Political Violence Before and After Charlie Kirk's Murder
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 850-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Brad discusses the political and cultural climate surrounding the murder of Charlie Kirk, focusing on the rise of political violence, the Supreme Court's recent decision enabling racial profiling, and the rhetoric of white Christian nationalism.
Joined by Alan Elrod, they explore how online culture and screens have changed the way Americans process violence and empathy, the impact of status anxiety in the heartland, and the dangers of exclusionary ideologies. The conversation highlights the erosion of empathy and civic connection in the digital age, the manipulation of tragic events for political gain, and the urgent need to foster both meaningful social interactions and reflective solitude to sustain a healthy democracy.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
Check out BetterHelp and use my code SWA for a great deal: www.betterhelp.com
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nearly half of American adults say they would suffer financial hardship within six months if they lost their primary income earner.
If that hits home for you, you're not alone and you're not out of options.
With Policy Genius, you can find life insurance policies starting at just 276 dollars a year for one million dollars in coverage.
It's an easy way to protect the people you love and feel good about the future.
One of the greatest things about Policy Genius is it helps you compare your options.
You can get quotes from the top insurers around the country.
You'll be able to talk to a team of licensed agents who will walk you through the entire process.
Life insurance is a form of financial planning, and Policy Genius is the country's leading online insurance marketplace.
Secure your family's future with Policy Genius.
Head to Policy Genius.com to compare free life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save.
That's Policy Genius.com.
What's up, y'all?
Brad here to tell you that Swatch Premium is on sale for $40 for 12 months.
We know things are hard right now.
We know things are uncertain.
We know that many of you are doing your best to make life happen.
So if you sign up today, you'll get the next 12 months of Swatch Premium for just 40 dollars.
We're inviting all of our premium subscribers to record our bonus episodes with us.
That means asking live questions, getting real-time answers.
We also invite our subscribers to our Discord community where folks discuss important topics, react to episodes, and share resources on local activism.
He'll get ad-free listening, access to our entire 867 episode archive, bonus content for me every Monday.
And just to make it even better, you'll get bonus content from Andrew Seidel's exquisite new podcast, One Nation Indivisible, every Tuesday.
It's $40 for 12 months.
That's a pretty good deal.
We'll hope you check it out.
It's subscriptions like this that help us keep the show going, doing it three times a week and covering every aspect of the Trump administration, Christian nationalism, and the rise of authoritarianism in the United States.
You can check out the info in the show notes.
You can also go to accessmoundy.supercast.com.
That's Access A XIS Moundy M-U-N-D-I.
supercast.com and check it out.
Thank you.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad O'Neci, author of Preparing for War, The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next, and the founder of Axis Moundy Media.
On Friday, I promise to talk a little bit more about Charlie Kirk and what has happened in the wake of his murder.
I'm going to be joined in a few minutes by Alan Elrod from the Pulaski Institution, who's going to talk about empathy and guns and phones and what we've seen in the week or so since the murder happened.
For now, I want to talk about the world that Charlie Kirk left.
I want to talk about the world that we lived in the day that he was shot, because we haven't talked about that all that much since the event, and that makes sense.
There's been a lot to dissect, a lot to cover.
It was a truly shocking moment in American culture.
But I want to make a point today that I think will help us understand the sense of political violence in the country and where we are as a nation because the the country that Charlie Kirk left, the world that he left, was one that is was already full of political violence.
Now I said it Friday, Dan said it Friday.
I'm going to say it again.
Political violence of any kind is something we condemn.
We're not happy, we're not joyous, we are fearful and sad over the events of the last week in this country.
We don't want to live in a world where people, anyone are shot, are killed, are afraid to go into public, are afraid That if they give a speech or stand up to speak their mind, that they might be hurt.
Gonna say that loudly and plainly and clearly from the start.
But I want to go back a week from today to a Supreme Court decision, where the Supreme Court ruled that it is okay for ICE to racially profile and to profile people based on the language they are speaking when deciding if they're gonna approach them and discuss with them their immigration status, their citizenship status, and so on.
And let me, in order to do that, let me read a little bit from Sherilyn Eiffel's Substack post from a week ago.
