Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman break down the chaotic aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and how the right is exploiting it. They unpack the instant anti-trans scapegoating, JD Vance’s open calls to wield state power against political opponents, Stephen Miller’s “domestic terrorism” dragnet fantasy, and a media ecosystem already capitulating. They trace the Overton window lurching right, the surveillance machine waiting to be flipped on, and why even an ICE killing barely registers amid the frenzy. It’s the pretext for repression, and the gate is closing unless we act.
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I'm here with my friend, my compatriot, my co-conspirator in the far left conspiracy that is overtaking the country.
Nick Halsman, how are you doing, my friend?
I'm not doing well, Jared.
It's not great.
It's bad.
It's bad.
It's bad and it's affecting things.
And I wish it wouldn't.
And I wish I hadn't seen things I saw.
And um, and hopefully you'll help me.
I will do what I can.
Um, I I want to say before we get going and do the whole spiel.
I I feel like we've turned the page and we've moved on to another chapter, and we will do our best in our responsibility.
This is what we've been doing for years to talk about what's going on, give it context and to tell you where this whole thing is going.
Um before we do that, a reminder, please head over to Patreon.com slash muckgrake podcast, support the show, gain access to the weekender edition on Friday.
We need your help.
We need your support.
We are entering into really dangerous territory.
We are so grateful for your support and your kindness.
It's what keeps us going.
Nick, uh, the story that just keeps developing.
Um, there has been an arrest in the case of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Uh, an individual is in custody.
Uh, reports are that he is not cooperating with federal authorities.
But as the story has developed, it turns out that his roommate there in Utah turned him in for the shooting.
Uh, that roommate, the right has now fixated on this roommate.
Some people say they're transgender, it's unclear.
Other people say that they're not.
They're claiming that uh the shooter is in a sexual romantic relationship with this person.
And what has it done, Nick?
It has set off a firestorm of anti-trans uh paranoia and hate.
And on top of that, and we'll talk about it more later, uh, there is a developing administrative focus on going after political enemies.
What is your reaction to the developments that we've had in the last couple of days and the details that have emerged and remain murky?
I'm skeptical, Jared.
Yeah.
Very skeptical about all of this having spent a lot of time in that area, right around there, uh, trying to picture, you know, uh a guy like I don't know.
I mean, listen, trans people are uh across this country and they live in various communities uh and accepted in various ways.
This is not one of those communities I would think uh you would you would see that, and especially because of their fixation on transgender people and shooters already.
Um I don't know.
Now, are you convinced or are you sold on that part of the story because even the governor is going out on public to talk about it that way?
Well, and that to before we get into the actual psychological components that are going on with the right right now, because there is a lot of meat on that bone.
We don't know we we can't trust anything.
We we can't trust anything.
They they they are acting like they have all this stuff figured out.
This is such a complicated situation with so many complicated dimensions to it.
And meanwhile, we have a public-facing group, including the FBI, including the governor of Utah, talking heads, commentariate, politicians, you name it, who are talking about this as and presenting it as an easily understandable situation because it helps their political project and their political motivations.
So, no, I don't trust it.
I don't trust hardly anything about this.
And the more that I drill down into it, the more that I realize everything that's being presented as concrete is I mean, gel a jello doesn't even begin to describe it, you know, in in opposition to it being concrete.
This thing is so weird and so fluid and so strange.
And the fact that it's being presented in this like tidy little case for the right to get what they want out of it.
It's um it's infuriating.
Yeah, and the right has no problem trying to persecute people for things that they might have done in their past that will then somehow discredit anything they might be saying now.
Well, okay, let's take a page out of that book and look at Cash Patel, who you know breathlessly ran from Devin Nunes' office in the middle of that whole thing with the Russia gate uh to try and uh muddy the waters with fake evidence.
And so he already had reported that they had caught somebody, and that was such a complete uh and utter ridiculous falsity, and doesn't even want to like walk that back or even delete the tweet that announced it.
Uh these guys are influencers.
They want to be podcast partner uh people.
They don't really want to Do their jobs.
We already saw Bon Gino, you know, complaining about how hard the job is.
He just wants to be do his podcast.
So uh all of that is just, you know, you cannot trust any of this stuff.
And you know, the grandma was interviewed, and she didn't mention anything about any of that stuff.
Uh they interviewed a neighbor, and these the people who were interviewing them is it's sort of like the journalism one-on-one, what not to do, or they're leading him with these questions.
And he was saying stuff like, oh, he was kind of weird.
Well, what do you mean, weird?
I don't know, he's kind of walking around weird.
Well, do you mean like because the guy who's walking around with maybe was a trans, somebody was transitioning to woman?
Oh, yeah, that's why that's what he was weird for.
I mean, that's literally how the conversation was going.
