In an emergency broadcast, Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman break down the shocking assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. Beyond the tragedy itself, they explore the dangerous ways this moment could be weaponized by the Right, the potential for escalating sectarian violence, and how America’s culture of guns, fascism, and grievance politics has led us here.
Support the show by signing up to our Patreon and get access to the full Weekender episode each Friday as well as special Live Shows and access to our community discord: http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hey everybody, welcome to an emergency broadcast and my break podcast.
I'm Jerry J. Sexton.
I'm here with Nick Halselman.
Uh, we were recording this on Wednesday, September 10th, uh, a couple of hours ago, turning point USA founder Charlie Kirk was doing an event at Utah Valley University and was shot and killed.
Kirk was 31 years old and one of the most influential right wing radicalizers and organizers in the country.
Um, Nick, there's a lot to discuss here.
Uh, a lot to look at, not just in terms of the actual event, but what might very well be on the horizon.
What are your initial thoughts on Kirk's assassination?
Well, um, you know, I was on a plane and uh I only had access to texting, and I heard people text, you know, I started getting some text saying he's dead.
Um right after he was shot.
And I I the range of emotions had gone through me in terms of I didn't even know who they were talking about.
Very interesting.
Um I suppose what was I thinking first?
Um, you know, the guy has said a lot of things that are extremely inflammatory, probably purposefully to do that.
Um, and he's also sort of characterized himself as one of those Ben Shapiro style, you know, intellectuals who doesn't have a lot of uh, you know, uh true information behind him.
So it's not easy to really have empathy for a guy like this, but clearly, you know, the fact that he was, you know, a family had a family and he has people who are uh dependent on him, uh is certainly a tragedy.
Um and just another example of like we're going somewhere, the Paul over the proceedings for the last however long, it's been a long time now, it keeps getting worse.
That that feeling of anxiety that isn't improving, uh isn't helping me, helping anybody out here.
So I think that's just it's just another, it's just another notch in the uh in what's where we're going.
Um I I feel first things first.
Um, you know, Kirk is one of those individuals that has elevated himself in a way that has been disreputable and harmful.
Uh hardly anyone in this country uh has done more to radicalize young people.
It's been his action and turning point all along, going around to uh college campuses and trolling, basically taking online trolling out into the world and out into physical space.
Uh he's done an incredible amount of damage.
And in a way, has turned himself into a figure that this particular thing, this assassination, um, you know, it it it kind of it goes beyond like an individual dying.
That's that's what happens with this stuff.
Um the the role that he played in the right wing ecosystem, I think cannot be understated in terms of uh being a vector in the pipeline to radicalization.
Basically taking young people who are angry with the direction of the country, who are interested in hearing ideas that might explain it, and then shuffling them further and further down a pipeline of fascism.
With this, I think, you know, Nick, I've been talking about this for months that we were entering a territory, and and I said unfortunately, and it's proven true, we were going to see more violence.
We were going to see more assassinations, and that that comes along with not just political instability, but also the rise of fascism and a sense of powerlessness that grows.
We don't know who did this.
We don't have a clue.
Uh the suspect is still at large as we're recording this.
Uh the right has already decided it was quote unquote they, which, you know, everyone from Fox News to far right influencers and the MAGA world are basically already declaring war, saying that violence and crackdowns are necessary.
Kirk, and and I'm not I'm not trying to provide subtext here, Nick.
I'm not trying to say that there is anything necessarily to look into here, but in terms of a martyr for the MAGA movement at this moment, where they need more and more reasons to become more and more violent.
He slots in perfectly.
And he slots in perfectly, not just because he was so uh out there and was so outspoken in the ways that you talked about, but because of his relationship to young people who have become radicalized and turned towards fascism more and more over the last few years.
This is um this has all of the ingredients to become a really, really bad situation.
And I'll talk more about what I've seen in terms of the channels and the voices that I've been paying attention to.
But this right here, I don't know how else to say this, Nick.
This has the potential to be a moment that we look back on in history and say that something was set off.
Um and again, I I don't know who killed him.
I don't know what their motivations were.