There is a lot I can say about today's Supreme Court order lifting the stay issued by a federal district court and Gnome versus Vasquez.
This is the case that challenges the constitutionality of DHS immigration raids in California, in which officers appear to rely on racial and language profiling to justify stops and arrests of suspected undocumented migrants.
Just to translate that, what that means is if you're an ICE officer and you're walking down the street and you hear somebody who is speaking Spanish, and they have brown skin, they appear to be Latino, then the Supreme Court says you can approach them and say, hey, what's your status?
Who are you?
Show me your passport, green card, I da ID, anything.
And this was stopped by a district court and ruled to be not okay, unconstitutional.
The Trump administration appealed that ruling.
And the court, the Supreme Court lifted the stay, the ban on this, and it did so without really explaining its rationale for doing that.
This is a shadow docket decision.
And it defers to President Trump's policy decisions, excuse me, it defers to President Trump's policy decisions before before a full trial on the merits.
This is what Sherilyn Eiffel says.
So one of the things that is most jarring about all of this, and it is what Brett Kavanaugh wrote about these kinds of stops by DHS.
Okay.
What Brett Kavanaugh wrote is, I think, pretty breathtaking.
The government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs, who work for or appear to work in jobs as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants and people who do not speak much English.
If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.
If the individual is illegally in the United States, the officers may arrest the individual and initiate initiate the process for removal.
Now, you and I have been watching television, YouTube clips, media clips.
We've been reading, we've been listening.
We know that this is not reality.
The reality is that people are being kidnapped from their homes.
They're being walking down the street, and men in masks jump out of a van that is not marked and take them away.
We also know, and I'm not going to go through all of them, but there are dozens of instances when green cardholders and U.S. citizens with passports have been arrested in these raids and taken into custody and sometimes held for days or weeks.
These are instances where people are thrown to the ground, handcuffed, violently taken away.
These are instances where recently a person died, and in California, the person was severely injured.
This is not a case where you have law enforcement calmly and peacefully walking up to people as Kavanaugh says, simply saying, Hi, what's your name?
Can I see your ID?
And even if they were, the Supreme Court is saying that we now live in a country where we're gonna have military in our cities, we're gonna have unmarked, masked, unidentified law enforcement prowling around our neighborhoods.
And they can stop anyone they like, depending on how they look or what language they're speaking.
That is the country we're gonna live in now.
It's a show me your papers country.
It's a country where you might want to carry your passport, depending on how you look or what language you speak, or anything, anything that might mean that somebody in law enforcement might want to stop you.
Here's what Sean Eiffel says.
Every aspect of this description is belied by the reality that appears on our televisions and online and every day.
Who are you going to believe?
Justice Kavanaugh or your lying eyes.
Kavanaugh's description reads as though it were downloaded from the Department of Homeland Security's website.
Almost every word of this is preposterous.
Brief investigative stops at places where undocumented immigrants are likely to work.
What do we have seen repeatedly are not stops?
They are grabs and kidnapping.
Most often no questions are asked, even when colleagues have insisted that the person targeted by ICE agents are here legally or that they are citizens.
ICE agents proceed to tackle, beat, cuff, and forcibly take people away.
This is the world that we now live in.
It's a world of violence and kidnapping.
It's a world where at any moment, unmarked cars with masked men might come prowling through your streets of your neighborhood, hanging around your school, hanging around your office.
And they might be supported by the National Guard or Marines.
They might be supported by the United States military.
We now live in a state where this is all legal and possible.
And where if you look a certain way and are speaking a certain language in public, you might just have to stop and show your papers and prove it.
And what we know, contrary to whatever Brett Kavanaugh wants to tell you, is that the people are not being asked.
There's not a nice conversation happening.
There's people being cuffed and kidnapped, thrown to the ground, beaten.
We're seeing injuries and we're seeing death.
Now, I want to bring this up today because this didn't get talked about last week.
This got covered up and for understandable reasons.
But this is the this is the United States today.
Show me your papers, country.
This is the United States right now.
Now this ruling from the Supreme Court came days after NATCon.
And NATCON is a uh conference for national conservatism.
It's something that's been going on about a half a dozen years now, funded by Peter Thiel and some others.