And I'm like, what are we doing here?
Well, uh, first off, these are not serious people who are doing very serious things.
And I want to break this down, Nick.
And and again, sometimes in the midst of the chaos, it helps to really put into focus something that feels obvious, but maybe hasn't been said.
Let's take this down the rabbit hole, Nick.
Before they knew anything about who committed this crime or allegedly committed this crime, had to be transgender, right?
It had to be a trans person because trans people are so violent.
Then it's obviously a leftist.
Then they found out it was a college student, had to have been radicalized by their professors.
Next thing you know, we now have this situation where, oh, they're living with a person who's trans.
We don't know if they're trans.
We don't know anything about this person, but because they're living with this person, they must be in a sexual relationship with them.
And by the way, that sexual relationship was so wild that it radicalized this person to go out and kill Charlie Kirk.
That, like really trying to keep up with that mindset, it sounds fucking insane because it's fucking insane.
We say it all the time.
The right is a psychosexual disaster.
They look at all of these things and and the way that they do it, it's so twisted and it's so messed up.
And the reason why this feels so insane is because the lens that they see the world through, it is so certain about things they don't know anything about.
It also has all these weird predilections that they're repressing.
It has all of these weird assumptions about people that they have that have no basis in reality.
It's literally, Nick, it's like talking to your Facebook addicted relative about current events and them spewing absolute nonsense that's hateful and dangerous.
It just so happens that those hateful, dangerous people are in in control of our institutions and state power.
Right.
And they need to have something to hate.
It's like their fuel, right?
Yeah, like I description.
Maybe it's been a while since I'll bring it out again.
It's like they have a proverbial gun in their hand and they're just pulling the trigger while they're looking around anywhere they can't find to put bullets in it, you know, and the bullets being any kind of evidence they could use to convince themselves that the left is some crazy wild cult.
And it's just it's so mind-boggling because if anything, the left um typically are like sort of the pacifists, right?
There's no left, first of all.
Like there's no left.
They've made up in their mind this, and which is what they do, they project on the world their own insecurities, but they literally believe that they are dealing with a satanic group of people who are hell bent on destroying the world.
And Nick, why?
Because they're projecting their own desires and their own self-loathing on the rest of the world.
And so they have to find the thing to snuff out.
Let me let me add to that because I was thinking of what is this notion of the left being violent?
Where is this coming from?
And it sort of rings uh a bell in terms of like maybe when we saw during the civil rights movement, we saw a lot of sort of violence in the streets, but it really wasn't instigated by people who were protesting, right?
And we had leaders who were very much focused on peaceful protests, but the civil rights movement is a huge thing that would that like spurned uh the silent majority, right?
To like turn on people.
So because it was like here are people marginalized in our society who are finally going to get a chance to have the you know equal rights in society, right?
And that's just really triggering.
Uh, or even fighting against the war against the Vietnam War, which is another one of those things where it's like, you know, that furthers this notion that like the left or that doesn't exist or whoever, they're much more of a it's a peaceful movement, you know.
Uh, and that's what it's rooted in.
Um, but the idea that they're gonna be able to turn this on their head, it completely tracks, right?
Because they're always manipulating the things that they see to uh further their hate, which is what they they need that fuel.
Well, and and again, like what is happening here is this fever Dream, right?
And you know, when when I was writing uh The Midnight Kingdom, the way I explained it is this righteous persecution that comes with Christianity, which is the idea that we can do whatever we need to do because the people out there are going to kill us.
They're coming for us, and we have God on our side, so we can do whatever we want to them.
You brought the civil rights uh movement.
Nick, mostly almost like 98, 99% completely peaceful, if not 100%.
It was based on nonviolence.
And as a matter of fact, in that time period, if I said to you the left that carried out violence in that time period, everybody will say the weather underground because there was like one example of a group that was actually out there doing these things.
There's like some isolated incidents.
It is right wing violence.
And you know, we'll we'll talk about I hate that we have to talk about J.D. Vance later.
But this this fantasy that Martin Luther King and the civil rights union uh uh movement, Nick, they created a fantasy that the communists were behind it.
And if they were allowed to get rights, it would lead to a communist takeover of the United States of America and eventually a race war, and eventually white people would be hurt and destroyed.
The entire idea is to create whatever scenario they need to legitimize whatever violence and oppression it is that they feel like that they need to carry out.
In this case, we are now, and we'll talk more about it.
We are now in a period, we don't know what happened here.
The closest thing that I've been able to discern is that this is a person with probably incoherent, you know, internet cooked radicalized ideology.
The other things that they're using to explain it, like if he had a cousin who was gay, they would be like, obviously, it's because his cousin's gay.
They're grasping for whatever it is, and we're watching this happen, and it it displays something really important, Nick, which is this was always where they were going to get.
