Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old Turning Point USA founder and pro-freedom leader, was fatally shot at Utah Valley University’s Orem rally in 2024 by a sniper using a rifle linked to "transgender and antifa ideology." Kirk, known for his debate-driven approach—like inviting critics to challenge him—was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Trump. The episode contrasts his constructive rhetoric with the radical left’s institutionalized violence, from demonizing conservatives as Nazis to normalizing riots like those tied to Obergefell and Roe v. Wade, while warning that unchecked extremism risks destabilizing democracy through escalating conflict rather than dialogue. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, so I was setting up the show today, yesterday, obviously just terrible, terrible days.
And what kept coming into my mind was an old adventure novel that I love.
It's called Scaramouche.
It was written by a famous adventure story writer named Raphael Sabatini.
And it begins, Scaramouche begins with a very famous line describing the hero of the story.
He was born with the gift of laughter.
and a sense that the world is mad, which Sabatini ultimately had engraved on his tombstone.
He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad.
And that's the way we always like to begin the show, with the gift of laughter in a sense that the world is mad.
I'd go further than that and say we love to begin the show that way.
I think we all have a good time.
Tom does the backgrounds, and sometimes the backgrounds are funnier than what I'm saying.
And it's just, it gets us into the mood for the show, and it really, it's fun, and we enjoy it.
And it reminds us of something that's really important, which it reminds us of two things, which sound like they're in conflict, but they're actually two things that go together.
And one is that the world is not just mad.
It's corrupt and it's broken and it's full of grief and sin and evil.
We are living, as C.S. Lewis said, in enemy territory.
And we are, all of us, struggling with what that means and waiting for the conqueror to come back and reclaim his creation and reclaim us, his own people.
And that's one thing that we remember.
And the other is what seems like a contradiction in terms, but is not.
And that is that life is very precious.
It's very beautiful.
And it is very, very short.
Whether, like Charlie Kirk, you are cut down at 31 or whether you live to an old age.
Life goes by very, very quickly.
And we are called, because life is so beautiful and because it's so short, we are called by God, our Creator, to live in joy, not in heaven, but here and now in this conquered, ruined, broken world.
And that's a hard thing.
That's like one of my favorite quotes from the Gospels, one of the least quoted quotes is Jesus saying, the reason I have told you these things, the reason is so that my joy, the joy that is in me, will also be in you.
And so the reason we can laugh at the human race is because we were made to be higher than the angels, and instead we are lower than the apes, which is not just a good joke.
It's actually the joke.
It's the source of all jokes.
It's the fact of what we are in the light of what we all know we're supposed to be.
It's not like a secret.
We all know that we're broken.
We're not what we're supposed to be.
And we wouldn't be able to laugh if we didn't have the knowledge in us that sometimes that something is terribly wrong with us, that we're absurd in our wickedness and our vice.
So I open up with these satires and there have been only in 10 years, there have been maybe two, maybe three times when I just couldn't do it.
And this is one of those times.
I always promise myself, I know because I had a comedian father growing up, I know that a lot of comedy comes out of anger and I'm not an angry person.
I always promised myself that I would never write comedy from anger.
I would never let the comedy bring anger out of me.
I would only write from my sense that the world is mad.
And there are times when I just can't do it.
I can't write without anger.
I can't write without sorrow.
And, you know, we all know this, that there are times, there are days, not forever, but there are days when death wins, days when Satan wins.
And my heart gets dark.
And I just don't have anything funny to say.
There's a psalm that my son Spencer reminded me of, Psalm 11.
It has the line, for behold, the wicked bend the bow.
They have fitted their arrow to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart.
If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?
So Charlie was murdered.
Charlie Kirk was murdered at 31 years old.
His husband, father, leader of a powerful, godly, pro-American, pro-freedom movement.
It spoke to young people really strongly.
A beautiful, beautiful thing.
And you probably know the details already.
He was shot by a sniper during a rally at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, a place I know well from my skiing days.
It was a beautiful place where no violence ever happens, really.
The Wall Street Journal, as I'm talking to you, as I'm talking now, they have not caught the killer, but they're on the trail.
And hopefully by the time you hear this, they will have.
The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that law enforcement has found a high-powered rifle with ammunition that was engraved with transgender and antifa ideology.
It was recovered in a wooded area where the suspected shooter apparently fled.
Investigators say it is unclear how far the suspect may have traveled overnight.
They think he was of college age, obviously.
Antifa and transgender ideology are very closely linked together.
If you read Andy No, a lot of transgenders in the Antifa movement, and both of them anti-reality movements and therefore violent movements.
People that are fighting are not fascists, and the people who are fighting are not transgender.
They're the sex that they were born in.
And so when you're struggling with reality, you tend to get frustrated and violent.
So it was a horrible day, and it's been a horrible day, a horrible couple days now, and I feel horrible.
And I'm sure some of you do too.
A lot of you do.
But I just want to remind you before we get started that those words I quoted from Psalm 11 are, I quoted them out of context.
Let me read you a little more of it because it begins like this.
In the Lord, I take refuge.
How can you say to my soul, flee like a bird to your mountain, for behold, the wicked bend the bow.
They have fitted their arrow to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart.
If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?
How can you say those things to my soul when the Lord is in his holy temple?
The Lord's throne is in heaven.
His eyes see.
His eyelids test the children of man.
The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the ones who love violence.
So it is a horrible moment and a horrible time.
But God is in his holy temple.
And by his grace and will, there are going to be other times and other days, and we will share the gift of laughter again, but not today.
I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
There is not a truth of the Bible that if you apply to your life, your life does not improve dramatically.
You're looking at the greatest miracle.
The greatest miracle is creation.
And the resurrection is the pinpoint of my belief that Jesus did rise from the grave so that we may live.
Today's episode is called The Opposite of Murder.
And so you might say to me, well, why did you call it the opposite of murder when what we're talking about is murder?
And it's because I think that's what Charlie did with his life.
He did the opposite of murder.
Obviously, in the largest sense, the opposite of murder is creation, because murder is an act of hatred and evil, and creation is the telos of love.
Creation is what love is all about.
Someone wrote an angry review of my book the other day saying, no, the telos of love is communion.