It's a place for people who consider themselves to be often to the right of the American Republican Party or the GOP.
Increasingly, it's become pretty mainstream.
It's lost its kind of shock value.
Last year, and we covered this if you go back one year, one of the keynote speakers was Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri.
Now, Senator Hawley at that moment used his time on stage to talk about how the United States is a Christian nation.
And in fact, it's not just a Christian nation, it's a Christian nationalist nation.
He did this sweeping history that went from St. Augustine through the Middle Ages all the way to the pilgrims and said all of them were proud to be building the city of God on earth, that their nations were a Christian nation and their nations had a distinct character because of their Christianity.
And that the United States, in the vision of the pilgrims, was built for, and in many ways by, Christian people, and by extension to this logic, white Christian people.
Dan and I dissected the theology that he presented there, which was amateur-ish, and the history, which was full of holes and glaring generalities.
This year, it seems that his colleague, the junior senator from Missouri, Eric Schmidt, decided he needed to one up his senior colleague.
He thought that, well, if you want to talk about Christian nationalism, hold my beer, because I'm just going to do some straight-up white nationalism with a little bit of a Christian chaser.
Instead of doing, you know, one part whiskey, one part Coke, I'm going to do a full glass of whiskey, full glass of white nationalism, And I'll pepper in there a little chaser of Coca-Cola just to make it respectable.
Now, I want to just before I get into Schmidt's speech, which is truly stunning and reprehensible.
I want to just remind you of a couple things.
Keep these in mind as we go through his speech, because this is all going to relate back to the Supreme Court's ruling on stopping people who are Latino, look Latino, and might be speaking Spanish.
We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
That's of course a declaration of independence.
Now it can it continues that when whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.
The Declaration of Independence was a declaration that all people have the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It was a proposition.
Here's the idea.
That's the only reason you have a government.
Okay.
And the government we are going to form away from the British monarchy is laid on the foundation of such principles.
The principles of every human being gets life, liberty, and happiness.
There is no mention here of ancestry or heritage, no mention here of the nation being a people that looks a certain way, has a certain ethnicity, or even a certain history.
Okay.
Now, I'll also remind you that someone named Abraham Lincoln said fourscore and seven years ago and talked about an American proposition.
Talked about the proposition laid out here in the Declaration of Independence.
And you're like, Brad, great.
Thank you for the history lesson.
We all appreciate it.
Well, here is a little bit of what Senator Schmidt said in his speech.
If America was a universal proposition, then everything we inherited from our specific Western heritage had to be abolished.
So the statutes came down, the names are changed.
Yesterday's heroes become today's villains.
The story of the nation has to be rewritten to align America to its true creed.
On the right, the Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from beyond the stockade walls, all of them will be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a proposition.
They believed they were fighting for a nation, a homeland for themselves and their descendants.
They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us.
They built this country for us.
America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations.
If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all.
Now, Senator Schmidt is, of course, rewriting history here.
He is going directly against the Declaration of Independence and what Abraham Lincoln said in his famous speech.
There are many other examples I could give.
But the implications of what he's saying are bleak and rather dire in terms of the country as it appears today and the possibility that we might be a pluralist democracy, multi-ethnic, multiracial, multireligious democracy.
Joshua Shane's writing at Slate put it this way: the implications of this vision are serious.
This is a repute repudiation of our Constitution and the core of a national identity that includes all its citizens.
It means that to be American is not about citizenship at all.
What is an American, Schmidt asked?
It is a white person.
America is a white homeland that organically binds together white people of the past, present, and future.
And its policies must be guided for their benefit if they are to succeed.
Non-white people do appear in this vision, but only as the usurpers of our white nation and its resources.
They are the quote, Indians, whom he portrays as savages, who succumb to the superior ability of their white destroyers.
They are Barack Obama and his supporters, who scorned the white patriots for remembering a country, quote, that once belonged to them.
They are the people tearing down the Confederate statues and removing Confederate names from buildings, streets, and forts, turning yesterday's heroes into today's villains.
They are the people behind the George Floyd riots as he describes them, anarchists who, quote, looted and defaced and tore down statues and monuments all across the country.
His vision of the United States is one that says this place is not about an inalienable right of freedom, life, liberty, happiness for all people.