They were always going to get to the point where they got this power and they were going to create whatever fantasies they needed, and they were going to use everything from the FBI to cooked up evidence or whatever it was to create the reality that they need.
Right.
And make no mistake, I mean, Charlie Kirk got his share of criticism while he was alive spewing the stuff.
Um, but I don't think he was ever necessarily the, well, I mean, I I'm not going to speak uh turn necessarily if they weren't calling him a Nazi or him a fascist specifically.
Um, but that's what they're trying to make a correlation towards, right?
You're calling us all fascists, you're using the word Nazi, and then he's going to then turn on Charlie Kirk.
It's a it's a bit of a stretch to get that.
It takes a minute.
But um, you know, but let's bring Charlie Kirk in this for a second, because you know, he uses religion uh is in that manipulative way, like you mentioned in terms of being able to rally people and then sound righteous and sound moral, but then he would say stuff that was immoral and completely hate-filled.
Now, I'll give you an example because it kind of connects to the civil rights movement where he was trying to say that um at some point that black families had started to disintegrate uh after the civil rights passed, civil rights acts passed in the 60s.
Ergo ipso facto QED, the civil rights act destroyed black families, is what he really was saying, right?
And it's just it's so that that's just why I don't think he was intelligent.
People say, Oh, he can remember things, he could spit back things.
So he knew all the five books of the Torah, good for him, uh, in order.
But um, but then he would use like that kind of fact to try and make it seem like whoever he was debating with didn't wasn't smart or didn't know his stuff, right?
But in reality, if you're gonna make that correlation when we know that what happened with black families specifically from the 60s until through the 80s has very little to do in terms of what they were suffering from from with the civil rights act.
In fact, it's the civil rights act didn't have anything to do with suffering and what the dissolution of families.
And he wants to make that case.
And it's somehow to certain people who are, I guess, already predisposed to that.
And uh, it is a uh some sort of a rational discussion for people.
And that's what's really scary about the whole thing.
Well, and what else did he peddle?
The idea that you know, black people were better under slavery.
Like that that's literally the type of revised history.
And and you nailed it, Nick.
What made him powerful and what makes people like Trump and other right wingers powerful is that they're telling people things that they want to hear.
They're predisposed to hearing it.
They hear someone with authority and influence in the platform saying it, and as a result, it turns into a feedback loop and it grows and grows and grows.
That is one of the reasons why it's made me so sick that you have all these comment commentators and politicians talking about, you know, oh, it's all good debate.
And he was trying to forward like civil discourse.
It was horseshit.
And quite frankly, again, his death is going to be turned into, and is the the wheels are already in motion.
It is already being turned into an opportunity to carry out the worst impulses of these people.
And I want to talk about speaking of the fallout from this.
For all the people who are sharing memes of him in heaven and calling him a martyr, Donald Trump was so upset about it.
Nick, here is uh how President Donald Trump reacted to a question about Kirk's death.
And remember, this is a guy whose death absolutely broke his heart.
If I could go over to the child first meeting Oh, it's just a holding up holding white sister up to it.
I think very good.
And by the way, right there, you see all the drop that just started destruction at the new ball for the White House, which is something that we die together for about 150 years, and it's gonna be a beauty.
I mean, not even a full sentence.
No, I mean, literally, he's asked about you know, this person whose death broke his heart, like how he's feeling about it.
And by the way, within like what, a day, he's at Yankee Stadium, he's going around, he's doing this, he's like having a great time, he's dancing on camera.
They they have a memorial uh at the Kennedy Center in DC, doesn't show up, happens to be golfing that same time.
He doesn't give a shit.
And the reason that we're talking about this is not to be like, aha, he doesn't care.
I actually think that clip of Donald Trump, I told this to uh friend of the pod Pete Dominic the other day, like it shows like how inhuman Donald Trump is.
Yeah, how much of a sociopath he is.
And in this way, because Nick, what what I follow is how this ecosystem works.
And before Charlie Kirk had even been declared dead, the people in his orbit were already trying to capitalize off of it.
Um, you know, you you have everybody trying to sell Charlie Kirk shirts and merchandise now.
You've got Steven Crowder, you know, bragging about how his show is now the number one show, you know, much like Donald Trump bragged about his buildings after 9-11.
You've got Ben Shapiro trying to take over turning point.
Alex Jones, within like maybe an hour of Kirk being declared dead, was trying to sell himself as the person to carry on his college tour.
He would be the one going out and doing this.
Like the point of it is everyone always asks, is this a grift or is it fascism?
It's both.
And these people are so hollow and they're so deranged that even someone being murdered that they knew that they spent time with, that they were, you know, quote unquote close with, they don't care about that.
They're looking for an opportunity to capitalize off of it.