I mean, we we've covered how many times have we covered right-wing people trying to kill right wing people?
We have absolutely no idea.
But I am now not looking at Charlie Kirk.
I'm now looking at how the sort of game board is being set up and looking throughout history, it's moments like these that can uh occasionally with the right situation really set off some some bad consequences.
I I mean, and I I'm not exactly sure if you're trying to imply that there is a you know uh the the whoever put the shooter up to this or whatever could be something connected to something political.
I have no doubt that the there was probably a lot of Republicans out there who are desperately scouring anything to figure out and hope that the shooter is a Democrat.
You know, I just I sense Oh, they want it badly.
Yeah, they want it badly.
That's gonna be a big part of the push.
Uh you that your tone right now is really reminiscent of when we had to do that emergency podcast after the assassination attempt of Trump in Pennsylvania.
And I I also I sense that a lot of it, even though it it does, I mean, we're all it's it's a terrible thing that happens to someone's family.
Uh, and we and we feel that and we're empathetic to that.
But I I think that part of the what I sense in your tone then and even today is what you just said is that it this is a springboard and it can be used to change the narrative and then sort of make somebody more powerful, even uh we're in in the situation, out of the situation.
And we saw that with you know, Trump was sort of sputtering along and not really gaining a lot of traction in the midst of his presidential run in the middle of the summer, and then you know, this thing galvanized a lot of people as it's it's expected to do when you have a near-death experience.
And so, you know, that I this is certainly uh a thing.
I mean, I I I I wouldn't I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being someone who is just I mean, certainly there's going to be the mentally deranged part of this that's always a big part that transcends political views anyway.
Um, but I suppose we have to worry about is when you get to a point like that where you are twisted enough to be willing to do this, that is where you had the leadership of whatever party you want to choose.
And we I think we can put our sights more on the deaf Republicans here for you know, uh uh what's the word, you know, inciting this kind of rhetoric and thought that kind of gets us there.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are all out there saying that it's because the Democrats are villainized for that that this is why it happened.
Well, I I'll there's a lot to break down on what you just said.
And uh I'll start with this.
I I paid a lot of attention, not just to far-right extremist channels, which I'll talk about in just a moment, but even paying attention to Fox News over the past couple of hours has been eye-opening.
We're talking about literal coverage that is more or less telling its viewers that there is a large and broad conspiracy against Republicans.
I mean, the the word war has been spoken over and over on Fox News.
And in fact, Nick, you you have uh you have a clip here from Jesse from the only time that I saw it on the coverage, but this is Jesse Waters responding.
This hits differently because Charlie was one of us.
And Trump gets hit in the ear.
Charlie gets shot dead.
They came after Kavanaugh with a rifle to his neighborhood.
They went after Musk's cars.
They just shot two Jews outside the embassy.
Think about it.
Scalise got shot, barely survived.
It's happening.
We got trans shooters, we got riots in LA.
They are at war with us.
Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us.
What are we going to do about it?
How much political violence are we gonna tolerate?
And that's the question we're just gonna have to ask ourselves.
Now, Charlie would want us to put as much pressure on these people as possible.
Dana nailed it.
This is unacceptable and has to stop.
And it has to stop now.
And everybody's accountable, and we're watching what they're saying on television, and who's saying what?
The politicians, the media, and all of these rats out there.
This can never happen again.
It ends now, Greg's right again.
This is a turning point.
And we know which direction we're going.
So that is a really good example of a lot of the rhetoric that's been taking place.
It is slotted into this alternate reality where the abuser of the right wing is now saying it's something that we've talked about, you know, ad nauseum, where it's don't make us do this to you, right?
Like your responses to the abuse that we dole out, it is going to be necessary because of what you are doing.
You're making us do this.
And watching that when combined with a lot of the leading right wing voices and personalities, you've got Christopher Rufo on social media calling for the federal government to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate left-wing groups, uh, invoking the name of J. Edgar Hoover, which we saw, you know, during the social revolutions in the middle of the 20th century.
You're seeing others that are calling for an all-out war on supposedly Democrat-leaning donors, nonprofits, institutions, you name it.