That it is not a promise of equality or representation, that this place that was supposed to be an experiment, a democratic experiment, a place that was audacious in what it was attempting, is in fact nothing of the sort.
The United States is simply a place that has a certain people, a certain homeland, a certain ancestry, a certain ethnicity.
And if you listen to the entire speech, it's very clear that that is all done by people of European heritage.
Now he goes on to say that his own ancestors came in 1840.
Germans.
Now, what a lot of people have pointed out in the wake of this is that his history is kind of bad here because when folks were coming in the 1840s, not only was that a long time after the American Revolution, that was not the time of Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay colonies, Certain parts of Europe, they were not considered Americans because many people, in prejudicial and disgusting ways, said that they were not really white or not really Christian.
Schmidt himself is Catholic.
We've talked a long time on this show about the anti-Catholic bias shown to all kinds of Europeans.
Italians, Irish, Polish.
If you were Catholic in the 1920s, the KKK considered you a traitor and somebody who could never be a real American.
There's a long history of white nationalism in this country, and that that history does two things.
A, it excludes people like him.
He would not have been white or Christian enough for most of the white nationalists in American history.
And two, the white nationalism project does exactly what it does to Schmidt.
It excludes.
It says you can only be a real American if it's only a place for these people.
That if we're going to be anything, we have to go back to our ancestry and our destiny.
What makes us exceptional?
This is how he puts it later in the speech.
America is not a universal nation.
It is something distinctive, unique, and real, unlike any other place or people in the history of mankind.
Western civilization was defined by its restless, relentless, dynamic spirit, a drive to create, explore, and discover that spurred the West to the heights of political, intellectual, and technological achievement, unmatched by any civilization in human history.
America was settled, founded, and built by the most adventurous, the most courageous, the most curious and innovative and risk-taking sons and daughters of the West.
Our country is, in this important sense, the most essential Western nation.
For our settlers, Ancestors, the American frontier stretched out as the horizon of infinite possibility.
Now, I don't think I have to tell any of you this, but I'll just say it anyway.
The United States has never been what he's claiming it is.
It has never ever been a homogenous white place.
There has always been a pluralistic mosaic of the United States in the United States population.
There were millions of people who were forcibly brought to the United States from Africa.
Many African Americans, Native Americans, and others were enlisted in building the nation, whether that is the White House, whether that is the railroads that connected the continent, whether that is any number of things.
This has always been a place that has been more diverse than white nationalists like him would like to admit.
Here's how Johan Jones says it at MSNBC.
The truth is that the U.S. has never been the homogenous white European utopia Schmidt's speech and visions.
Since day one, the United States has not achieved lasting progress without contributions from the non-European immigrants whose Americanness the freshman senator from Missouri sees fit to question.
And in fact, when the Senators family arrived here in the 1840s, very soon thereafter, there were Chinese immigrants arriving on the West Coast.
Those who were part of the gold rush, those who were part of building the railroads, those who were excluded in the 1880s by law.
Like very close to when Schmidt's own family becomes quote unquote American.
There are Chinese folks on the West Coast trying to claim their part of the United States, working hard on one of the most amazing engineering feats in the history of the country, but one he seems to have forgotten when he lists all the ways that the United States is exceptional.
Now, just for posterity's sake, he he needed to pepper in a little Christian nationalism to his white nationalism, and so here it is.
We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe's shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.
Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief devoted to their cause and their God.
We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe's shores to baptize a new world.
So what if you're not a Christian?
What if you're not somebody who has Christians in their ancestry?
What if you're somebody who doesn't see their lineage coming from Europe's shores, but from other shores, from Africa's, from Asia's, from a southern border that has moved many times because of war and land appropriation.
According to Schmidt, you're not an American if that's true.
You don't fit the vision of what it means to be somebody who is a citizen in this country.
You're an interloper.
You are something else.
And what Schmidt is saying here is something that I've highlighted on the show before, but I'll just say it again.
Stephen Wolfe is a political theorist and a Christian nationalist.
He wrote a book called The Case for Christian Nationalism.
And he says in a recent speech that white Protestants are not immigrants to this country.