And what you saw here with Trump, I I can't think of a purer example of that mindset.
I I agree.
I mean, it can now it brings us to the next point, which is that his podcast goes on, apparently, and it is being host.
The first one back is being hosted by our vice president of the United States.
J fucking Vance.
And for anybody who didn't tune into this thing, consider yourself lucky.
I watched this damn thing.
Here is JD Vance filling in for Charlie Kirk.
There is no unity with people who scream at children over their parents' politics.
There is no unity with someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order to excuse his murder.
There is no unity with someone who harasses an innocent family the day after the father of that family lost a dear friend.
There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination.
And there is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers who argue that Charlie Kirk, a loving husband and father, deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words with which they disagree.
Did you know that the George Soros Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie's death, do you know they benefit from generous tax treatment?
They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer, and how do they reward us by setting fire to the house built by the American family over 250 years?
I am desperate for our country to be united in condemnation of the actions and the ideas that killed my friend.
I want it so badly that I will tell you a difficult truth.
We can only have it with people who acknowledge that political violence is unacceptable.
And when we work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country.
Nick, I have a lot to say about this, but uh I want to hear your reaction to hearing the vice president of the United States of America saying this.
Well, it it took him only 45 seconds to get to George Soros.
So that might be is he's is he slow on the draw all of a sudden?
I don't know.
But um he sounds like not someone who wants to help the country heal.
He also sounds like someone who didn't have any of these feelings when we've seen other lawmaking in cold blood in similar ways.
Um they don't I it doesn't seem interested at all uh in in any whatever the words that are coming out of his mouth.
He seems you know interested in in dismantling some other leftist deep state that he thinks exists.
So a couple of things are happening here.
One, this has been JD Vance's mission since he entered politics.
Everything is about the professors, everything is about the academy, everything is about the so-called cathedral.
All of it is about carrying out the things that Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel are constantly saying, which is a cultural revolution through violence.
And like Nick, I I don't know if the alleged shooter is the person who killed Charlie Kirk.
There is absolutely no relationship between that I know of, and my God, maybe maybe I'll find something out.
There's no relationship between this person and George Soros or the Ford Foundation or any of these institutes or think tanks.
They are in it's in such bad faith to go ahead and say, Oh, this happened in this instance.
Now we're going to go and dismantle this.
That would never, ever, ever happen with the Democratic Party.
Never.
That just would not take place.
They would they wouldn't even even attempt to draw the line, much less saying this has provoked this response.
We're now legitimized in going after so-called liberal think tanks, institutes, and networks.
They have taken advantage of this in a way I figured it was coming, but watching it and hearing it and seeing it and witnessing it, uh, it was it was uh chilling, is what it was.
I I mean, you know, the the one place you might have wanted to hear democratic leaders speak like this is after Sandy Hook or after Parkland, you know.
Uh, those are the times when they'd be like, we are finally going to once and for all get rid of these guns, stop people from doing I don't know what they're gonna say, but it would be nice to hear that.
And instead, we got what you're supposed to get the reconciliation, the things we're gonna bring together, some prayers, all that kind of stuff.
And it's Colin Harris couldn't even be bothered to bring up Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, you know, buying JD Vance on the ticket.
They didn't even mention them in the 2024 election, much less like going even further.
Well, let me just just in case you're wondering it whether if you felt like Vance was, you know, angry and by the way, he mentioned somebody who was harassed, who's a good friend of them.
He's talking about friend of the pod, uh, Stephen Miller, who uh apparently some people wrote some a chalk message on their uh sidewalk in front of their house and said that Stephen Miller is not a nice guy, and uh, and that's really you know, uh a line too far.
It's too much, Nick.
It's too much.
You gotta you gotta bring in the full force of state power on them.
So this must have inspired uh Vance to say this.
And while our side of the aisle certainly has crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far left.
There we have it.
Yeah, not only is that horse shit and has no truth whatsoever.
Nick, the one word that I keep coming back to when it comes to this is fascism.
That's what this was.
This is one of the most purely concentrated examples of fascism and action that I have seen.
And what are they trying to do?
And we'll hear from Stephen Miller here in just a second.
They are trying, much like the Nazis painted communists as the biggest threat whatsoever that they could deal with.
They had to wipe them out of public life.
They are literally making the argument that their political opponents are so dangerous and are such an existential threat that they have to be wiped off the map.
It has to move towards a one-party system, period.
Oh, I'm I don't even have anything to respond to on that.
I mean, that's exactly well.
Let's hear let's hear from Stephen Miller, the the guy who is just, you know, really, really big.
Right.
And I'm not proud of this to have to even share his uh his is the sound of his voice.
But here we go.
And we are gonna do that under President Trump's leadership.