Basically turning this into a situation where more or less this is almost like a Reichstag.
Like this has happened, this has taken place.
Now we are valid in doing anything that we need to do.
I have been tracking so many calls for violence, so many people actually celebrating the death of Kirk because they've been looking for something.
You know, they've been champing at the bit for something to unleash the full force of their violence and retribution.
And so watching this come out, Nick, I I have to tell you, I don't know what the consequences are going to be.
We live in a very bizarre world.
I don't know if you saw this.
There was a mass shooting that took place immediately after this.
I believe it was in Denver.
But over the past few weeks, you had the Minneapolis uh church school shooting.
Uh just a few days ago, you had this stabbing in Charlotte, which has inflamed white supremacists and racist, like nobody's business.
They have been looking and building themselves up.
And this isn't just Randos on Twitter.
This has been Elon Musk.
This has been all of the major vectors of the right wing ecosystem.
They have been looking for something.
And we covered it on the last show, the idea of uh, you know, declaring all trans people um mentally unwell and unfit and taking away weapons and possibly institutionalizing them.
A lot of the pieces that have been put in place are now sliding fully into place.
And in this case, this event to me feels like it has the kinetic energy to turn into something else.
Right.
And I think what you're trying to maybe get to is uh somebody out there on the right wing will be willing to get retribution, uh, someone who doesn't have mental illness, right?
Who wouldn't be associated with anything like that, who says, no, I am justified in getting and then and making my statement in response to something like this.
Is that fair to say what you're kind of saying?
It is, and if you take a look, I I want to tell our listeners if you really want to understand cycles of violence, go out and look at something like the years of lead in Italy.
Go take a look at how these things start to inform one another.
And when you add in the component of basically the vast majority of America being tired of this shit and pushing back against secret police and ICE, and you name it, now you have a powder cake, and you have the right, which now thinks that it has uh a valid license to do whatever they want in order to push back.
That sort of specter and that sort of energy mixed with this, and I'm not sitting here telling you there's going to be left-wing violence.
We've certainly seen some components of that.
But we certainly have all of the ingredients for sectarian violence right now, which is what I'm I'm really concerned about.
Um, you know, I I I can follow that.
Uh certainly.
I mean, the the that kind of thing certainly seems uh inevitable as we're going through where we live in the country we live in anyway, right?
Um, and uh, you know, it was kind of shocking to hear the details that are coming out about this.
And I'm not, I mean, we might have to go in a little bit more about what 20 Point USA is because maybe a lot of the audience doesn't really know.
Um, but you know, the the he has these really big campus, you know, um rallies, whatever we'll call them.
Uh no security uh on this one, apparently.
People were walking able to walk in and be in there.
Now it also sounds like the shooter was not amongst the crowd per se that perhaps is somewhere on a build in a building.
Um but um it was um kind of surprising to me that a guy like that would not have maybe more security, you know, in that in the in the same sense you'd see like a politician, because you have to remember like during during a lot of these Republican, you know, like the state of the union stuff like that, you'll see Charlie Kirk have a prominent seat and then most politicians do, right?
So he's already kind of had been elevated to that at a very young age, uh, which is I think impressive in a way what he is able to build, but also frightening because what you mentioned before about how he's been able to tap into the younger, younger and younger people.
We're talking about not even college.
We're talking about like teenagers in high school who were able to follow him uh or who galvanized to him as a a real leader.
Um, and it either he was the one in the sphengaliz Vengali mode convincing them, or there's just a lot bigger uh group of people that age that are really radicalized already that we don't understand um that are that you know it was easy to just sort of turn their attention to him.
Well, I mean, uh there's a lot going on there.
I mean, just to you know, what was it yesterday?
We saw a revolution take place in Nepal based on a group of young people who were tired of the corruption and tired of the bullshit from their government.
So when you enter into a period with very little hope for the future, and my God, I mean, uh all sort of all sort of avenues for getting ahead and having a future and living the so-called American dream, those are gone.
You have the existential crisis of climate change.
So you have generations that are are growing up right now that don't have answers, they don't have a decent vision of the future.