That they are settlers of this country, and therefore they are the Native Americans.
There was no America, quote unquote, before them.
And so they are the ones who began the nation, despite the fact that there were, of course, people here before those white Europeans arrived.
Now, Schmidt doesn't even fit Stephen Wolfe's definition.
He is a Catholic, somebody whose family came in the mid-1800s, not the mid-1600s.
But nonetheless, Schmidt is hoping he can get into the party, that he, a latecomer to the European part of the American puzzle, at least in some historical sense, is hoping he still can get a wristband to the MVP area, that he can be one of the real ones, while everybody else stands outside, waits in line, and will never be assimilated into what he thinks of as the United States.
Now, why bring all this up today?
Because this ties directly into what happened with the Supreme Court.
On one hand, you have a sitting senator outlining a white nationalist vision of the country.
And on the other hand, you have the highest court in the land saying if somebody's brown and somebody speaks the wrong language, go question them and see if they're really meant to be here.
It's all you, don't worry.
You can racially profile people now.
You can approach them because of what their language is saying, despite the fact that the Declaration of Independence says that the government derives from the idea that it is supposed to institute life, liberty, happiness, that it's built on the foundation of those principles, not on how you look, not on your race or ethnicity, not on what language you're speaking as you walk down the street or talk on the phone, or eat lunch with your family.
The Supreme Court says, nah, racially profile, go ahead.
And the sitting senator says, Yeah, of course, because this is a white Christian nation, and only white Christians can be real Americans.
That is the world Charlie Kirk left.
Now, what I mean by that is not the one he created, and he left it for us.
What I mean is when he left the world, when he when he was shot last week, that is the world we were all living in.
That is the one that Charlie Kirk departed.
So there's a lot of talk about political violence.
There's a lot of talk about the current temperature of the country.
No matter what anyone says on the American left, what any democratic sitting senator, congressperson, governor, mayor says, it seems that the American right is bent on this idea that whoever's not with them, it's not a part of their group, is happy that Charlie Kirk was shot.
I'm going to say it one more time.
I said it about five times Friday.
I'm going to say it again today.
am not.
This is not a good event.
I am not happy, joyful, gleeful, anything.
Thank you.
I am as soon as I saw the news, I was in deep shock, sadness, fear for him, for his family, and for all of us.
But when that event took place, we were already living in a world where the Supreme Court said, if you're Latino, what is happening in LA and so many other parts of the country where people are being tackled and kidnapped, cuffed and beaten based on how they look or sound is okay.
And a sitting senator saying, Yeah, of course it's okay because this country is about the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims.
The temperature in this country is only going to get hotter and hotter politically and culturally.
I don't know what is going to happen next.
But what I do know is that last week a momentous event took place in American culture.
But what was behind it or part of it, or laying in the context behind it, was a Supreme Court decision and a speech that already told us everything we need to know about the kinds of political violence and the kinds of exclusion, the kinds of attacks that are now becoming solidified in the regime that is in power at the federal government.
To me, all of this is linked.
And it doesn't mean that anything that happened with Charlie Kirk is to be overlooked, and that we shouldn't talk about it.
And I'm actually going to talk to Alan Elrod right now about what happened.
It means more that we have been living in a climate of political violence.
And the Supreme Court just said it's okay.
It should continue.
And a sitting senator said, it's why wouldn't it?
Because there's probably people here who don't belong here.
And there was no way I could let all this go without noticing what was happening in the background, what was happening in the country as we all turned our eyes to that one event.
I'm going to turn now to my conversation with Alan Elrod.
All right, y'all.
As I mentioned, I'm joined now by Alan Elrod, who's a first-time guest and uh someone who I'm just so thrilled to have on and get to talk to today.
Alan is the CEO and president of the Pulaski Institution, a contributing editor to liberal currents, and somebody who teaches for Arkansas State Bibi.
So Alan, thanks for joining me.
Really glad to be here.
You just wrote uh a piece about political violence, and of course, all of this takes place in the context of what happened last week and the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Want to talk about the ways that you mentioned in your piece and basically argue forcefully in your piece that political violence, violence in general in this country is about the guns.
It's also about the screens.
And I think that's something a lot of us can intuit, but maybe couldn't put into words like you have.