I don't care how it could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection, but we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism and that are committing acts of wanton violence.
It has to stop.
And my message is to all of the domestic terrorists in this country, spite evil hate.
You want us to live in fear.
We will not live in fear, but you will live in exile.
Because the power of law enforcement under presidential leadership will be used to find you.
We'll use it, take away your money, take away your power.
And if you've broken the law to take away your freedom, Sean.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
Uh and and again, like Stephen Miller, I I I cannot overstate like how dangerous of a person this is.
And I don't think that he's sad about this.
I don't think that he's upset about this.
He sees it as a really potential moment, which is what I was afraid of the moment that all of this happened was that this would, again, pardon you know, the use of the language, that this would be a turning point in which they were going to find validation for using state power to oppress their political enemies.
He made it very clear.
And Nick, I I don't think I need to tell our listeners that this because they've been listening to us for years.
You have to take them seriously.
This is not just blowing off steam.
It's not bullshitting on Fox News.
These are conversations that are taking place, and they're building off of conversations that have been taking place for a long time.
There's a reason why Trump went after law firms, why he went after institutes, why he went after think tanks, you name it.
They've been laying the foundation for it, and now they smell blood.
And they see an opportunity to go ahead and carry out sort of the next level of this thing, and they're they're not gonna stop.
Whatever happened to um free speech, right?
They're championing free speech.
They want free speech and want to be able to say whatever they want to say.
And instead, they're now going to silence that.
And here's the thing that's really the nefarious about it is that they're somehow conflating uh criticism of someone of what someone says to political violence, right?
That's what they're saying.
And who gets to decide what is political violence and what is free speech and who is gonna, and then how are they going to use the powers of the government against entities that they feel are uh, you know, uh creating some sort of uh domestic terrorism.
How easy would it be for someone like Stephen Miller to look at um planned parenthood and call it, you know, terrorism and then shut that down and then people put people in jail for it.
Well, and we've already seen the groundwork laid for this.
Like we saw this during the war on terror, the the idea of criticizing the United States and what they were doing.
We saw that labeled as terrorism.
And in the modern era, Nick, I don't blame them for thinking this is possible.
I mean, like criticism of Israel became anti-Semitism and took away people's rights.
They got thrown out of college, they got beaten up by police.
And by the way, the Democratic Party didn't stand up for those people, and in many cases, we're carrying out the enforcement against them.
So I do think that there is a possibility that they can figure out a way to say, and and he laid it out here, domestic terrorists.
We're going to hear so-called leftists, Democrats and liberals, I mean, my God, it's not even the left.
We're going to see them start to frame them as domestic terrorists.
And there's so much cultural cachet and power built up around that, because we've been stewing in it for, you know, going on 25 years now.
And this is what happened in the past.
This is how communists, labor unions, leftists.
They got deported out of the United States and sent to so to the Soviet Union.
This is how you saw people round it up.
This is how you saw the FBI violate people's rights.
My point is that this isn't new.
It's the overtness of it.
And it's the fact that because it's building off of these past moments, it's probably going to be even worse than what we have seen in recent and past American history.
And one of those reasons is if you look and listen to Randy Fine, the congressman from Florida, who had a tweet I want to read to you in a second, about who else he wants to go after.
Because again, in their minds, they can say, well, if you're a government employee and we're starting to see people getting punished for what they said about Charlie Kirk, which again, most of what I saw that they're being punished for is simply just a criticism of what he had said while he was alive.
Just basically quoting the guy.
But uh here's what Randy Fine said uh on Twitter now uh late yesterday.
He goes, those celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk must be thrown out of civil society.
Now remember, most of these things that they're saying are celebrating a death or simply just quoting Charlie Kirk.
Uh he says, if you are aware of anyone in the sixth district of Florida, or heck, anywhere in the state who works in any level of government, works for an entity that gets money from government, healthcare, university, or holds a professional license lawyer, medical professional teacher that is publicly celebrating the violence.
Please contact my office.
I will demand their firing, defunding, and license revocation.
If you don't think I am serious, I got two state university board chairmen fired for less.
These monsters want to fight.
Congratulations, they got one.
And by the way, notice that what's been happening, and we've seen a spate of these things, Nick.
Um, Matthew Dowd was fired at MSNBC.
Karen Atia uh just found out that she was fired from the Washington Post.
We're seeing, and by the way, neither of them really said anything that was like really out of bounds.
They both basically said, you know, Charlie Kirk had a lot of problematic ideas.
It wasn't celebrating his murder, but they can take that and twist it because they understand that they own the rhetorical concentration here.
We were saying they, this is the Washington Post who twisted it and said that she was lying and rising in a really incendiary uh response.
So it wasn't even like fucking Stephen Miller saying that shit.
