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Sept. 11, 2025 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
35:26
Live with Richard Spencer

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Everyone.
I hope you're doing well.
This is a very late night stream.
But I did want to get a lot of my initial thoughts out about the Charlie Kirk assassination that occurred to today.
And we're gonna have our show as usual tomorrow.
And uh our frequent guest, old buddy of mine, JF will be on there on for our usual Thursday night show.
And um, you know, JF has a lot of experience in politics and this movement of we want to call it that.
And so there's a lot to be said.
Uh, but I just wanted to get my thoughts out initially.
Um, first off the first layer of the onion, it was uh pretty traumatic.
It was shocking uh to say the least.
Um I was not a fan of Charlie Kirk.
I I think you could safely say that I couldn't stand Charlie Kirk.
I did not benefit from his commentary et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But uh when this murder came uh uh over my timeline, uh I was shocked and my sympathy just began pouring out.
I had a tremendous amount of love for him and and fear for what seemed to be happening and sympathy for his family.
Uh so there's that.
There's just the shocking thing of a murder being broadcast live for everyone to see, and for it to be broadcast in graphic detail.
I mean, there was the Trump assassination attempt, but he of course survived that.
And it was almost immediately apparent that he had survived.
I'm not sure anything really compares to the scene of Starley engaging with a a questioner at a college campus, and the next moment blood is gushing out of his neck.
Simply horrifying.
But you all know this, and I imagine that you feel the same way as I do.
And uh it's important to talk about other aspects of this whole case.
Um first off I'm really conflicted in terms of whether we should speculate about this at all.
Now, more information is gonna come out, no doubt tomorrow.
And to be honest, 24 hours later, I think we could basically assume that he's got away scot-free.
Thinking about it, processing all of this stuff.
I do think that this scene, this was a professional job.
I get a very strong impression that this was a professional job, that this wasn't just some lone nut taking a pot shot.
Now, that doesn't mean that this was done by the CIA or or or whatever, or foreign entities, Israel, uh, Russia, et cetera.
It doesn't mean that.
I I just think it's safe to say that this person either had military training or professional sniper training of some kind.
First off, the shot was dead on, and it was a kill shot.
Uh and there was one shot.
Brooks firing at Trump, he fired off a number of times, killed some bystanders, missed Trump, et cetera.
This was one and done, and the assassin, we have video of him escaped.
Uh Kirk was hit in the neck.
Maybe that was what the assassin was aiming for.
I saw some speculation about the bullet deflecting off the um some sort of Kevlar vest.
I don't buy that, actually.
I it sort of does look that way, but the angle is all wrong if you're thinking he's firing from above, et cetera.
I I think he was I think the bullet hit the target.
Now, perhaps because he was high, uh, he was aiming for a headshot and he hit the neck.
Gravity pulled the bullet a little bit.
Very possible.
Perhaps he was going for the jugular, as the phrase goes.
And um, no doubt it was a it was a fatal blow immediately.
Uh so my first impression, again, is that this person had some sort of military and professional training.
Now, my next thoughts on this are I I guess maybe sort of contradict what I just said.
There has been a lot of speculation about Charlie Kirk was killed by Israel.
I don't, and that that seems to be the major speculation that's going on on the timeline.
Uh, I don't buy that in the slightest.
And there was a tweet from a few months ago by Harrison Smith of InfoWars, where he was saying, oh, Charlie told me that if he turned on Israel, Israel would kill him or something.
And I saw a number of tweets.
They were getting a lot of it was secretly going against Israel and so on.
First off, I don't buy this in the slightest bit.
I have been around right wingers for a long time now.
And I if I had a nickel for every time I heard that someone who is a mainstream hack like Charlie was, sorry to speak a little bit ill of him, but I I think that that's accurate, was secretly based and secretly knew all the truth the truth.
And it was only a matter of time before he turned on his payment.
I just, if I had a nickel for every time I've heard that one, I would be a very rich man.
I don't buy it.
I right wingers talk this way, and it doesn't have a lot of meaning, in my humble opinion.
