America After Charlie Kirk dissects the fallout of Kirk’s murder as a clash over faith and power, with Tucker Carlson framing his Christian defiance—free will, anti-abortion convictions, and critiques of Israel—as the real provocation for elites. Megan Kelly counters leftist slander, exposing hypocrisy in pro-Israel groups and hate-speech rhetoric, while Scott Adams ties the shooting to media-induced radicalization, predicting a conservative backlash. The episode links Kirk’s death to broader cultural wars: cancel culture, gender-transition policies, and Israel’s political exploitation, culminating in a defense of his legacy as principled resistance against authoritarianism—both at home and abroad. [Automatically generated summary]
Last week, within just really minutes after Charlie Kirk was shot at that event in Utah, a kind of proxy war broke out over his memory.
Who gets to own it?
Who gets to use it?
While the rest of us were still reeling in shock, trying to figure out what happened, a ton of people appeared online, not just in this country, to tell you exactly what happened, exactly what it meant, and exactly what we should do next.
And you can see why, with this level of emotion, rage, and grief in the air, it's pretty wise to leverage that much energy.
It's almost like nuclear power.
It can be used for good or bad.
And a lot of people wanted to use it.
There's no question about that.
So they begin telling you, Charlie died for this.
He lived for this and he died for that.
So the crazier reaches of the left, it was Charlie was a Nazi.
And the lesson is Nazis get killed.
It makes sense.
He was a bad guy who got what he deserved.
And a lot of them said that out loud.
Certain parts of the right immediately told you that actually this was about something completely different.
You know, Charlie died for Israel.
Many began to say the prime minister of Israel said that, and so did a lot of other people.
Charlie was a defender of Israel, which he was, by the way.
And therefore, he died for that cause.
But none of these explanations, all self-serving, are really satisfactory.
They don't capture who Charlie Kirk was.
And on some basic level, they're dishonest.
Charlie was not a Nazi.
He was not killed because he was a Nazi.
Yes, he was a defender of Israel.
He didn't die for Israel, however.
Why did he die?
What was his life about?
What was the sin, the core sin that Charlie Kirk committed against somebody, power, that got him killed in the end?
And the answer is right in front of us, certainly those of us who knew him.
Charlie's life was defined by his Christian faith.
Not his spirituality, but his belief in Jesus, his life as a Christian.
Everything in his life flowed from those beliefs.
Everything, everything he did, said, and believed came from the fact that he was, above all, a Christian.
And that is and was, and in fact has always been deeply provocative and offensive to the rest of the world.
And why is that?
It's worth thinking about it for just a second.
Christianity doesn't seem like the kind of religion that would provoke people to anger and violence.
In fact, it seems just the opposite.
It's the world's most profoundly nonviolent religion, maybe the world's only truly nonviolent religion, a religion based on a man who Christians believe was also God, who, as he was being led away to be tortured to death on made-up charges, scolded one of his disciples for fighting back.
This is a religion committed to love above all and to living in peace and harmony, truly.
It's a universalist religion that believes that every person has a shot at heaven.
It's not exclusionary at all.
And so you would think it would make sense that if you're a government or if you're in power, that you'd want a lot of Christians living in your country because they're not going to cause massive problems.
Not a lot of sincere Christians are fomenting insurrection at any given moment.
Pretty much none most of the time.
They're tidy.
They get married.
They love their children.
They pay their taxes.
They're commanded to pay their taxes.
So why wouldn't you want a nation full of Christians?
Why wouldn't you encourage this religious belief, even if it wasn't yours?
Why would you hate it?
Well, there are a couple of reasons.
There are a couple of things about Christianity, and these were evident throughout Charlie's public life, that are deeply provocative to the people in power.
And the first is the insistence that Christianity comes with, inherently, that you are not God.
You are not God, and neither are your leaders.
God is God, and all of us stand before him in the end to be judged, and all of us will be found lacking.
Christians believe the only way to heaven is through Jesus.
That's the only way.
But all of us, whether we believe in Jesus or not, are fallen.
We are sinners.
We are less than we ought to be.
We are not gods, and neither are the people who lead us.
And this has a lot of implications.
The first being, if you're not God, you don't get to do whatever you want.
There are limits.
There are rules that you didn't write that you have to abide by.
That's not a judgment.
That's a statement of fact.
Some call it natural law.
It's been the basis of every functioning society since the beginning of time.
But the basis of our society is the Christian understanding of justice, which flows from that belief.
You are not God.
God is.
He writes the most basic rules.
You abide by them.
Period.
That's the basis of our law.
That's the basis of Western law.
And that is a threat, a challenge to people who would ignore the limits on their behavior, very much including our leaders and very much including the most powerful people in our society, whether they're elected or not.
Nobody wants to be told you're not allowed to do something.
And Christianity inherently tells people that.
It doesn't judge them.
It just states it clearly.
No, you do not have the power to kill, except possibly in self-defense, but you can't just go killing people.
And you can't go killing people because, and this is the second thing about Christianity that tends to set the teeth of the powerful on edge.
Christianity insists that every human being is created by God, every single one.
And that means that every human being has a soul, a distinct, unique soul created by God.
It is, once again, the only true universalist faith there is.
And the New Testament is the story of this, an underread collection of books that is not the story of the Old Testament.