No, and that is where capitulation and collaboration come in because so many people are going to go ahead.
They're afraid of getting their money pulled.
This is why it was so important to talk about what was happening with universities.
They were both being like having their funds withheld, but then the message was basically sent out, which was do not allow people to say these things.
We're seeing professors and teachers who are being fired.
There are lists being made of people who supposedly celebrated Kirk being killed.
We're seeing employers getting contacted, people being fired.
The FBI is tracking posts about this thing.
They've already contacted people who have who didn't celebrate the death, but they're asking about their intentions.
The point is this we're now turning a uh a corner.
We're now moving into a place where all the things that we saw sort of come into fruition, like earlier on in the term, and a lot of the political conditions and things in the environment we're seeing now where that it's like Nick, it's like putting a machine together, right?
Piece by piece and making sure the wiring is there and it's all plugged in.
And then you turn the button, and the machine works the way that it has been designed to work.
And now we're entering into the period that I was afraid of, which is after this incident, now we're going to see everything put on its head, and you are going to see real cultural, economic, and political oppression.
Oh, I mean, you know, I think you were worried when we heard about Bezos taking over the Washington Post to put a button for it, right?
And you might have thought, oh, hey, we need someone who's got a lot of money, who's not going to worry about bleeding money so they can keep this enterprise going.
But what you realize is the threat uh that he is under with Amazon, where and we've already seen the government can easily put their finger on the scales and make Amazon's uh you know life a lot harder to do business with, and that will then in turn force Bezos, or not force him, but you know, in incentivize him to create an environment in the Washington Post that will be much more favorable to the administration the way it is now.
And that's where we are, or here.
And that that's what's so scary.
And that goes for everything.
It goes from CBS to NBC.
We saw Trump already call for the um revocation of um, geez, NBC and somebody else, ABC maybe too.
Uh they're their license.
I mean, he's called for everybody's license to be revoked.
Yeah.
And meanwhile, the two places you want to revoke are like so milk toast and not incendiary anyway.
That's like that's how scary it is if he's willing to get those guys pulled off the air.
So um we are we are fast moving to a place that will um, you know, I don't know what what they're gonna do.
I I said this before, where the reason why a lot of People want the second amendment so they can they can protect themselves against a tyrannical government.
Well, we're on our path to that, but for some reason, most of the people that want those guns to protect them from that, like are cheering it on.
I I will say, regardless of what we find out about the alleged shooter and where the story actually leads, we've already had it previewed that they want to take away the gun rights of trans people.
We've already heard that they want to declare trans people mentally unwell, even though there wasn't a trans person involved in this incident that we know of.
They're they're going to go for that.
And that is the other thing I want to remind people.
Fascists will go as far as they possibly can and they will test the limits.
I think we're going to see a lot of these things floated.
The other thing, which is the cultural conversation and the discourse and the thought is we're going to see, and and I mean, Nick, the thing we haven't even talked about is that there is a surveillance machine that's been building for a while, right?
And it has everything to do with digital spaces, social media, you name it.
Like I guarantee that if that thing hasn't been turned on, that they're trying to like bring it about like Operation Warp Speed.
And the other thing about it, I just want to point out because I'd be remiss if I didn't.
Nick, this is this is just the cancel culture that they were screaming about for forever.
That they were just saying, oh, people, you know, aren't allowed to have the thoughts that they have.
And I want to point out it's not just that they're hypocritical, it's that the right is interested in their rights and their protection.
They're the ones who deserve these things.
Everyone else, it's used as a cudgel and a weapon against them.
And again, the right projects everything.
When they say, oh, those people over there are creating a cultural revolution by stifling free speech, they're saying we will do that.
If we have power and if we have the capability, we're going to do it.
And it is going strong so quickly, because this is a catalyst that they that they were looking for.
And quite frankly, it's not the quote unquote left that is celebrating Charlie Kirk's death.
It's actually the right that is actually celebrating the death because it gives them the opportunity to do what they wanted to do anyway.
I don't think that's consciously how they feel about it.
But I think the way that they're motivated and the way they process things, I think that's what's happening.
Exactly.
The way they process things, where they, again, they need anger.
They need to find something to be angry about because they're the internal conflict that exists there for so many people.
You can't be mad at yourself.
You have to be mad at other things.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And so I yeah, I am extremely worried because they have time and who knows how long that anger is going to last about this incident.
And so they're they're already ready to go.
And then they don't have much time.
That's why Stephen Miller is going to ratchet this up really quickly this week.
I'm sure we'll see some things where they start to dismantle, you know, uh companies or uh, you know, uh think tanks.
Who knows how they're with who they're going to attack first?
Nick, they're still talking about Hillary Clinton's emails.
They're still talking about the BLM protest.
Nick, they're still talking about Jesse Smallett.