Um secondly, if we we give any credence to this notion, uh, I don't think that Mossad or Israel would have killed Charlie Kirk in such a spectacular manner.
The fact is you made this man into a martyr, you made this man into a symbol.
It just will be more powerful in death than he was while alive.
I I just simply don't buy it.
I don't buy that Charlie Kirk was anything other than a good friend of Israel.
I think that is very clear.
And I don't think Israel would have done this.
Some other speculation, now, and this is just pure speculation.
Um if you do think that this is a professional job done by a foreign entity, would be uh Russia.
And why I say that, and I I understand that the Russia-Russia Russell stuff can get uh old, just blaming Russia for everyone, everything.
Um, is that it fits with a certain propaganda strategy of the Kremlin.
And that is not propaganda in the way that you're used to it.
That is posters saying, you know, Uncle Sam wants you to buy war bonds or something.
Russian propaganda is more about spreading chaos.
It's about putting normal people into this kaleidoscope where they don't know what's up and what's down and what's real and what's fake and what's left and what's right.
And uh there's no doubt that this sort of act can do that to people.
And it can inspire the worst on the left.
We've definitely seen that on Twitter.
There have been celebrating his death.
It can inspire craziness on the right as well.
It can inspire a kind of overreach on the right.
Another trend that I've noticed on the timeline is right wingers basically saying, like, this is it, this is war, and the in the words of libs of TikTok, we're going full fascism now.
We can never allow the left to not be in prison or something like this.
You know, uh, they are violent fascists, and so the only protection against them is fascism, of course, of the most violent kind.
Uh so basically a lot of people are taking the bait, as it were, and they're getting put on an edge.
They're getting they're getting anxious and nervous.
They're they're losing their minds because of this.
And in that sense, I wonder if this could be thought of as a kind of propaganda effort in a way.
Um, another thing, and this is a a tweet that I tweeted out from um someone actually from Texas Monthly of all places, but he was uh recounting a story that is true, which is that Charlie Kirk throughout his career has been basically loathed by the far right.
And here he's referring to the gripers in particular.
I mean, I couldn't stand Charlie Kirk as well.
Uh, but I never really fixated on him.
I just sort of dismissed him.
Uh the Gruper War occurred, I guess, seven years ago now.
Wow, time flies when you're having fun.
And it was really an attempt of the Nick Fuentes people to isolate Charlie Kirk as the enemy and basically say that he's cucked, he's ruining the movement, he doesn't understand Trump, et cetera, et cetera.
So I don't think it's totally out of the realm of possibilities that it the shooter might very well become a right winger.
And I I we sense a little bit of this with crooks.
Crooks donated, that is the young man who um attempted to assassinate Donald Trump uh July of 2024.
He donated to Democrats.
He was uh called right wing by people who knew him.
We know next to nothing about him, but there does seem to be that quality of him.
Who knows exactly?
But all I'm saying is that within the realm of possibilities, is this going to be a situation where a right winger was directly attacking uh Charlie Kirk?
Certainly possible.
More likely is this, that it is what it is.
What you think this was all about is what it's about.
This is a person with a left-wing ideology, but but I think the left-wing ideology is not the primary cause.
I think this person would be profoundly narcissistic.
Someone who feels that he, it's most likely he has never been appreciated throughout his life.
And they'll know my name now.
They'll listen to me now, finally at last.
And he did this.
And ideology is a sort of justification in a way for an act that is ultimately derived from profound narcissism.
And uh, I could see this being a uh, you know, vouch supporter or um uh Hazan, that's his name, watcher.
We've already had a situation where one of his fans was accused of terrorism.
Um and that's how it goes on the internet, isn't it, isn't it?
That you're streaming video games and you're talking politics, and there's just this natural tendency to be as extreme as possible.
They're not, there are not very many middle of the road centrist Democrats who are popular online, who are in Discord forums who are streaming video games.
The name of the game is to either go full Leninist communist or full Nazi fascist.
That that's how it goes.
There's just a tendency for this to happen.