Let me start here.
What are some things about what happened last week in terms of what we know about Tyler Robinson, online culture, political violence, the reaction of the right, any of the menu above that strikes you as something that we should maybe be talking about that you're not hearing other places or things that folks are not discussing enough.
Well, when it comes to the shooter himself, I don't want to overreach right now.
I mean, we're early days.
I think a lot of people are eager to try to say exactly what his ideology was.
Although I think one of the things that's usually pretty clear when you're dealing with a lot of these things where people are very online, and it seems to be that he was quite online, you know.
Some of these the the sort of references to memes and internet subcultures on the bullets seems to indicate uh it was, you know, spending a lot of time on the internet.
A lot of times though, this stuff is not super coherent.
I mean, there might be a broad left or right bent in some instances, but most of the time it's it's a hodgepodge of weird uh, you know, idiosyncratic interests and predilections and beliefs.
And also usually, you know, people don't normally well, people who are who are generally well don't normally go out and shoot someone with a rifle.
Yeah.
Um a lot of what I tried to talk about in the piece was less a kind of the causes of political violence, which I think have been discussed a lot lately, and more what happens to us when an event like this unfolds on social media because you know, Charlie was killed in public in front of a lot of people, and there's multiple videos of it that he immediately went around.
So, you know, a few thousand people saw him get shot in the neck, and then a few million people saw the video.
And then people spent days arguing about what his death meant, and not only what his death meant, but but pretty much attacking anyone they felt might be interpreting his death in a way they didn't think was the correct way.
Yeah.
And that was where I really wanted to send in the conversation was the way in which how we take in information, how we interact with other people, how we think about other people when we're engaging them primarily through screens and social media affects us.
Well, you know, I think one of the things I took away from your piece is that this was happening before Charlie Kirk died.
There was this sense of online swordsmanship and an online culture that I think needs no explanation in terms of the ways people become very toxic very quickly on anywhere from Facebook to X to any other form we can we can name.
One thing you argue in the piece is that there has been political violence in the past.
We can talk about political violence spilling into the streets in Nazi Germany or the the years before the Nazis took power.
We can talk about the 1960s in this country.
You make the argument that there's something different now, which is the screens.
And I'm wondering if you can unpack that for us briefly.
Well, I think it cuts in a few ways.
One, it means you can have a sort of strange motivation sometimes for shooters where it doesn't, it doesn't totally make sense where what they're doing where it comes from.
It also means there is more of a chance to become famous.
You know, in this case, Robinson didn't stream himself, but we've had a number of instances in the past few years, right, where shooters stream themselves, clearly for the purpose of disseminating their ideas and their their likeness while they're doing the act.
So so that potential to to create instant notoriety is also there.
And then I think again it comes back to how we all process it.
I mean, our own desensitization to this stuff.
Yeah.
You used to really have to work in a specific Kind of line of work, or to have been a soldier in war, or to just have been a deeply unfortunate person to have seen someone die.
And now a lot of us have seen a lot of different people die through our screens.
And I think that that that is that is astonishing.
And that's that by itself is not necessarily, you know, the phone's fault, but the world we live in and the platforms we're on.
Yeah.
Make it possible.
I mean you used to really not expect the average person to necessarily have seen a violent murder in front of them.
But now millions of people have.
And I don't know if they've even really processed the fact that they have.
Yeah.
So taking all of what you just said there in terms of what we see now.
I mean, so I will tell you, I'm I'm gonna make a dumb example here, but I I hope it makes sense as to why it's relevant.
I I remember being in college, and I'm old.
So this is like turn of the millennium.
And you know, the internet is like it's it's new ish, right?
I mean, and and for for people who were not technologically advanced like myself, it was like 2003, 2002.
These are years where you're like, whoa, there's everything on the internet.
And I remember being in college and my roommates, like we would look at these dumb clips of things happening that we'd have never seen before.
And some of them were like, you know, you your roommate in college would call you and be like, Look, I found this clip of like this deer getting run over by a car.
And you're like, what okay, Kevin?
Thanks a lot, right?
And and this is a stupid example, but it's it's one of those moments I remember being like in my head, I was like, A, I'm not sure I want to see that, but B, where would I have ever had the possibility of seeing this before?