But of course, communion is just a stage.
Love leads to communion with one another and with God, and communion leads to creation.
And in politics, what communion looks like, what the opposite of murder looks like is not everybody holding hands and in agreement and singing kumbaya and happy with everybody, everything, because that's never going to happen.
That's not the world we're in.
Communion in Conversation00:06:01
We all have different points of view.
In politics, the opposite of murder is communion in conversation, in talking, in debate, in bringing our powerful differences and our deeply held beliefs and our absolute certainties and talking with people who have totally different beliefs and totally different certainties in a spirit of goodwill, and listening to one another and with respect and grace, and sometimes finding out that maybe our arguments are the bad ones,
and then doing the painful business of changing our minds and reaching communion with people on the opposite side.
And from that communion we create the future of the country out of the will of the people, which is never one will.
It's always a group of wills compromising with each other and cranking into each other and arguing with each other.
That's what Charlie said he was doing whenever he was asked.
He would go onto campuses and onto various places, set up a table sometimes or do the rally, the kind of big rallies he was doing now as he got more and more famous.
And here's a clip of him explaining to a woman who was questioning him why he did this.
It's cut one.
I go around universities and have challenging conversations because that's what is so important to our country is to find our disagreements respectfully because when people stop talking that's when violence happens.
Have you never seen someone do these?
Well it's a growing trend because people like me are facing violence, assaults, the left.
Yes, the campus Antifa.
I've been stormed out of restaurants.
I've been assaulted publicly, multiple death threats.
Okay, so what's your brawling?
There's more people that agree with me than some people would actually believe and they come out of the woodwork when I do stuff like this.
We record all of it so that we put on the internet so people can see these ideas collide.
When people stop talking, that's when you get violence.
So when people stop talking, that's when you get violence.
Obviously, that's true.
You know, I met Charlie the first time when he was, he must have been, he might have been 20.
It was a long, long time ago.
He came on my show.
And, you know, Ben has been talking about when he met him and he was a kid and that Ben was so impressed with his energy and his spirit that he thought he would one day lead the RNC, which, of course, I think he did something a lot more noble than that.
But I had a different reaction because I was so much older and he was very, he was incredibly respectful.
I mean, almost painfully respectful to my elderly self.
And I was thinking, this guy is smart and he's certainly very impassioned, but he's callow.
He has time to change, but he's going to have to change.
And that's what he did.
He made himself.
I said this to Ben, I don't know, maybe three months, four months ago, how impressed with him I was that he had made himself better.
He read a lot.
I think he was a Claremont Fellow, did one of those Claremont study fellowships.
He taught himself things.
He found out deeply what he believed.
He became more than he was, which only doesn't happen to you automatically over time.
You don't just gain wisdom over time.
You have to go out and get those things.
He famously didn't go to college.
He felt he left school because he thought it was an educational, it wasn't an educational experience.
It was ideological indoctrination.
We all know in most schools, in many schools, that's true.
And he started Turning Point USA, which relatively rapidly became a huge and powerful organization with branches all across the country and spreading the word among young people.
He was a big force in getting Trump re-elected, bringing young people into the Trump campaign.
He reminded me, oddly, I think he partly modeled himself on Ben.
I think he modeled himself on people he saw who were doing good things.
He reminded me of Ben in a lot of ways because I met Ben when he was a kid too.
And I used to think, wow, this guy has been given a gift of God with his tremendous brain.
But he was also a kid.
And, you know, kids are callow.
They don't really get the whole picture yet.
And I watched Ben, as I've said openly, everybody always knows what I think of him.
And I watched him with great admiration and affection as he learned that all those facts in his head required also an understanding of people's feelings.
You know, he started out saying facts, don't care about his feelings, but I can tell you stories, which I won't tell you because they're his stories, watching him suddenly discover, oh, wait, you know, there are people inside these people.
They're not just argument machines, debate machines.
They're people who have feelings and stories and things.
And he became, and especially after he had kids and realized this, he became a much deeper, richer person.
And Charlie kind of came in the opposite direction.
He started out with all the warmth and the passion and the instincts, but he taught himself the facts.
You know, he had the feelings.
He taught himself the facts.
He garnished God's gift to him with the hard work of educating himself so that when he dealt with people, he could argue with confidence.
He recently, I think it was just last spring, he went to debate in Oxford University in England.
And the question before him was, has Trump gone too far?
This is cut 11.
I never went to university.
I take that as a great compliment.
So therefore, everyone who wants university should be able to run circles around me.
You'll be the judge, but I'll do my best.
Has Donald Trump gone too far?
Well, I can nitpick at how vague that question is.
What is too far exactly?
Are his tweets too long?
Can all of us even agree on what we're aiming at?
I don't think so.
The truth is this.
If you dislike the West and if you hate the West's values, if you think the West is evil fundamentally and deserves to be destroyed, then anything Donald Trump does basically short of surrender will be too far for you.
So, you know, that's very American thing.
You know, my son went to Oxford.
These are the smartest people in the world.
They are dauntingly smart.
I sometimes listen to Spencer talk to his fellow Oxfordite Mary Harrington.
I can barely understand what they're saying with the references and the depth of knowledge that they have.
And he, you know, I won't state it too strongly to say he took them apart, but he did.
He had the facts.
He had the knowledge.
And he made himself that.
Maher's Front Line Appeal00:09:42
He made himself become that.
And to be a self-made person who starts out with gifts and garnishes them is exactly what America is all about.
So this murderer, whoever he or she turns out to be, killed someone who was doing the opposite of killing people.
He was talking to them.
He was discussing them and he was debating them.
Because of all the wrong things the left says, language is violence is the wrongest thing.
It's the wrongest thing that they say.
Language is what we have instead of violence.
I think it was, was it FDR?
He said, I prefer jaw, jaw, jaw to war, war, war.
It's unique to human beings, this gift of language.
And the kind of language we have is unique.
It's uniquely suited, according to my Oxford-trained linguist son Spencer, uniquely suited to the expression of ideas.
Other people, other animals, get along with this very rudimentary forms of communication.
They can talk to each other in certain ways, but we're born with this instinct for expressing ideas because we're spirits.
We are spirits.
And that's what makes us act as ideas.