And so I could also imagine this being some sort of leftist assassin.
That is probably most likely, if I'm to think about it, someone who's watching all these things, you know, when someone on CNN calls Trump a fascist, they are sort of putting their tongue in their cheek.
I think they do have genuine concerns about overreach of government, uh, destroying longstanding institutions, authoritarianism.
I think those concerns are genuine, but I don't think they believe that Trump is literally Hitler in this sense.
I think people who watch Vouch does they think Charlie Kirk is much like these goofballs from InfoWars, they believe that Charlie Kirk is secretly an anti Semite and secretly uh wants to round up all non-whites and put them into camps or something.
I I think they actually believe this.
And uh I someone, again, who's maladjusted, antisocial, obviously, and someone who gets lost in these forums and watching social media all day, extremely online, as they say, could have done this.
I I think that's well within the realm of possibilities.
And I think that's probably most likely.
But we'll see.
Um, we'll there is a possibility this man is going to get away with it.
And that would make everything much worse because it would add this layer of ambiguity to the situation that would resemble the JFK assassination, where, you know, everyone has two opinions and it's just uh it can never be resolved, really.
I think that's very possible.
Um the standpoint of a left liberal, Charlie Kirk was a fascist.
Charlie Kirk was baby Hitler that you need to kill in the crib on the right who are online, basically take Charlie Kirk as a pushover, as a cuck, as the alt-light, maybe not even that, as sort of representative of everything that they hate about the GOP.
That's not the perspective of outsiders.
And you and to it to try to understand what just happened, you have to put yourself in the shoes of those people.
You can't just be like, well, Charlie Kirk had a gay black guy at one of his rallies, or uh, you know, Charlie Kirk said something nice about BLM once, or whatever.
All of that is immaterial.
Charlie Kirk is a powerful influencer, deeply connected with the Trump system, with Trump world.
And that is how he's viewed by most liberals and leftists.
They don't get the nuance or they don't hear the criticisms online.
They see him for what he is, which is a kind of front man of the Trump regime.
Um Charlie Kirk is a fascinating figure in this regard in the sense that I, you know, I wonder if he ultimately won the Groiper War.
And what I mean by that is that Charlie Kirk, as I mentioned, was isolated As a representative of the establishment back in 2018 and 2019, he was called a cock.
People at QA sessions were yelling at him and waving rosary beads at him.
And, you know, how does gay sex help the American people and our families and things like this?
And so maybe immediately he lost the Gruper war in the sense that he was being heavily criticized.
He was being made fun of.
And the energy seemed to be on the far right.
But the the fascinating thing about Charlie Kirk, what made him not just a Republican hack, made him more than that, in fact, was that he was able to absorb.
Excuse me.
He was able to absorb all of those energies.
And he was able to absorb anti-COVID energies.
He was able to absorb anti-MLK and civil rights energies.
He was able to absorb white nationalism.
He was even to a degree able to absorb anti-Zionist sentiments, anti-Israel sentiments.
He is a truly remarkable man in this regard.
So his first line of attack when the Gruper War started was to push back and basically say, you're all losers.
Fuck off.
We love Israel.
You're not part of this movement.
That was successful to a degree, but it's more successful to absorb all of these energies.
The best opposition is the one you control.
The best opposition is you.
You can be your own opposition.
That's operating at a high level of discourse.
And Charlie Kirk, despite the fact that I didn't find him insightful at all, and I found him off-putting, to be honest.
He gave me the ick.
He was operating at a very high level of discourse because he was able to do that.
And so people would come to TPUSA events, and they would talk about whether we need to assassinate Dr. Fauci or we need to bring guns to the pharmacy and shoot the vaccines, the people tried to give them give them to us.
And I'm only exaggerating slightly here.
There was a lot of hard talk, hard right-wing talk going on at TPUSA.
And Charlie Kirk never really countersignaled it.
Charlie Kirk never rejected anti-Israel sentiment and even anti-Semit Semitic sentiment.
But he sort of did an end run around it.