Yeah.
Like that, that I mean, that it never stops.
That stuff, it just keeps collecting, like um, it it's like when your arteries get, you know, filled with gunk.
It just builds and builds and builds.
It's not going to pass.
This is the perfect situation for them in order to feel victimized and oppressed and targeted.
And it now gets it basically is the most enabling thing possible.
And you're right, they can't possibly stop being angry at things outside of themselves because they hate themselves.
And if you're not angry at other things, Nick, they're still bringing up NFL players taking knees.
When was it?
Was that 2020?
I I like that that hasn't happened anywhere in forever.
It it just, it's it's the only way it's their drug.
It's the thing that keeps them numb to the pain that they have inside of themselves.
And then meanwhile, you know, Nick, the other component of this, the trans thing.
Have you ever seen this is a weird thing, but I think it needs to be brought up.
Have you ever seen when like pornography sites release their like most search subjects by state?
Have you ever seen that?
I have.
In the most conservative states, they're always looking up things that that they say that they hate, the things that they're disgusted and angered by.
What's actually occurring is that the things that they quote unquote hate are the parts of themselves that they hate.
And they they're caught in this constant hypocritical self-loathing cycle.
And as a And this is why they cannot have power.
This is why you can't trust them with power because they're not operating in good faith.
They're not operating from a place of like conscious decision making.
They're taking their own shit out on us.
And here we have the perfect scenario for them to take their shit out on us.
And it's interesting because it's like it's the reaction to when you're when you're faced with things like that you're not familiar with, for instance, and and how you choose to react to that is very telling.
And it's like you know there's a few choices.
Like if you're if you're walking down the street and you see someone who's trans, right?
Who's who's a um a trans woman, uh, you know, you get you have a choice.
You can be like, oh, that's interesting, or oh, that's a great look, or oh, that is disgusting.
And we're it's the worst thing I've ever seen in the world.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
And it's like there's that that confusion, you know, can lead to a few different responses.
And it's like you, I guess you have to be conditioned, I think, from a kid of an earlier age to sort of get to the point where you are so sickened by this that you want to start turning into laws and start to campaign as a president of the United States uh on this issue saying that people like this are mentally unwell and need to be locked up forever.
Like that, that is what I find kind of the most interesting thing about this is because there is a choice about that.
And of course, when it where it does come out, and you see the private stuff, what they're doing and the self-loathing that comes out of that as well.
Like you keep telling everybody they're just they're just unwell, and they prove it every day uh as loud as they can.
And I just want to emphasize this again.
If there's a thesis from this to take, what is happening right now?
And Nick, you and I, whether we've been on camera or off camera, the thing that we keep talking about is like how this shit doesn't make sense, right?
Like how insane all of the different parts are.
This isn't how things are going to feel forever if they have power.
It will get worse.
Like we're in the opening salvo of something that will become so dangerous and so infuriating and so crazy making that we have to have a moment here of clarity where we say, Oh, we're not voting against this.
You know, we're not like talking about how to defeat this in an election.
We literally have an existential crisis that we have to deal with.
And Nick, to bring forward a metaphor that I'm always talking about.
I keep saying that we're being led down a chute, and eventually the gate is going to be shut behind us.
The gate is shutting.
Like each time something like this happens, the gate gets closer to being shut.
And what we're watching right now, I hope people can see with a sober clarity that this insanity, this somehow or another, and I promise you, as someone who has dealt with these situations, somehow or another, this insanity will manage to get worse.
And and I think the reason why we're getting to that point is that the Overton window has shifted so far that a huge reaction to what Charlie Kirk was saying by the right is that he was very moderate.
They're not they want to make it seem like he wasn't that big, you know.
He was just really down the middle and saying really good things.
That's what's so frightening because that actually might be true, right?
Oh, no, it is.
No, it is.
Yes.
Yeah.
And despite the fact that like what he would say was would be the most I mean, it's wild that the things he'd say that deal with misogyny and racism, um, would be considered moderate now.
But that is the case to so many people, and that was soul killing while reading this over and over again the last several days.
Nick, and and I I'm I'm glad you brought this up because I always talk about the Overden window and how the idea of what things are and what they become.
If you were to take a snapshot, like let's go back uh a week ago before he was killed, right?
And you were to take a snapshot of the Overdon window, Charlie Kirk was center right.
Like that's where he was on the political spectrum.
And and that's that that isn't okay.
Like the things that we've covered that he has said, the things we've talked about that he said, that is far right fascistic horseshit.
And meanwhile, there are people who are so far more extreme than him that are currently looking at him and looking at him as you know, for lack of a better phrase, because this is Nick, I've spent so much time reading the far right's response to this.
They looked at him uh as like a liberal cuck, is how they looked at him.