We're not machines that act after a sequence of physical events.
Ideas are what move us for good and for ill.
And that's why this idea that language is violence and there are things that you must not say and ideas are violence, that's why it's so toxic.
And that's why, you know, you see the left in moments like this, not all of them, I have to say this, not all of them, but you see them expose themselves.
Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC.
You really have to, you got to work at it to get fired from MSNBC.
But he reacted to Charlie's murder with this is cut six.
But following up with what was just said, he's been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups.
And I always go back to hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.
So they fired him.
He should be fired.
He should be drummed out of the profession.
You know, that is not, you know, he shouldn't be silenced.
but he should not be somebody that respectable people have on.
You know, compare that to this report from John Carl of ABC.
Now, I have gone after John Carl possibly a thousand times.
He is a very, very left-wing reporter who reports with great bias from ABC.
And this is him talking about Charlie after he was murdered and after Carl had been hanging out at the White House, where people were, of course, devastated because he was a friend of many of them.
It was Cut Seven.
First, David, I have to say that the president sounded really struck by the event.
He sounded shaken by what had just happened.
It was before he had announced that Charlie Kirk had died.
And he told me, it's horrific.
It's one of the most horrible things I have ever seen.
He was a great guy, he said.
He was a good man.
He was an incredible guy.
Nobody like him.
And David, he also said, he liked you.
I don't know why, but he liked you.
And I have to say, my engagements with Charlie Kirk, he was a real critic of the news media.
He was always willing to engage and always pleasant in those conversations.
See, this is the thing.
I mean, that is a remarkable thing for Carl to say, and good for him for saying it.
You know, Charlie was so often like this.
The New York Times running the story went out of their way to quote things that they said that they thought could be construed as hateful and small-minded.
And yet if you watch Charlie, you have to remember he started out as a kid, just like Ben.
Ben at one point posted a list of things that he had said that he no longer adhered to.
If you can't change your mind over time, you know, when you start out at 18, then you can't grow up and you can't become the kind of deeper, richer people that Ben and Charlie became.
And so they can quote things that he said, but when he would, you know, he's a devout Christian, a devout evangelical Christian.
He felt homosexuality was a sin per se.
And yet I had seen him numerous times when gay people would approach him and say, what will you say to me?
He would say, I would say, well, he would say, I say, welcome to the conservative movement.
I don't think what you do in the bedroom defines you.
Obviously, I think you shouldn't live that way, but that's not what defines you.
And he was talking, of course, about ideas.
And let me just say, you know, a lot of people, this is a moment, like I'm not going to lie to you.
I don't want anybody to think that I'm saying to you, don't be angry or don't be sad.
My heart feels like yesterday, I thought my heart was going to burn away from the acid inside it.
I mean, I could barely speak.
It was just, I was, the rage and the grief were so powerful.
But it's not that hard.
It's not that hard when the father of two small children and husband and a man who has moved and excited so many young people dies.
It's not that hard to gather yourself.
Here's Brian Stelter.
You've heard me go after Stelter a zillion times.
But for this, he showed up with grace, and this is what he says, cut 10.
In a country like America, in a democracy, we only have a democracy if we settle our disagreements with words, not with violence.
You know, for the liberals, for the anti-Trump voices, for the anti-Kirk voices out there who feel despair, you know, about the direction of the country's politics, the way to address that is through words, not through violence.
And so whenever we see one of these appalling crimes, it is disturbing because it cuts to the core of how the American democracy functions.
You know, and I could say the same thing about Stelter that the New York Times tried to do to Charlie.
But let's not.
You know, let's not today.
Let's just say good for Stelter for showing up here and talking about the fact that this is in politics to disagree with grace is what we do instead of killing each other.
Charlie was at this rally.
He was talking about transgender violence when the sniper took him out.
But the last question he answered before that was about the Church of Latter-day Saints, where we've been having a little bit of a conflict and controversy here at the Daily Wire.
And this was Orem, Utah, which is all Mormons.
And like I said, I've been there many times and just I loved it because it was like visiting the 1950s.
It was like kids riding their bikes down the middle of the streets, happy families, together families, lots and lots of kids, and beautiful, beautiful place.
And he was asked about, Charlie was asked about Mormonism, which of course he didn't share as I don't share it.
And he said, he was talking about, well, stuff you've heard on the show too, about that it's all about God.
It's about praying to God.
And when you're talking, when you're talking, especially when you're talking about God, even when you're arguing with God, even when you're shouting at God, even when you're angry at God, if you're talking, the door is open and the road is open.
The path to truth is in front of you.
And I think that's true when three or more people are gathered together and they're talking and they're listening.
I think even though each one of them is wrong, the path to truth is opened up.
You know, Charlie borrowed a lot of things from other conservatives and put them to his own uses.
He learned from those who had gone before him.
He used to say to people, if you disagree, come to the front of the line, which is something Ben always says.
I always tell people when I give a speech, if you disagree with me, sit quietly until you figure out where you went wrong.
But Ben and Charlie would say, if you disagree with me, come to the front of the line.
I want to talk to you.
And he was always ready to debate, and he used Crowder's prove me wrong.
And he would do it with a great deal of grace and friendliness, though intensely, he would argue his case very, very clearly.
It was amazing, I thought.
I was really impressed because I don't do that kind of thing.
I don't think that fast.
I was always impressed with how quickly he could get to the heart of what he was trying to say.
You know, these things like prove me wrong and come to the front of the line.
These are not things you copyright.
This is not stealing something from somebody.
These are things that people invent in their tools that we use because it's not really about getting our faces in front of people.
It's about, you know, helping the country that we love so much.
And Charlie's warmth and humanity really were powerful.
I just want to play this one other clip of him.
He's talking to Bill Maher.
Maher does the show where he gets stoned and talks to other guys, and hopefully they get stoned.
Of course, Charlie didn't drink or smoke dope or anything like that.
And so Maher offered him a drink and he turned it down.
And here is a little bit of that exchange, cut three.
Drink?
No, I'm good.
Thank you.
You don't drink?
No.
Or smoke pot?
No.
And you're married and super Christian.
We're going to get along great.
This is going to just be perfect.