And what one of the most famous incidents is when he said that Israel that was attacked on October 7th, 2023, they now get to feel how white people have felt all these years.
So he's sort of in this way that's the that occurs quite often.
He was sort of creating an amalgamation of the anti-anti-white sentiment and pro-Zionist sentiment.
So you're a racist for Israel.
You're a Nazi for the Jews, in the words of Gavin McGuinness.
He was able to do that.
And I think that's what makes him interesting.
So the liberals have a point when they say that Charlie Kirk was a racist fascist.
He wasn't, of course, on a basic level.
He's a off-the-shelf B party activist.
I think that's where he got his start, religious right conservative.
But what made him different is that he was able to absorb the Fuentes energy.
And in that sense, I think he actually won the Gruper war.
Some Grupers might not want to hear that.
Perhaps they Agree with me, perhaps, and they think that they won because they influenced him in this way.
I have a more of a cynical view.
Being absorbed and having your energy redirected is not necessarily influence.
So that's what made Charlie Kirk powerful.
That's what made Charlie Kirk interesting.
Now, what comes next?
I there are other people who do what Charlie Kirk has is doing or did, I should say, sadly.
Tucker Carlson, most obviously.
He clearly wants to absorb Alex Jones energy and even Groper energy while denouncing Nick Fuentes.
But can he replace Charlie Kirk?
Charlie Kirk was 31, and he sort of grew up with the online right.
I've seen so many people who claim that Charlie Kirk was their friend.
It's a bit incredible, actually.
You know, I knew Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk.
What I think happened is that they talked to him once at a TPUS meeting, USA meeting, and they really felt a connection with this person who was roughly their age.
31, they were 20, or even 17.
There are a lot of young people who are politically active.
And they felt a connection with him.
I don't think that they can feel that connection with me, for instance, from for multiple reasons.
One of which is that I'm older than they are.
I don't think they can feel that connection with someone like Tucker Carlson, who's even older than I am.
So I don't know where the replacement comes from.
I don't think there is anyone comparable who is as talented as Charlie Kirk was in his realm.
Now, again, I didn't really like his commentary.
I didn't really respect him.
I guess I had a grudging respect for his political operation in the sense that that was very successful.
But I don't know if there's someone who's a young person who's wily enough to absorb all of these far right energies and ultimately push them towards the Republican Party.
Basically, you can be a nut.
You can believe in UFOs, you can be anti-Semitic for traditionalist Catholic reasons.
You can criticize Israel, you can be a hardcore libertarian.
You can think that the vaccine is just about to kill everyone on earth.
You can think all of this crazy shit, but so long as you are pushing towards the GOP, and so long as you are voting for Trump, you're A-OK by me.
That is Charlie Kirk.
Is there someone else as who has the right identity as a young white conservative who can do these kinds of things?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I've also heard that Nick Fuentes will rise to be the leader of the right.
I don't think so.
And I'm not saying that as a criticism.
I think Nick Fuentes will continue to grow.
And the, you know, article in the New York Times was uh obviously a good step in that direction of notoriety, et cetera.
But there's a big asymmetry between Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes.
Nick Fuentes's uh growth or Nick Fuentes' our um audience is largely organic.
They are young people, they listen to him every night, they're live streaming with him, they like him, they feel connected to him, et cetera.
Charlie Kirk really wasn't that.
Charlie Kirk was much more of a synthetic creation.
I do think he was talented at what he did, but I don't think Charlie Kirk could have independently developed the audience that he did.
Charlie Kirk was backed by, you know, billionaires in Utah who owned chains of plumbers who would give him millions of dollars to promote the pro-life cause on campus.
I mean, he was connected to that traditional boomer and even silent gen donor base in a way that Nick Fuentes is not.
And I don't think Nick Fuentes ever could be.
And I mean that as a compliment.
He's too independent.
He's too willing to go his own way.
He's too hardcore, you could say in many ways.
So I don't think that.
But I also don't have a name of someone who could replace Charlie Kirk, who's coming from that conservative wing.
They're going to try too hard to be like him.
You've got to be your own man.