On top of that, Nick, not only did they go through the COVID pandemic and were they absolutely betrayed by their leaders, but on top of that, this is a generation that has been marinated in one mass shooting after another.
Their entire lives are dictated by the idea that at any moment their lives could be snuffed out.
They have made easy pickings for people like Charlie Kirk.
And Charlie Kirk, whether and and maybe because he's been killed, maybe people will start to appreciate this, has played an absolutely essential role in all of it.
I mean, has been an incredibly damaging person.
And if it wasn't him, somebody else would have done it.
And there are certainly many other people in the manosphere and you know, other sort of places.
But Charlie Kirk played an incredible role in that.
And so you you brought up security.
Well, what are we dealing with here now, Nick?
This was at a university, this was a big giant event.
We are moving in a direction with gun violence in this country, in which there's nowhere we can go at any given moment where we feel safe.
There's nowhere we can go where there isn't at least the haunting specter of us dying from gun violence.
And so there's really no way to look at this.
And and whether or not this leads to mass sectarian violence or not, this is going to have an effect on what kind of events things have.
Like a lot of a lot of this stuff is going to move inside.
You're going to see the right lock down.
I mean, that there are a lot of elements here.
And when it comes to gun violence, I mean, the fact that he was killed and what a what a bizarre thing.
I I want to tell people stay off social media as much as possible, not only for misinformation and disinformation, but now we're being inundated with one video after another of a person being killed in what really looks like a professional hit.
Like really an awful situation.
But it comes down to we are now inundated completely by gun violence.
And when you have this many guns, when you have a culture of violence, a culture of narcissism, rising fascism, and worsening future outcomes and horizons.
This is the kind of stuff that happens.
That's why I was able to predict we were going to see a bunch of this.
It doesn't, it doesn't take like a psychic to see it coming.
Well, and you said like you no one is safe and nowhere is safe.
And you know, near Orim, Utah, I actually had spent uh more than a little time there uh in the recent my recent Past and uh it's a beautiful place.
Everyone there is extremely nice.
And I can tell you right now, politically, uh the the percentage of people that would be completely aligned with what Charlie Kirk's views is very high.
So that this was probably another one of those instances where they felt like uh this would be a safe spot, right?
In the middle of Orim, Utah would be the one place where he wouldn't have to worry about anybody in that community being upset with anything he says.
And yet here we are.
Um, and so that that is another one of those things too, where you're not, you know, you're just not safe.
Uh, and and just to kind of paint more of the picture, I mean, Charlie Kirk is a guy who used religion uh to an end.
Uh, I mean, whether or not he was a believer or not, he was a guy who completely uh believed in the whole trad wife thing and has been very inflammatory against women who are strong, women who have made made careers and has been, you know, uh insistent that they women should just be in the home and should just be having babies,
you know, really, you know, uh make America great 50s stuff, uh, which is again disarming from people who living in a city at least to see someone who is that young, and I mean, he was doing that at 20, 21, uh, and then having people gravitate towards that.
But I I did want to include a little bit of the um, you know, he his he has takes on empathy where he doesn't really believe in empathy, which is a really powerful statement to tell young people as well, which is scary.
Um, but I just wanted to share with you one of the clips here because um he also talks about the gun violence that we have here, and um, you can hear what he says about what what he understood about uh having as many guns as we do in this country.
So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero.
It will not happen.
Right.
You can significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home by having more armed guards in front of schools.
We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one.
You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun death.
That is nonsense.
It's dribble.
But I am I I think it's I think it's worth it.
I think it's worth the have cost of unfortunately some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights.
That is a prudent deal.
It is rational.
Nobody talks like this.
They live in a complete alternate universe.
I don't know.
I wonder what he says now or what he'd be saying.
Well, I mean, and and that's the other thing with it, Nick.
I think it is ironic that the day that he is assassinated by a gun, that we also saw the passage of the military funding bill, we are inching so close to a trillion dollars in military spending.
On top of that, we've talked about it in depth.
What are the major like profit sectors in this country?
And content and guns, weapons, arms.
That's what we have become.
It's not a coincidence that he would he was shot from 200 yards away by a sniper by someone wielding a weapon of war.