But can I just ask you, because I want to find out a lot about you, because you're obviously a super bright guy.
But you do think that I have the right to live completely opposite than you do.
I think you can get as drunk as you'd like.
And you're that kind of an American, right?
You're not forcing your opinions as...
I'm not here to say you can't.
What do you think?
No, okay.
So what I love about that clip is if you're listening to it, you can't really see it, but it makes the drunken Maher look like what he is, you know, just a little bit pitiable.
you know, not bad, not evil, but somebody you don't want to be just because he doesn't condemn him because he greets him with warmth.
He says, this is going to be perfect.
I'm happy to talk to you, even though we're so different.
And, you know, if you would walk, if you were a young person, I think you would walk away thinking, you know, I kind of like the guy who's not getting boozed up more than the other.
Difference on the Left00:15:04
And that changes minds.
That changes minds.
That's how it's done.
So look, at moments like this, when your heart is filled with the acid of anger and grief, These are perfect moments not to be making plans and not to sort of be talking about the future because we don't know what the future is going to be.
And all these thoughts come into your mind and the absolute fury.
And as I say, I'm not excluding myself in a single moment.
This is, I told you, I talked about this last week.
I talked about the fact that in these transitional moments, violence is, I won't say it's likely.
It's just one of the things that people do in transitional moments because power is changing hands.
And as you know, powerful people don't like to give up their power.
The guy like George Washington, who hands over his sword, is the rare guy.
Like I said, I was talking about this last week and how it leads to violence.
And during the George Floyd riots, I remember saying on my show, saying to you, you know, they're making a terrible mistake because they think they've won.
They think the fight for the country is over.
They're taking off the masks and they're putting it all out there, setting the cities on fire and basically saying, you deserve this, America.
They've closed our churches.
They're burning the cities.
They're declaring racism a public emergency and therefore they should have total authoritarian control, emergency powers forever.
They think they could diddle the elections around and take away, you don't need any, it's illegal to check your ID.
We want to have just written write-in things and all the things that make it easier and easier to cheat.
They're going to declare DC a state.
They're going to rein in so that they have those extra representatives and senators.
They're going to pack the court.
They had things in the New York Times, op-eds in the New York Times, we should destroy the Constitution.
They were not disguising themselves anymore.
And I said this on the air at the time.
They think this is their moment.
They think this is the transitional moment, and they are wrong.
And they were wrong, right?
You know, you thought they had entered the promised land of left-wing monopoly, and now they've found out no.
The tide is turning, the vibe is shifting, and they're exposed.
I mean, what happened, as I've said a million times, what happened is the media exposed them.
Guys like Charlie exposed them.
Things like the Daily Wire exposed them.
Megan Kelly, Joe Rogan.
You know, all of a sudden, it was like they did not have.
And Elon Musk, let's not leave him out.
He was so important.
Remember the fury they unleashed on Elon Musk just for letting the opposition speak, for doing the opposite of murder, for letting the opposition speak.
That's why you kill people.
That's why you censor people, because you can't win the argument.
And they did lose the argument.
And so now they are inflamed and they're humiliated.
And I think that that is a very, very dangerous thing.
You know, and if you don't have those arguments, that's when the violence happens.
And that's why so many of them don't mind the violence.
But let's talk about this.
I want to talk about the violence.
You know, I told you last week, and I've said before, that I deeply oppose political violence because it's so rare that it leads to more freedom.
It almost always leads to less freedom.
And political violence isn't increasing.
And so you go in the New York Times and they say, yes, there's terrible violence.
Josh Shapiro's house was firebombed.
And what about that horrible January 6th?
Wasn't that just awful violence?
And of course, no mention of the George Floyd riots because that's not political.
That's mostly peaceful, right?
That's not violence at all because it's just property, as one of their editors said.
And the idea is, the idea they're trying to get forward is there's violence on the left and right.
And on the right, we keep saying, no, no, this is all leftism.
And that's half true.
That is half true.
The left is worse.
But let's be very precise, especially in this moment when the anger is so high and the grief is so high.
Let's be very precise about why the left is worse.
and why because we're not exempt.
We're not exempt from doing violence.
But let us make it clear, most of political violence in this country is from the left.
And they're not worse because we're better people than they are.
Put that thought out of your mind.
Just trust me on this one.
You may feel like we're better people than that, but I know a lot of left-wingers.
Many of them are lovely, lovely people.
We're all messed up.
We're all capable of terrible things.
And the left is not worse because at the center, center left, they don't have anything to say.
In a free country, there's always going to be a struggle between the many and the few, between the rich and the poor.
The Bible teaches us that we have to treat the rich and the poor equally.
It doesn't say only love the poor.
It says, do not be prejudiced against the rich as well.
And that has been the American way because we know that the rich provide jobs.
The rich provide creativity.
The rich provide all these things.
And so they shouldn't get any privilege before the law, but they should be treated equally with the poor.
There should be no, I'm very much against this idea of minority rights.
Everybody has the same rights.
That's the point.
And, you know, so there are people on the left that we should talk to.
You know, I disagree with the left very strongly on almost every point, but they do have things that they do that I acknowledge are important because the left always wants things to change and we always want stability.
Sometimes when things need changing, they see it before we do, at the center, at the center.
Here's the difference between us.
And President Trump talked about this in his tribute to Charlie yesterday.
Here's a little bit of it, cut four.
On campuses nationwide, he championed his ideas with courage, logic, humor, and grace.
It's long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.
For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals.
This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.
Here's the thing about that.
He's talking about the radical left calling us Nazis.
And by the way, he announced, Trump announced today that he'd on this Thursday that he'd would posthumously award Charlie the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The difference between the left and the right is this.
Our center is at the center of our movement.
Our center, the central right ideas are at the center of our movement.
The people they call far right are not far right at all.
Ben Shapiro is not far right.
I'm certainly not far right.
If you played a speech by John F. Kennedy, Ben and I would probably agree with almost all of it.
Not all of it, but a lot of it.
I mean, John F. Kennedy was virulently anti-communist.
He cut taxes.
He was, you know, this is an icon of the left, the Camelot of the left.
He is what most of us are.
We are not far right.
We are center right.
We are what people in this country have believed forever.
Okay.
