout out to those that I react to.
It's just Moon on YouTube.
I recommend you check out the full channel and subscribe to watch his full video.
And full credit to Moon.
Shout out for your video so far.
I think you've done a pretty good job.
And let's listen.
In Yugoslavia, in the 80s, it was described as one of the largest, most developed, and diverse countries in the Balkans.
Different ethnic groups lived in the same neighborhoods, went to the same schools, intermarried freely.
It had been a functioning multi-ethnic state for decades.
Then the economy started falling apart.
And by 1991, Stovenia and Croatia were declaring independence.
U.S. intelligence predicted Yugoslavia would cease to function as a federal state within a year and will probably dissolve within two.
And that the violence would be intractable and bitter.
Military Intervention Debate00:02:59
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Over the next few years, more than 100,000 people were killed and 2 million were forced to flee their homes.
Neighbors who had lived peacefully together for generations started slaughtering each other.
And you can question whether America is really comparable to other countries that had civil wars, but the basic pattern is developing.
Countries don't usually collapse overnight.
They break down slowly, then all at once, especially when foreign hostile countries do everything they can to make sure this happens.
And singular violent events are proven to accelerate the trajectory, even in historical events as colossally huge as the fall of Rome and World War I.
But here's the thing though, we don't even need to speculate with historical parallels when we can see what's happening right now in America.
Since 2024, approximately 2,000 National Guard troops have been deployed domestically.
Trump signed an executive order directing the National Guard to create specialized military units to quell civil disturbances in American states.
Right.
All to be deployed at his command.
Retired Major General Randy Manner, a former acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau, said the administration is trying to desensitize the American people to get used to American armed soldiers and combat vehicles patrolling the streets of America.
Trump is allowed to do this.
Trump is allowed to deploy National Guard and even the military.
However, they can't enforce local laws.
There's a law called Pasi Comitatus, which says that you cannot use the military for local law enforcement.
However, they can be deployed under the orders of the president.
The easy way to put it is, if local laws are not being enforced, the federal government can use the military to enforce those laws if Trump declares an insurrection.
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There are two different versions of the Insurrection Act.
One was updated.
Meanwhile, threats and harassment against local officials jumped over the past few years.
The Capitol Police said they have more threats against members of Congress in 2024 than ever before, with even two attempts against Trump himself when America was just inches away from Trump being dead.
And then we can also look at how this division is affecting the population itself.
Recent polling shows 65% of Americans feel exhausted when thinking about politics.
55% feel angry and only 10% feel hopeful.
Most troubling of all, 80% can't agree on basic facts anymore.
Most critically, people oppose each other more harshly than ever.
43% of Republicans and 38% of Democrats hold very unfavorable views of the opposing party, up from just 17% and 16% in 1994.
And this is where it gets so crazy with Charlie Kirk's assassination.
When people live in completely different versions of reality, they start seeing political opponents not as fellow citizens with different views, but as existential threats that need to be taken out.
All whipped up and catalyzed by our media environment that has basically created those parallel universes in tangent with social media.
Existential Threats and Beliefs00:07:50
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Take campus protest events, they regularly turn violent, require riot police and tactical gear to move people along, or the storming of the Capitol or the BLM riots.
Now let's just pause and point out.
The storming of the Capitol was one bad thing and it was a bad thing.
But the BLM riots, the college protests are an ongoing thing for my entire life.
In fact, in the 2000s, I was a part of these anti-war protests marching through the streets of Chicago.
Everybody was pissed off.
Then when Obama got in, they seemed to not really care about the war all that much anymore.
Until the crisis happened with financing and housing.
Then people started to get upset, leading us a couple years later to occupy Wall Street, for which I was there.
I documented it.
I filmed it.
I live streamed it.
There has every year of my life since I was a young teenager.
I can't speak to being 12 or younger because you had the Al Gore Bush thing.
I don't even know about that, to be honest, not at the time.
Now here we are today.
The right is not going out in the street engaging in this violence.
But that's neither here nor there.
The question right now, a good point brought up by Moon.
The polarization and the bifurcation.
What we are looking at is two universes.
Both sides seeing each other as an existential threat.
And that's true.
It doesn't matter what you think is true.
It doesn't matter.
You know, my favorite example of this is.
I state all the time, what the truth doesn't matter to a hyper-polarized people because they determine what's true from their world.
If you grow up and all you see over and over and over again are videos of police brutality, then you believe it's a pervasive problem and it's the worst problem imaginable.
If you've never seen those videos, you'd be like, what are you even talking about?
So when you come from a traditional American moral worldview, you're going to say child sex changes are bad.
If you come from a progressive, adaptive view built largely on social media algorithms, you're going to say, what's the problem?
Because the traditional moral worldview of America, and I'm not even talking about Christian traditional, I'm talking about liberals and Democrats from like 10 years ago would be you don't give kids sex changes.
But now it's become mainstream and pervasive among the progressive left.
The traditional American view sees that as an existential threat to our existence.
Children must be able to grow up free from these mutilation, and otherwise they can't even reproduce.
And if we can reproduce, what do we do?
And the left says, abortion's for all, sex change is for whoever.
But immigration threatens the fabric of the nation because the worldview of those migrants is also drastically different from traditional Americans.
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Thus, no matter which side you're on, you face an existential threat.
It's not so much about who is right or wrong or what is true.
It's that if you're a progressive liberal, yes, Charlie Kirk, if he were to win politically, your worldview would be marginalized.