And fast forward 20 years later, and as you just said, millions of people saw the footage of what happened to Charlie Kirk within an hour, within minutes of it happening.
One of the the things though that I think is so illuminating about what you wrote is all of the research you draw on that really does prove that our capacities for empathy are diminished when we interpret things and other humans through a screen.
Would you mind unpacking that just briefly and as best as you can?
So I cite Helen Reese, who actually leads the empathy research project at Harvard, and then also an interview that she gave a few years back with another website called Treesbug.
Um, you know, she's not a doomer about this, and I think plenty of people aren't that it's not that it's impossible to be online and also be empathetic people.
But, you know, there's a lot of things we are wired for evolutionarily speaking, when it comes to how we, you know, make connection with people, how we build those sort of fundamental sort of emotional scaffolding to a conversation and then eventually to a relationship.
And they relate, they rely on things like eye contact and tone of voice and body language, and in many cases, eventually things like touch.
And this is not possible to do on the internet.
But you have, I think I've gotten responses to this piece that sort of say, well, look how many people are on the internet and they're not radicalized.
And my answer to that is, well, I'm not just concerned about the people who are radicalized.
I'm concerned about the day-to-day banal small erosion of decency and empathy that happens to all of us on these sites.
And in that case, I think we can very clearly say we all know moments where someone has replied to us and we've snapped, right?
And said things in a way we never would have in person.
And sometimes that we we we are in arguments with people who are also being rude and abrasive to us.
Other times you look back on an interaction, you go, Oh, this person was just trying to have an interaction with me, and I I just blew up, or I just took them out.
And, you know, some of it is because the platforms also gamify things, and so there's an incentive to score points with likes and reposts, etc.
But it's also just because on your device, you just don't have this capacity to relate.
People treat each other different in person.
And it's not because people are being fake in person.
It's because the the hardwareing in us that is actually built to form connections and to trigger all those things, familiarity and and recognition and stuff like that, that really gets lit up when we're actually in person and and not those green.
You you move on from that that argument and and the references to Dr. Reese's work to a book by Robert Talise called Civic Solitude.
And the takeaway for you from that book is that if we're gonna have a democratic society that is in any way functional, that our lives, and I'm quoting you now, must be full of vibrant and healthy and social connections and meaningful contemplation of our polity and our place in it.
I guess what I took from your writing there is that as our lives move more and more onto screens, as we no longer have to interact with people, even to order fast food.
Yeah.
One can just hit a button on an app, or as the amount of human eye to eye, face-to-face interactions go away.
One of the things that that does in a drip dry drip by drip process is degrade our public square, which may sound like okay, grandiose takeaway there, pal, but that's what I take you and Talese to be arguing.
Is that a fair assessment?
Or what would you want to add to that?
So the I think the big thing I'd add, and this is the really the thrust of Siles's book is it's not just that for a healthy democracy, we need quality civic spaces and places where we interact.
We also need quality alone time.
In other words, when you exit the public square, the person you are when you go back, go away from it before you come back again.
Yeah.
That person needs breathing space to actually think about themselves and the world around them and be contemplative.
So what we have is a system right now that not only degrades our social interactions, when we're having it, but also degrades our alone time because we're just never alone.
We're just always having these slightly less good social interactions 247, which means not only are we not getting as much of that in-person interaction that we need, the alone time we have is not as reflective or restorative or or or meditative in the ways that actually help us to be good neighbors and citizens.
Yeah.
I love this.
So I will say I'm gonna make another dumb example, but I hope it makes sense.
I I really enjoy surfing, which is like, okay, thanks for telling us.
And but the reason I bring that up, and I've I only figured this out like in the in the recent months, is that when you go surfing, when I go surfing, I'm not good at surfing.
I'm old and bad at it.
But I am outside, which is good for me.
I'm alone, meaning like I'm actually alone.
But uh to your point, I do not have a phone in the water, and my phone doesn't work there.
And it's one of the few times, Alan, I feel alone.
Oh, it's the best because like in in weeks, in weeks like last week, where everything that happened with Charlie Kirk's murder, it was very difficult for someone in our line of work for me to turn the phone, like even when I was like enough at the computer, enough at the whatever, I'm gonna go take a break.