The problem is that the radical left holds the center of the left.
They hold the high ground on the left.
People who say literally insane things like men can become women or Trump is Hitler or let's get rid of the Constitution or let's pack the Supreme Court or let's show children gay porn in elementary school, things that were absolutely detested by everyone 15 minutes ago.
Those radicals hold the positions of greatest power and influence on the left.
You know, when Obergfell, that thorn in the side of America, that decision that said not that you could have gay marriage, but that gay marriage was a constitutional right.
It's a lie.
The decision is a lie.
There is no constitutional right to gay marriage.
And that's what makes it so bad, just like Roe v. Wade was bad.
And it's going to have the same effect as Roe v. Wade, where somehow we would have all reached some kind of consensus on this, maybe, you know, civil relationships or whatever we decided on.
But instead of that, we're going to argue about it for decades, and then it's going to cause more and more division.
And then eventually the Obergfeld will have to be overturned.
But when Obergfell was passed, Barack Obama was president, and the man who had told us that marriage was just between a man and a woman lit the White House, the people's White House, up with rainbow lights, right?
And suddenly every corporation had a gay flag and our embassies in Muslim countries had pride flags on them.
And we had a month to celebrate homosexuality, right?
The pride of homosexuality.
That power of the clericy, the people who set opinions, that power of communication, that power of the academy, the Hollywood, the news media, all of that was marshaled to nail down this opinion, which even then was not a majority opinion.
It was made so that you could not say that it was not the majority opinion.
So the radical left is the left, whereas the radical right is not.
I mean, you hear me come on here all the time, and Ben does it, and most of us do it, and talk about the people who have gone off the reservation on the right, and we take holy hell from them for it.
But they're not the center of the right-wing movement.
And by the way, the radical left is not most left-wingers, right?
It's just they have seized the institutions.
And they always say the same thing, by the way.
They always say, what about Donald Trump?
What about Donald Trump?
Well, listen, Donald Trump has a rough-hewn way of speaking, and he can be very tough and say very blunt things with four-letter words and all this.
His policies are absolutely dead centered.
Rule of law, obey the Constitution.
He never, you know, these judges make stuff up to stop him, and he has never disobeyed them.
He has always followed the law.
You know, deporting illegals, again, you know, these are criminal people they're thrown out of the country, lowering taxes, less regulations.
These are the things that they call fascists, but they're just, there's nothing far-right about Donald Trump.
He is not a far-right figure.
You may not like him.
You may hate him.
You may think he's ill-mannered.
You may think all kinds of things about him.
But if you look at his policies, he is a middle of the road to the right, to the right guy, because he's in favor of business.
So this is the difference.
This is the difference.
When I said that Antifa and transgenderism are violent movements, and people who think that they're one sex instead of the sex they were born are mentally ill.
This is an induced mental illness.
We pick on the guy, the transgender person, because he's the person doing offensive things.
But there wouldn't be transgenderism if it weren't for the authorities, the Academy, Hollywood, the news media telling them that they are in fact right in their delusions.
It's like as if they were starving to death, as if they had an eating disorder.
And the New York Times, the paper so-called of record, is telling him, oh yeah, no, no, no, you are.
You're much too fat at 60 pounds.
You're much, much too fat.
Don't even eat less.
Eat less.
That's what's happening.
That's where this violence is coming from.
And I'm not, I don't want to use inflated rhetoric and say the New York Times has blood on his hands.
That's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying the atmosphere in which these things take place is an atmosphere in which the furthest left-wing people dominate the left-wing movement.
Why is it?
Why is it that a moderate left-winger can't get elected?
And if he does get elected to Congress, he can't do anything.
It's because of the press.
It's because of the academy.
It's because if you put Barry Weiss, the mildest of a liberal, a person on the left of the center, if you put her in charge of CBS, they threatened to walk out.
She was called a Nazi by the New York Times in-house.
She was called a Nazi for being on the center left instead of the radical left.
And that's the issue.
It's not that we don't have our crazies.
It's not that we don't have our hatefuls.
It's not that we don't come out and say hateful things on a bad day.
It's none of those things.
It's that those ideas are fringe on the right.
They belong in the comments section on the right, wherein on the left, they dominate the party.
When I started, when we started the Daily Wire, I used to sit, we used to have these wonderful discussions and arguments.
And the guys used to say, they're all younger than me, and they all used to say, this is the most divisive moment since the Civil War.
And I'd be like, guys, guys, when I was a kid, they murdered the president.
They murdered the president's brother.
They murdered Martin Luther King Jr.
They murdered Malcolm X. George Wallace was shot down.
It was like every day somebody was being bumped off.
That was different.
But then I would always say the big difference now, the big difference now, is that then the people in authority, the clericy who make opinions, the chattering classes who are the people who appear on our TV screens and in our academies and who are dubbed experts and things.
Those people were not in favor of the violence, right?
We didn't have things like Tim Waltz.
Tim Walsh the other day is this guy.
Again, not a radical guy, not like a guy with an X platform, saying crazy things that I have to come on and say, oh, he's supposed to be on our side, but he's saying crazy things.
No, this is the guy at the top of the last ticket, right?
He was the vice presidential candidate for the Democrats.
Donald Trump took a day off and went and played golf, and they started spreading rumors that he had died, and Walsh celebrated that as a cut eight.
You get up in the morning and you doom scroll through things and although I will say this, the last few days you woke up thinking there might be news.
Just saying, just saying, there will be news sometime.
Just so you know, there will be news.
He's talking about Donald Trump dying.
We can all hope for Donald Trump to die.
Institutional Responsibilities Matter00:08:48
Again, this is not some guy in an attic room writing Samas dot pamphlets.
This is the top of the last ticket.
That is different from the right.
The things that they call hateful on the right, John F. Kennedy was saying in my youth, they are not hateful.
They are typical of American politics.
They are typical of the American way.
And so, you know, they dub us far right.
They say that we're radicals.
They say we're weird.
They're calling JD Vance weird because he has a wife and kids.
You know, they call Mike Pence weird because he tries to avoid situations where he might be tempted to do something stupid, you know, in his marriage.
So he doesn't want to do that.
So he avoids those situations.