And it's not a coincidence that the profit seeking that is come from America's arms industry, which has sacrificed, and and that's the thing.
We're talking about the death of one person here.
I I can't even imagine how many people have been needlessly killed, like just since to the today.
We don't have a clue.
I mean, I mean, again, we had a mass shooting that took place immediately after this took place in Colorado.
Um, but how many people have died needlessly because of this culture of guns and violence and the American disease of narcissism?
And so what we see here is it, you know, I think about this all the time, Nick.
I think about those old cartoons where two characters start fighting and a big cloud erupts around them, and people get drawn into the cloud, you know, and it just turns into like a whirling maelstrom.
All of our problems have just turned into the biggest tempest.
And they all keep touching on one another over and over and over again.
And instead of having a conversation about how to solve any of those individual problems that are all interconnected and all turn into this larger crisis, we keep having events that take place like this that are then going to lead to activated retaliations, activated worsenings, and activated escalations.
And that's what this looks like.
It looks like another moment where all of America's problems come together all at once and aren't going to be addressed and aren't going to be dealt with.
And instead, we're going to probably have more tragedy because of it.
So to tie back into what you were saying earlier, in terms of like the resistance to gun control by uh Republican politicians, you know, because I I'm convinced that even if Donald Trump was shot live on TV and died by a gun that somebody was able to easily buy, they would still not enact any kind of reasonable gun control.
No, you would see you would see a rise in in gun purchases.
No, it wouldn't do it.
And then you hear what Charlie was saying about that in terms of like we need more guns.
Like we they wanted teachers to be armed, and that was going to stop school shooters.
So it's not even out of the resistance to gun control isn't necessarily out of a fear of losing votes.
You could argue that it's because they want more of these.
And this will allow them to completely uh tamp down and and uh and ratchet up the uh the the uh surveillance state and the authoritarian state uh and take over this.
And and then I like I said this before, and then they will take the guns when they find when they feel like they have enough control and probably militarily over society, well, then they don't want anybody to have guns that could stand up to them.
But like I I know you push back a little bit on that, but I think that there's something in that in that path.
Um, and you have to imagine that that has been talked about, it's in some levels uh in the White House.
I don't know how conscious a lot of this is.
You know, I uh and and like I I don't know anything about what happened here.
I haven't, you know, I haven't heard from any experts, I haven't heard from whatever.
It feels odd.
It's a very strange thing.
I especially felt it was very odd when they, you know, took into you know a suspect into custody, and it like there's no way that this took place close to Kirk.
Like this was obviously a sniper style assassination.
That felt weird, but now that that person doesn't seem to be the suspect, I'm still waiting to find out what's going on here.
I'm not saying that there's some sort of a big plan.
I don't know.
I I I don't ever want to tiptoe into conjecture or anything like that.
But I do know that so much of what the right does, it is a combination of conscious profit seeking and power seeking, which is how to do these things.
There are certainly people in rooms right now, and this is the the sick truth of it, Nick.
There are people being paid by billionaires right now to sit in a room and figure out how to capitalize off of this.
What does it make possible?
What what how can we take advantage of this?
How can we push our agenda using this?
The rest of it is an unconscious reaction by people who don't understand why they're doing the things that they are.
They're scared, they're angry, they're activated, they don't understand exactly why they want to do the things that they want to do.
But it's those two parts.
It's a conscious and unconscious cycle that plays itself out, which goes back to what I always say, which is the right is a psychosexual disaster.
It is such a mess of of weird motivations and pathologies.
And meanwhile, there are absolutely people sitting in a room right now figuring out how to capitalize on this thing and how they can take advantage of it.
Right, right.
And I that would be a thriller, uh, a movie where they actually would show all this because it's like we can conjecture all we want about what the conspiracies are going on, but once we see the results and what's going on, clearly a lot of the things that we've already had to deal with the last 10 years have been discussed and have been focused on.
And when you we, if you would have to imagine that scene, it would be you know chilling.
Um, and uh, you know, I'm just I I kind of get back to sometimes with the minutiae of this stuff because I'm into this, you know, with the rifle and the shooting.