I it was just too tempting not to pick up my phone and think what happened now, what next?
Who said what?
What's going on?
And it just no matter what I did, I felt like I couldn't get myself to to leave the digital public square.
And I think, yeah.
It's hard for us.
People who do what we do, you know, one, uh, I wouldn't have the kind of life I'm building for myself if not for these networks.
I've made so many, you know, you and I connected this way, and lots of other people that I consider, you know, not at this point, plenty of people I consider friends.
Yeah.
Uh, you know, so I'm not denying the capacity for these places to bring people together.
I'm not denying it at all.
But then the funny thing is, once I make a genuine friend on there, I'm like, ah man, I gotta find a way to see them in person.
Because I know in my gut that it's the best.
That's right.
The best thing is actually seeing that person.
Yeah.
And then add to that the thing is we feel that stress.
We feel like we have to be.
So it's like here I am complaining, but I can't get off.
I'm addicted.
I am addicted.
I'm addicted, and I'm professionally obliged to be here.
And man, when you get in a situation like you were describing a surfing or any situation where you're required to like leave your phone somewhere, oh man, doesn't it feel good?
It feels great.
One of the reasons I love going to the movies is that it's rude to have your phone out.
And so it keeps me from doing it really.
And then I go, man, I'm gonna spend two hours just taking in one thing, not 10 things.
Yeah.
It's gonna be great.
Yeah.
I let's wrap this up in a bow for people.
You know, what does you know?
I think one of the the arguments you're making here is we have a gun problem in the United States.
And I think that, you know, we you and I agree on that.
We've talked about that on this show at length.
I think most people listening are are gonna say, yeah, you don't need to explain that to me.
I'm on board.
That makes sense.
What you're outlining is a problem with screens and what they do to our sense of self and empathy, our participation and non-participation in the public square.
What does this have to do with political violence, the ways that we react when something like last week's event takes place?
Does this help you understand how the American right has reacted?
Or does the American rights reaction in general just have more to do with authoritarian politics and a desire for something that will simply launch us into a uh a moment of escalating and truly frightening violence in in the United States.
I mean, I think it's kind of all these things combined, right?
I mean, I don't actually think you can separate authoritarian politics from some of this stuff.
These does these places help you become more reactionary.
And they turn us all into little authoritarians, right?
I curate my feet, I'm beat out, I bump out the people I don't like and I pick the people I do, and I'm mean to the people, you know.
They actually facilitate our own little tiny tyrants in us anyway, right?
Which is not necessarily the same like as saying, you know, then you were going to ascribe to great replacement theory.
But it spreads in these places for a reason, right?
Because, you know, they're just they're they're cocked in that way towards, you know, hate and virality and things that really, you know, entice your emotions.
And because a lot of the people who spend the a huge amount are unhappy in other parts of their lives.
And so they're they're they're primed to be persuaded into dangerous ways of thinking.
Um so yeah, I think it's all a cocktail.
I I think we're better people offline.
I think there are people that you might can there, I think there are people you can reach offline in terms of political persuasion that you'll never reach through an you know an online uh slugfest.
Yeah.
All right, that's amazing.
Can do you have time for like one or two more questions for our subscribers?
Okay.
All right.
If you're a subscriber, stick around.
Alan does just amazing work at the Pulaski Institution on the idea of Heartlands, and I want to ask you, Alan, about that.
So if you're not a subscriber, today's a great day to do that.
It's 40 bucks for the entire year.
Before we go, just say thank you for listening.
We'll be back Wednesday when it's in the code and Friday with the weekly roundup.
Alan, you can find him at the Pulaski Institution at Liberal Currents, and that is where the current piece we're we're discussing now lives.
Are there other places people might find you, Alan?
Yeah, I mean, I I've written in the past for a place called Arc Digital.
I I write on and off with for the bulwark at times, which I love working with them.
Um other places around the web.
But yeah, those are probably the the main places you'd find me.
Alan, thank you for stopping by.
Thanks for your time.
Thanks for all the work you're doing.
I appreciate you and I appreciate this piece that you wrote last night.