And they made fun of him for it while they're spreading, you know, while the New York Times and other venues are publishing.
You know, how to do a thrupple?
How do you know how to cheat on your wife?
You know, this is the kind of thing that they're doing that they consider to be mainstream, but it's not, right?
And I talked about it before, Nicole Hannah Jones, who published this dishonest 1619 project claiming that America was founded in order to preserve slavery, which simply is not the case, and then said she didn't say that she did that when she did.
When our cities were being burned down because of George Floyd, the death of George Floyd, this is what she said about those riots.
It's cut nine.
Violence is when an agent of the state nails on a man's neck until all of the life is leached out of his body.
Destroying property which can be replaced is not violence.
And to put those things, to use the exact same language to describe those two things, I think really it's not moral to do that.
Somewhere between, and again, let me just emphasize, that's an editor at the New York Times.
That's an editor at the Paper of Record when she was saying that.
And it is violence, not to mention the 20 to 40 people who died in those riots, but dreams are destroyed.
That is violence.
Burning cities is violence.
That's what the word means.
It may not be violence against persons, but it is violence against persons because the buildings that burn down are people's buildings, their homes, their businesses, their dreams.
It is violence.
And you know what's not violence?
Talking is not violence.
Language is not violence.
Silence is not violence.
Debating is not violence.
It's the opposite of those things.
And so these are the people who have induced this mental illness in this country because they're powerful people.
You know, the left took over our institutions.
We all know this.
Well, congratulations.
Good job.
You did what you set out to do.
But when you take over institutions, you inherit institutional responsibilities.
You now have the, you don't just have the power of running Yale.
You don't just have the power of the New York Times.
You don't just have the power of owning every network and every Hollywood studio.
You also have the responsibilities that come with that.
You can't just declare yourself mainstream because you're not.
Institutional responsibilities are always in some sense conservative.
If you run a central institution, you can't by definition be a revolutionary, you know, because this is the thing.
I mean, the left wants to oppose the man, but they are the man.
They've been the man for 30 years.
And the man's job is to protect what was built by the men who came before him.
You know, it's okay to have an avant-garde.
I think we should have an avant-garde.
We should have people who say absurd and ridiculous things.
Sometimes avant-garde ideas become establishment ideas, but the avant-garde can't be the establishment because of the paradox of radicalism, which you've heard me speak about before.
The paradox of being a radical is that your values were formed by the civilization you are in.
The reason you think the poor should be taken care of is because you were raised in a Christian-based country.
That is why.
That's the bottom of the Jenga Tower.
You tear that down.
You're such a radical.
You tear that down.
You tear down the tower.
So you destroy it.
And if the institutions are out to destroy the institutions, there's a word for that.
It's called self-destruction.
The president here is not here to fundamentally transform America.
The president is here to make sure America survives into the next generation.
If he can tinker with it and make it a little better and fix some of its flaws, huzzah.
But his first responsibility is to keep it safe.
It was handed down to him.
People died to preserve it.
He's got to keep it safe.
And so when the president stands up and says, we're going to fundamentally transform the country, he's in the wrong place.
He should be in an attic writing samizdot.
You know, everything that grows out of the left grows out of this one thing.
It is the idea that you can govern as a radical, that they are revolutionaries who don't have to have a revolution because they infiltrated the institutions.
No, I'm sorry.
You take over the institutions.
You become institutional.
You have institutional responsibilities.
That means you have to conserve things.
You know, the very phrase woke, this phrase woke, it implies that suddenly they have awakened to the realization that only they see that life is imperfect and values are wrong.
It's the criminals who are the victims.
You don't see it, but I'm woke, so I see this.
It's the criminals, the victims.
The victims are the criminals because they represent this evil society.
The victims deserve what they get.
Why doesn't the left want gangsters deported?
Why don't they want criminals imprisoned?
Why do they feel a man charged with crime should be set free a dozen times?
It's because they have awakened.
They are awoke and they see at last, see at last that our country is fundamentally wrong.
And therefore, those who are wrong in that context are in fact the ones who are right and those who are evil are good.
And you know what the Bible says about people who call evil good.
All of this is fine.
Again, if you're some offbeat guy with a little beard and a ring in his nose, you know, sitting up in an attic writing tracts.
But when you have corporations like movie companies making billions of dollars making movies about how great socialism is, you are in a state of self-destruction.
You know, while we're talking about murders, I mean, this is the story of Irina Zarutska, this beautiful young Ukrainian refugee who was slaughtered on a light rail in Charlotte while she was sitting there reading her phone in North Carolina by a madman who had been arrested and released 14 times.
And the media, the institutions that are taxed with spreading information covered it zero times.
And Charlie was instrumental in forcing it down their throats.
Here's what Charlie said, cut to.
A white Ukrainian refugee was murdered just because she was white.
Everybody knows that, obviously.
If a random white person simply walked up to and stabbed a nice law-abiding black person for no reason, it would be an apocalyptically huge national story used to impose national sweeping political changes on the whole country.
Instead, Megan Basham, no one seems to care when a white woman gets stabbed to the death.
Obviously talking to our own terrific Megan Basham.
But that's the moment we're in.
This is the moment.
This is the fight we're in.
This is the exact moment we're in.
The way the left lost the power it thought it had secured forever was information, was talk, was language, was what Charlie was doing.
It was the opposite of murder.
They weren't murdered.
We didn't kill our way back.
We simply spoke and argued and publicized our way back into the mainstream.
That's what happened.
And that's why they think language is violence, right?
So this is what this fight is about.
This is what this moment is about, this transitional moment when I am fearful of more violence.
And I'm fearful this is the start of something dreadful that could happen if we don't act wisely and act well all across the board.
It is that fight that we are in.
Can we, can they share the information space?
Are they willing to meet in debate?
Are they willing to have people who speak and aren't shouted down?
Because there are only riots on campus.
There are no right-wing riots on campuses when left-wingers come to speak.
That doesn't exist.
That's a non-happening thing.
That does not exist.
It's only when people like Ben and me and Michael go that there is danger, that there is actual danger, people rioting, right?
There were no pro-Jewish riots.
There were no pro-Israel riots.
There are pro-Hamas riots because that's the far left making friends with people they shouldn't be making friends with.