Yeah, but he was center right in our political ecosystem, which expresses something, which is we have been drugged so far to the right that literally the spectrum has almost ceased to make any sense.
And we And what we now need to be uh aware of a lot more is the terminally online Absolutely You know that that this is a thing that you cannot overlook at some point when the vast majority of these atrocities are happening from a specific uh you know group of people, um, and there's a lot of nuance there, like we like you're saying, we don't really know what's going on.
I'm not sure we'll ever get it like from the mainstream media exactly where uh Robinson fits in and what that all happened to him, but you know, you have this the subtle shades of differences between like groipers and black pilled people and all other manner of of uh deep rabbit hole internet uh uh disaffected alone loner people.
Um it it is a deep and dark place to be in that doesn't necessarily connect to politics per se, the way we call politics, and um again, we it's not going to fit whatever narrative they're gonna try and put push, and because people don't recognize that um that there is a lot of nuance to that, they're just gonna grapple grab onto what you know, whatever they can recognize and use it.
Nick, about a year ago.
I don't know, I I don't know if your memory of our shows works this way, but I basically have like a roving catalog of things that we've talked about, and when we talked about it.
About a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago, is the first time that I mentioned Nick Fuentes, a literal neo-Nazi.
And I said the reason why he's having so much success is because he's going the step further and being very open about being, you know, a neo-Nazi and his beliefs.
Nick, you want to talk about where the Overden window is and where things are leading, because it's it's a one-way train right now.
He just had a profile in the New York Times.
He is now one of the most influential people on the right because that extremism and radicalization, it only goes in one direction.
So if you want to know where this thing is going, if you need more to motivation to stop this, we're not just heading to Nick Fuentes, Nick.
There are people to the right of Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi.
That's what direction that this entire thing is going.
And we'll get there if we don't stop it.
And there's a vacuum now, and Nick Fuentes is getting a lot of free publicity out of all of this.
And uh, listen, I'm not even gonna tell him, let's say that like because the Groiper um ideology is what caused him to shoot Charlie Kirk.
I I don't think we have to go that far either.
It's probably a lot of other things that are going on.
But the way you do need to worry about is that people are like, oh, well, what is what is this guy about?
Let me hit listen to him.
Oh, that's interesting, you know.
Uh he's got a good voice, you know.
Like that's that's how it will start.
And then, you know, who knows?
I I don't know.
Um, I I I am worried because yes, Nick Fuentes had come on the scene in a way that uh next thing you know, he's at the White House, he's having dinner with Trump or whatever, uh, or Mar Lago.
And um, and and you know, which is what Charlie Kirk was doing.
So, you know, at some point.
And one last point before we wrap this up.
Nick, what's the other thing that we needed to talk about today?
Ice killed somebody.
Yeah.
I shot somebody dead.
Silverio Villegas Gonzalez.
And I bring that up because my God, Nick, what was it three, four, five months ago when this stuff was going on?
I said eventually they're going to kill somebody.
And that could very well be a turning point.
They did it.
They shot somebody dead.
And it's not even it, it's not even bubbling up to the surface as like one of the main stories right now.
It's happened.
We're there.
And it's not even a major story.
This is how this process works and how it takes us in that direction.
No, no one paid attention to the shooting in the uh in near Denver uh a couple days or a day after the Charlie Kirk assassination.
Um, and again, uh this the guy that did it apparently was way into uh other shooters and there was evidence out there, but you know, the the FBI being being dismantled the way they're doing it because of some oh, and we never talked about this.
Cash Patel is in the middle of a lawsuit because they fired people based on ideology.
And they're they should lose that suit.
Like the FBI should lose.
And um we have to keep your eye on whether Castro Tell is going to keep his job.
He got, I think, some sort of uh pat in the back from Trump today, which usually is a kiss of death, um, meaning he's not he'll be gone sooner than later.
But um, you know, all of these things are mixing together in a really interesting way that makes you feel like it's on purpose, right?
Because it couldn't be any more incompetent if you tried.
Uh, I mean, there are so many different components of this.
The entire point of this episode, shit is taking a turn.
And it's everything that we it's we've done this for years.
You you sent Me a text, you were like, We're not even sure how many episodes we've done at this point.
It's over 600, easily.
And it's just like if you go back and you listen to the first episodes, it's like, hey, we're going here.
And then it's hey, we're going here, and hey, we're going here.
And it just keeps happening.
And I just want to emphasize again, this will continue until we stop it.
And we have to stop it.
Period.
We have to take action.
All right.
We will be back with the weekender on Friday.
Again, head over to patreon.com slash microwick podcast.
I mean, every episode at this point is just another landmark in this whole thing.
Um, yeah, please go over there, subscribe, and support the show.
In the meantime, you can find us over on Blue Sky.