You've got to go your own way.
You can't just mimic what other people do.
And that's basically what I see from conservatives.
So in terms of the future of the GOP of the conservative movement or whatever, I don't know.
I don't know who's going to replace him.
I maybe maybe he can't be replaced, and it's actually going to be very detrimental.
What does this mean for America going forward?
I I've retweeted a couple of posts that were basically saying we're entering our years of lead.
The years of lead is more or less Italy in the 1970s that included many political, politically motivated assassinations, a escalation between the far left and the far right, former fascists whom were funded by the CIA and Operation Gladio, which is real.
Communists probably funded by the Kremlin.
I mean, it it was nasty.
And I think that that is a good analogy.
I've heard also the analogy of the troubles in Ireland between Catholics and Protestants.
There's probably some other analogies as well.
It's not outright civil war.
I don't think you're going to wake up tomorrow morning and people are building barricades or digging trenches and fighting over territory.
I don't think that's going to happen, of course.
But I do think that the political world is going to become nasty.
I mean, does anyone think that this is the end of political violence?
I mean, I can in my own lifetime, I can remember this sort of escalation.
So before 2017, really, um, Antifa were almost like a comical band of weirdos who were kind of funny, if anything.
And, you know, going to a lot of these conferences, et cetera.
I remember getting into arguments with Antifa, throwing insults at one another, and it was all sort of good fun in a way.
Now, they were obviously nasty, but you know, it wasn't a big deal.
And the punching of me was a major wake-up call in January 20th of 2017.
Because I just walked out there a naive idiot thinking that nothing bad could ever happen.
You know, you can go sarcastically grin at Antifa, freight a few insults, and that's it.
Um, I could have been killed in January of 2017, getting hit upside the head by someone running out of a crowd.
You know, I got away with slight damage, no big deal, but I could have been killed.
But even that seems like a weekend holiday in comparison to political violence that involves assassinations, long guns, spectacular deaths caught on camera.
Um, I I think it's a very good thing that the spotlight is off me.
Uh let's just put it, let's leave it at that.
I don't want to talk too much about this macabre subject.
I does anyone really believe that we're gonna go back or that we're gonna reach across the aisle and hold hands and say we all denounce political violence.
Let's move forward together.
Does anyone really think that that's gonna happen?
Antifa in this fascinating way is gone.
Antifa, I I don't know where they are.
They weren't present at J6.
When there was an actual coup, they weren't present.
And I haven't really seen much of them since.
Maybe they've all OD'd on drugs.
Who knows?
Maybe they too have been sort of absorbed into other different formations.
But what seems to be coming after Antifa is clearly worse.
And the notion of a profoundly narcissistic radicalized assassin picking off influencers, is a pretty terrifying notion.
Um before I go, I wanted to reproduce something, a a observation that was made by uh a man named Hierarchy, who was on a space that I was on.
And he he said something very interesting about how he believes that this was a left-wing shooter.
Now, again, I I'm open minded about the whole thing.
It's fine to speculate.
It can't be bad to speculate, but it's fine overall fine to speculate so long as you know you're speculating.
You don't have this, you know, confirmed conclusion.
You know exactly what it is.
I don't, and I'm open to possibilities.
But I agreed with hierarchy's argument, which was this this does have a sort of hallmark of a left-wing shooter in the sense that the left-wing shooter is more likely to go after a person or an icon or a kind of idol.
You're more likely to try to kill the czar.
You're more likely to try to shoot the president or something like that.
Um it has that kind of iconography of left-wing violence.
You personalize the situation.
You think that this evil figure is changing the world and needs to be stopped at all cost.
I do think that that's a a sort of left-wing mentality.
Something we can talk about on Thursday.
But does anyone have any questions or comments?
I'm not going to stay on this too long, but someone could actually even come up if he or she wants to.
All right.
I guess you guys just wanted to listen, which is usually the case.
Uh thank you for being here.
I'm glad to get these thoughts out.
I have many more thoughts, and we will talk about it on Thursday's show.
So I'll see you then.
All right, good night.
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