So we are in this moment.
Conservatives Pounce00:14:34
And when Abby, when finally, so finally, the mainstream media, because of Charlie and other people too, but Elon, I have to say, because a lot of it came on X, finally they had to cover the story of this beautiful young woman being murdered.
And the New York Times, of course, did conservatives pounce.
Conservatives pounce.
And Abby Phillips on CNN did the same thing.
It's cut five.
People like Charlie Kirk fan, they've been looking for opportunities to make this some sort of like reciprocal George Floyd situation.
And that's the part that I think he's almost giving away the game.
And it's sad to see a lot of people going along with it.
So I called her Abby Phillips.
It's Abby Phillip.
And here's the thing about this.
And they all start saying, oh, it's racist.
The reason Charlie said that he killed her because he was white is because the guy, as he walked off, is on video going, I got that white woman, I got that white woman.
He wasn't making that up.
I started out early on as a newspaper man, and I was a radio news writer and a radio reporter as well for a while.
And there are two kinds of stories in the news.
There are sensational stories and there are indicative stories.
And of course, the sensational stories are what sell newspapers, right?
So a rich person is killed, a beautiful blonde woman is killed, you know, a billionaire kills his wife.
That's a sensational story.
It doesn't really tell us anything.
And so in the old days, that was fine with reporters because they were working class guys just doing a job.
But once it became a profession, once it became journalists, you stopped being reporters and you were a journalist with a degree from journalism school, people got embarrassed by these sensational stories.
It's very human.
It's very human to follow a sensational story.
Just in the same way you watch a Shakespeare play about the Prince of Denmark.
The prince represents you and you may be a janitor, but somehow the prince speaks to you.
That's a very human thing to attach yourself to people who are famous, big, rich, royal, whatever it is.
So sensational stories sometimes catch the imagination without really meaning anything.
And once journalists got embarrassed by that, they would try to pretend they meant something.
But then there are stories that are indicative of something.
So the number of young suicides goes up in a certain location.
That's indicative of something happening in that location to young people, right?
And that may be sometimes dull, and it's hard to get people to pay attention to that because oftentimes it's based on statistics.
When you get a story that's both sensational and indicative, you have hit gold.
You have hit the motherload of gold.
That's what every reporter wants.
He wants a story that's sensational, but also tells us something about the country.
They pretended that was true of George Floyd.
It is not true of George Floyd, a police officer killing a man.
And we don't even know if that's what happened in that case.
I don't actually believe it.
But let's say that even, let's even say that's what happens.
That is an anomalous thing.
People, and especially in black neighborhoods, they think cops kill black people all the time.
Cops fight with black people and get into incidents with black people because crime is high in black neighborhoods.
That story was the exception, not the rule.
A story of black crime is closer to the rule.
There's a lot, a lot of black crime, especially violent crime, is centered in black neighborhoods.
And most of it is against other black people, but some of it is against white people.
This story was both sensational and indicative, and that's why it got zero coverage.
And this is the thing, when you silence the truth, that is where the violence comes from.
As Charlie said, when you stop talking, that's where the violence comes from.
when you stop telling the truth and people can see it.
They can see it with their own eyes.
They know it's happening.
You tell them, oh, you're evil for getting out of an elevator when a black man, you know, a slovenly looking black man gets in.
No, you're not.
You're acting as the human body was made to act.
The human mind was made to act.
You're extrapolating.
That guy may be perfectly innocent, but you don't have time to find out.
So you are acting to keep yourself safe.
And they tell you that's racism.
Ultimately, that causes fury.
It causes absolute fury.
And this is another thing.
You want to talk about it?
Let's debate it.
Instead of calling me a name, let's debate it.
Because I believe that there's crime in black neighborhoods because of left-wing policies.
I don't believe that you're born black and therefore you're a criminal.
I believe that when you teach people that out-of-wedlock births are fine, drug use, fine, coddling criminals, you can get out without bail, fine.
Tell people that they're victims.
It's the society, society that has made them what they are.
They're going to feel that they have some kind of right to become violent.
You want to debate that?
Debate it.
Let's talk about it.
Let's talk about it like they talk about it in Oxford with rules, with experts coming forward, with people who know how to debate, not just debate me, bro.
Let's have people who actually know what they're talking about, talk about it.
But they never do.
They never do.
And what's the opposite of that?
Well, the opposite of that is shooting people dead.
That's the opposite of it.
And this is, you know, the reason we debate and the reason debate is the opposite of murder.
And the reason we can't just have comedy and agreement and people getting together is because the world is broken.
It's because people are sinful.
There is a truth, but nobody has a monopoly on the truth and nobody has righteousness at all.
So if you think you're awoke to some new moral structure and therefore do not have to talk to people who are saying the same things that people have said for 2,000 years, think again.
Change your mind.
At least open your mind.
This is why I disagree.
Look on the right.
This is why I disagree with the Catholic intanguralists.
This is why I'm always punching knolls about the head and shoulders about this stuff.
Thrown an altar.
Thrown an altar is an inherently violent way to live.
When you stop talking about, you know, starry-eyed about the history of the Catholic Church and start looking, not because of the Catholic Church, just because of the way things were during the days of thrown and altar.
Virtually, read Shakespeare.
Almost every king was thrown out in a violent upheaval, right?
The only way, if you have a king, the only way you can get rid of him, you can't vote, you can't debate, you can't say, you know, I'm sorry, king, you're not the king, where the people want you gone, you kill them.
People have, you know, kill people to get new things.
If you have a church that depends on everybody believing what they say, then you burn people at the stake when somebody says something differently.
I remember when the Daily Wire was starting, Ben, I made a comment, well, at least we lost an election, but at least we had a peaceful transition of power.
And he said, that's nothing in a peaceful transition.
We always have peaceful transition of powers.
I thought, my friend, no, no, this is a rare thing.
It's a rare thing that we have.
It only happens when the people have a right to speak and when everybody has a right to speak.
And when we argue it out and we talk it out over a course of years, people will come to a consensus and the extremists will be shut out.
But they don't let that happen.
And the people, you know, this change is coming.
The change is coming.
Populism is rising.
Socialism is rising.