And you mentioned the 200 yards away and who that could be, who to make that shot.
Now, I remember I think 100 yards in Pennsylvania with a Trump assassination attempt was no no biggie with your scope.
Uh, you you're more familiar with guns than I am.
I think you can probably confirm that uh 100 yards isn't a big deal.
I I don't even I don't think 200 yards is even uh a huge stretch for a scope and the guy trying to I'll I'll say I'll say this without you know having any access to the ballistics of it, I would say that whoever did this has some sort of training.
Right.
But by the way, they're not aiming for where it hit.
Like it don't I don't go online, do not watch it.
You know, by the way, no, I I just I disagree.
I actually think that this shot hit exactly where they wanted it to hit.
In his neck, okay.
I don't know.
That's just in his in his jugular, yes.
Okay, really.
Uh right.
Because again, as soon as I saw that and everyone's like, oh, maybe he's gonna survive.
I'm like, they had about 30 Seconds to maybe to get that blood completely stopped bleeding before.
No, it it was that that's what got to me whenever the the initial reports were that it happened from close up.
Um, but no, what what I've seen, unfortunately.
Um, I I didn't want to see it.
And you know, for those of you who are listening who had to, I'm sorry that you saw it.
No, it it struck me as something that was done um with with some sort of training.
Now that's interesting to me, because I I would have assumed they would not, that's not where you're re aiming if you're uh, you know, somebody wants to take somebody out.
But um, you know, I guess we'll have to find out more.
Now, the last thing to uh this puzzle is that like just like what we saw in Pennsylvania, you know, there was never any information really about the shooter that ever really came out.
It's very, very strange.
And uh they don't even, by the way, the shooter is at large, like got away, right?
And so, you know, now you have this whole notion of where they catch him.
Now, I think they've caught most of these people who've ever tried this, right?
They somehow figure it out.
I I mean, yeah, I mean, at least they've stated that they found the people who have done it.
I mean, who knows, you know, how many of how many people got away and there was some sort of a patsy who who fell behind them.
Nick, I I don't think it one way or another, I don't think it actually matters if they do.
I mean, like it matters in terms of like a law and order idea, but in terms of how the right is going to react, they've already made up their mind.
The the general use of the word they, they have a conspiracy in mind, which is what they look for is they project their own self-loathing out on the world and think that they're fighting like evil satanic influences.
They've already got the narrative that they want and the narrative that they need.
It literally doesn't matter if they catch the person who did this and they're covered in Trump tattoos and you know, MAGA paraphernalia.
It really doesn't matter.
They have the story that they need.
They don't need to go back and and and go through it with cognitive dissonance.
They already have what they have.
So it really doesn't matter to them whether or not they catch this person.
Right.
I mean, you know, if you want another one of those rabbit holes to look up James Rill Ray and find out, uh, which is I actually an interesting parallel in some respects because uh Martin Luther King was not a politician, was not elected official, uh, was hugely influential and pop and well uh actually wasn't as popular, but um uh or in certain circles.
And I Charlie Kirk, could you argue in today's age with the reach we have of social media that he was as influential as Martin Luther King?
Uh I would probably argue that he wasn't with the fragmented culture that we have.
I mean, obviously I think Martin Luther King King became one of the most famous individuals and influential individuals.
No, I wouldn't say that Kirk had that type of influence, but I will go ahead and say, because you brought up this time period.
Nick, I you you've studied this time period, I've studied this time period.
People are listening who live during that time period.
There's going to be a lot of stuff that happens in this time period that we're never going to know the truth about.
We're never going to know exactly what happened.
We're never going to have complete certainty or clarity.
That is one of the aspects of this time of violence and this time of retribution and going back and forth.
Like people are going to have to become very comfortable with being uncomfortable with not having clarity because we are entering a uh we are we're not just entering, we are smack dab in another period just like that one.
All right, everybody, that's going to do it for this emergency broadcast.
Uh, we will be back with the weekender on Friday.
Uh in the meantime, if you need us, you can find us over on Blue Sky Nick's at Nick Houseman.