He didn't want to kill anybody or anything like that, but he certainly would say you can't give kids sex changes, which means if you live in a world where you deem it mandatory, you were facing an existential threat to your ideology, not to you personally.
But that's what they said.
They want us to not exist.
Respect existence or expect resistance.
That's how they played it.
Depending on which news anyone consumes, they see completely different events.
And we all know by now how social media and his algorithms play into this.
As there's barely any money to be made from nuanced coverage that says this was complicated with multiple factors.
Now you need two or more sites to contribute to any debates.
But a healthy debate needs a middle ground.
And that's what America has completely lost.
Mostly because of the way the media treats issues.
To exemplify what he's saying, I'm going to show you this post from the Joe Rogan subreddit.
This was done intentionally by me, and anybody who follows me on X knows this.
He followed up with a tweet saying believing in God should be illegal, which got far less engagement, which no doubt he pointed to saying, see, they hate religion.
But he still didn't get it.
Because I made my point.
And actually, I think if I sort by controversial, because that's what Reddit's giving you, you might actually see he's making a joke for F's sake.
Yep.
That's bait.
It's downvoted.
Tim Poole tweets are trolls, LMAO.
I'm not sure why we're posting a tweet from six months ago, but freedom of religion is protected.
In which case, at least on this point, I am right.
The bifurcation is here.
I don't know how YouTube's gonna deal with it.
Completely dehumanizes those on each side of the political spectrum.
And while this isn't exactly new, it's getting so much worse in the last couple of years.
And this sort of violence has a nasty habit of snowballing.
Take the 2011 shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.
Within hours of the tragedy, both political sides were blaming each other's rhetoric for creating the climate that led to the violence.
The shooter turned out to be severely mentally ill with no real coherent political ideology, who actually voted for independence and his friends said wasn't left all rights, but that didn't stop the blame game for slogging on for weeks.
When Martin Luther King was assassinated.
That's a really great point.
You can look back at those shootings and say, it was not politically motivated, but it led to the bifurcation.
The rhetoric that he was this moon was describing on both sides is the conversation that breeds two distinct political classes in the younger generation.
The older generation is more unified.
But as time goes on and they age out, you eventually end up with two distinct universes who see the world in entirely different ways.
Within these factions of moral worldview, you will get distinct and individual groups with slightly different beliefs.
In 1968, things got way worse.
Riots erupted in nearly 200 cities within hours.
43 people died, 3,500 were injured, and 27,000 were arrested over 10 days of violence.
And the significance of this, though, is that three TV networks basically told the same story to the whole country.
People could disagree about solutions while agreeing on basic facts.
But America no longer has that luxury anymore, as we can quite clearly see from the world's reaction to Kirk's assassination.
It's a horrifying thing to see because back in 2021, MIT researchers working with the Club of Rome updated their modeling and found that we were on track for quote the terminal decline of economic growth within the coming decade.
In 2022, they put out the latest study called Earth for All that basically asked, what happens if we keep doing what we're doing?
And their answer wasn't exactly our beats.
They ran two scenarios through 2100.
One where we model through too little too late and one where we actually get our act together.
The model through scenario shows well-being dropping by 40% in wealthy countries by the 2050s, with regional societal collapse becoming more likely as social tensions, food issues, and environmental problems start feeding each other.
Today, we're already half through 2025, and guess which scenario we're following?
Yes, it's not the optimistic one.
And this is all before just the recent events of the last month.
And while plenty of people think that these researchers are just professional pessimists who've been predicting doom for decades, their track record has actually been pretty solid so far.
But whether you believe their projections or not, the basic point is that when societies are already stressed on multiple fronts, economically, socially, environmentally, they become way more vulnerable to what researchers called shame reactions of bad events.
One bad thing happens, then another, then another.
But it's why it's clear that Kirk's assassination seems to be a huge tipping point in America, adding so much fuel to the fire of a country where 80% can't agree on the basic facts, where political violence is getting more calculated and targeted.
Where to be in politics and give your opinions in America means you have a very high chance of being killed.
Where our media, politics, and social media all then reward division over unity, where people are quite literally excited to see their political opponents get taken out.
The question isn't really whether America can survive any single political assassination, but whether it can survive becoming the kind of country where political assassinations feel inevitable.
Correct.
Because the most shocking thing about all of this is that not that many people are even surprised.
It almost just felt like something like this would happen.
And it probably will continue to do so.
No.
Maybe.
Maybe for him, you know, maybe that's what he thought.
None of us thought that Charlie would be killed like this.
And I've done events.
We are going to do an event.
And with all the security threats that I've faced, I never thought this was possible.
This is why I plead and I beg and I cry to so many liberals.
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Get out of the cult, but they can't.
I'll make it simple for you.
The argument for why 2 plus 2 equals 5 is because of decimals.
They say 2.4 rounds down to 2, but 2.4 plus 2.4 equals 4.8, which rounds to 5.
Therefore, to simplify, 2 plus 2 equals 5.
They also make the argument that if you have two individual cubes and two individual cubes and you put them together, you have 1, 2, 3, 4, ah, but 5 now because they form a cube unto themselves.
Therefore.
But it's a lie.
Intentionally breaking apart or tricking, like 4.2, what is it?
If you're doing 2.25, oh, I'm sorry, 1.25 and 1.25 plus 1.25 and 1.25, you get five.