There is going to be a conflict.
And there's going to be conflict in one of two ways.
It's either going to be responsible people at the center of our civilization shouting at each other, talking it out, and allowing the people to decide after they've heard the debate, or it's going to be in fire and flames.
It's going to be in fire.
You know, I said last week, you know, I always joke that this show gives you tomorrow's news today.
I have never been so sorry to be right about it because last week I was telling you that these are the times when people turn to violence.
This is going to happen.
Populism is going to rise.
Socialism is going to rise.
We're going to have to work it out.
It really is going to depend on what people like Elizabeth Warren, what people like AOC, what people like Chuck Schumer say.
And if what they say is, you know, sow the wind and reap the whirlwind, it's going to end up with gunfire and it's going to be ugly.
And I don't know if that is something I do not know if the Republicans survive.
You know, Charlie Kirk was exactly the kind of guy we needed.
He was exactly the kind of guy we needed.
If they had one on the left, you know, there was one guy on the left, and I'm sorry, I've forgotten to name a young guy who was bawling.
He was a total far left-winger, and he was kind of Charlie Kirk's opponent.
He was bawling when he heard that Kirk died.
And I'm glad to see it.
I'm glad to see that that feeling is still there.
These are the kind of people we need.
The people who debate, the people who talk, who discuss and put their case before people.
Charlie was a gracious man, tremendously gracious man, sometimes a funny guy.
He had courage.
He had faith.
When you murder a man like that, what do you think is going to happen?
When you eliminate a man like that, what do you think you have?
And are there so many good men out there that you think we're guaranteed to have another just rise up in his place?
This country has been blessed by God.
This is not a question.
This is not a theory.
You don't get Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and John Adams in a single room at a single time if God does not put his gigantic thumb on the scale.
God loves freedom.
We can deduce this because we know he loves it so much that he allows people to do horrible things.
And he loves freedom because he loves love.
And he is love.
And he knows that love is an action that has to be freely chosen.
And you have to be free in order to love, to love truly.
And that is why he loves freedom.
And he will stand up for a country that loves freedom if it does not use its freedom for evil.
You know, this is a time of rage and sorrow.
And like I said before, it's a perfect time to not talk about the future, to not say what you think is going to happen because my heart is dark.
I know my heart is dark.
When your heart is dark, the world looks dark.
When time passes, when you get some healing going on, and that will happen, that it will happen for all of us.
You know, things start to look a little light.
You think, well, wait a minute, I would despair there for a minute, but I'll see another way forward.
You get to be my age.
You've been through it a number of times.
You know that's going to happen.
You don't jump the gun.
You don't go on TV and start shaking your fist at people.
You know that you've got to wait and see what the way forward is.
This is a perfect moment to turn to prayer.
And let me end with this, about talking about prayer for a minute.
The left has been making fun of prayer.
They think there's no God.
They think that prayer is nothing.
It's talking to yourself.
The other day when children were murdered in that Catholic school in Minnesota, they said, the children were praying.
If prayer helped, why were the children killed?
I mean, this is in the Gospels.
Jesus says there were people praying in temple when the temple collapsed on them and killed them.
It's like this is something that we know happens because this is what the world is like.
The world is broken.
The world is not our world.
The world is not, it's God's creation, but it has been taken over.
It is enemy territory.
And the left, because they have lost their faith in God, they have gotten a blown-up faith in themselves.
Socialism, leftism, is an inherently materialist philosophy.
It is the philosophy that we don't need God to come for us eventually and rectify things.
We are going to do it ourselves.
It's not a philosophy of, oh, if I play with this, maybe things will get a little bit better sometime.
It's a philosophy that if we just have the right system, things will be right, which by corollary means that if things are wrong, then the system is wrong.
When they talk about systemic racism, that's because black people do not have the same outcomes as white people.
So there must be something wrong with the system.
That's not true.
It is not true that that is a necessary case.
It doesn't mean that you can't have programs that help and do things that help.
It means this radical attitude that is now at the center of leftism, that now is the center of our institutions, an institutional takeover that means our institutions hate their institutions.
The New York Times hates telling the news.
It is a comical paper when you read the New York Times.
It is comical, the lies they tell and the distortions they tell and the fact that they have to chase a Barry Weiss out because she's center left instead of far left.
When you have institutions that hate the things that made the institutions, that is a recipe for self-destruction.
You know, Barack Obama said this.
He said, I wish I could just sit with the experts and we could figure things out, but we're in this democracy thing, you know, and so I got to consult with the people and I can't just do the thing that I know would solve it all.
This is a tragic world.
It is, I say this all the time.
You know, people ask me, how come you're so jolly?
I say, I'm jolly because I know it's a tragic world.
And right this minute, nothing tragic is happening.
Well, now something tragic has happened and it's not such a jolly moment, but it's still, it's still life.
It's still beautiful.
It still has to be lived with joy.
And the only way to do that is to know that this is the enemy's world.
We're stranded in it until Christ comes to the rescue.
That's just the way it is.
You know, it's like, you know, you don't have to talk about original sin.
You don't have to believe in anything.
It's just the way human nature is.
And that is why we have to love God.
We have to love each other.
We have to forgive each other.
We have to love our enemies.
And God knows how hard that is on a day like this.
And we have to forgive them.
And we have to pray to God who made us all and put our hopes not in ourselves, but in Him.
That is Psalm 11.
That's what I started with.
That's what I'll end with.
In the Lord, I take refuge.
Not in myself, not in my systems, not in some political panacea that's going to change anything, but in you and us, who are in the image of God, talking to each other, debating each other, like Charlie Kirk did it.
That's the opposite of what we're saying here.
That is the opposite of murder.
The murder won over Charlie Kirk, but what Charlie Kirk did can continue.
In the Lord, I take refuge.
How can you say to my soul, flee like a bird to your mountain?
For behold, the wicked bend the bow.
They have fitted their arrow to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart if the foundations are destroyed.
What can the righteous do?
How can you say that?
The Lord is in his holy temple.
The Lord's throne is in heaven.
His eyes see.
His eyelids test the children of men.
The Lord tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.
Production Roles Revealed00:00:49
The Andrew Clavin Show is executive produced by Lisa Bacon.