It's very much the story of the New Testament.
In the New Testament, all people are God's chosen, every single one.
And the story itself makes that point.
The founder of most Christian churches in the early Near East was a former Pharisee, a Jew, who was in charge of killing Christians until he famously met Jesus on the road to Damascus.
His name was Saul.
It became Paul.
And he is the most prolific author in the New Testament and the basis of a lot of Christian theology.
And his life tells the story.
People can change no matter what they look like, no matter what they previously believe, no matter where they're from, no matter what language they speak, because they are created by God.
And every person, every single person, whether you like them or their relatives or the way they look or not, has that chance because all were created by God and all were loved by God.
That is the basis of Christianity.
That's the Christian story.
And so a sincere Christian proceeds with that belief.
It requires free will, and it requires free will because it respects the individual conscience emanating from the distinct soul of every human being.
And that is why in the West, which is based on Christianity, our civilization is a Christian civilization, tattered though it currently is, collective punishment, hurting people for the sins of their relatives, is unthinkable.
It's a crime because each person will stand alone as he was made before God.
And every person is equal before God, fundamentally.
Does it mean each person is equal in his ability?
It doesn't mean each person is equal in the choices he makes.
Of course not.
But it means that every person is a human being with a divine spark inside.
That is the core assumption of Christianity.
And it was obvious when you watched Charlie Kirk that he believed that.
Charlie's been famously quoted for the last couple of days saying he abhors anti-Semitism.
Not simply to build a coalition or get this or that person elected, but because he believed as a Christian that convincing people voluntarily with words in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.
So the Gospel of John begins.
Words are the key to winning people's minds and their souls.
And you know on a basic animal level, like your dog knows, when something is wrong.
You can feel it.
And the whole purpose of modern society, it seems sometimes, is to get the rest of us to ignore what we know, that vibration inside us that tells us the truth.
Always, it never lies to us.
Charlie did not ignore that.
And you'll notice that in the end, he appealed to it with that young woman.
He didn't scream, you're a murderer in his face, though he considered abortion murder, which it is.
He felt that deeply.
This wasn't a performance.
He wasn't another nonprofit phony in DC, feigning outrage about something.
He really believed that taking innocent life was wrong in the womb or in crowded cities, anywhere.
He thought it was wrong because his faith tells him it's wrong and because his conscience confirms that belief.
And so does yours and so did hers.
So did all of ours.
We know when something is wrong.
And the people above us shout at us, no, really, there's an explanation for it.
Because consider what it means if you don't respect free speech, which is another way of saying free conscience, the right of other people to make up their own minds about the basic questions of what is right or wrong and to express their views on those issues.
If you don't acknowledge the right of other people to do that, and if you take steps to prevent them from doing that, what are you really saying?
You're really saying, I don't think you have a soul.
I think you're a meat puppet I can control.
I think you're an animal, maybe sub-animal.
You're a slave.
You're a person to whom I can dictate belief.
I don't acknowledge that you have the right to come to your own conclusion is another way of saying, I don't acknowledge that you're a human being.
But for a lot of people, particularly those who are just repeating what they think they should say or responding to the momentary rage of the moment, they just throw stuff out.
And we've got to hope that the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi, is in that category.
This is the Attorney General of the United States, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States, telling you that there is this other category called hate speech.
And of course, the implication is that's a crime.
There's almost no sentence that Charlie Kirk, and I'm not running the risk of appropriating his memory for my own ends by saying this.
It's provable.
There's no sentence that Charlie Kirk would have objected to more than that.
And you've got to think the Attorney General didn't think it through and was not attempting to desecrate the memory of the person she was purporting to celebrate, that she just threw that out there, that she hadn't thought about it.
You hope that.
You hope that Charlie Kirk's death won't be used by a group we now call bad actors to create a society that was the opposite of the one he worked to build.
You hope that.
You hope that a year from now, the turmoil we're seeing in the aftermath of his murder won't be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country.
And trust me, if it is, if that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that ever.
And there never will be.
Because if they can tell you what to say, they're telling you what to think.
There is nothing they can't do to you because they don't consider you human.
They don't believe you have a soul.
A human being with a soul, a free man, has a right to say what he believes, not to hurt other people, but to express his views.
And by the way, that thinking, and not to pile on the attorney general, who's a very nice person, but that thinking that she just articulated on camera there is exactly what got us to a place where some huge and horrifying percentage of young people think it's okay to shoot people you disagree with, to kill Nazis for saying things they don't like.
But what it really is is 12 and then 16 years of indoctrination in our schools at the hands of people who tell them that, who say exactly what the Attorney General just said.
Well, there's free speech, which of course we all acknowledge is important, so, so important, but then there's this thing called hate speech.
Hate speech, of course, is any speech that the people in power hate, but they don't define it that way.
They define it as speech that hurts people, speech that is tantamount to violence.
And we punish violence, don't we?
Of course we do.
They've been taught that every year of their lives.
And so naturally, most of them believe it.
When Charlie Kirk is shot in the throat with a 30 out 6 on camera, I doubt very many young Americans want to see something like that or actually applaud the death of a man, a father, a husband.
But they've been told for their entire lives in schools exactly what Pam Bondi just told them.
Well, there's free speech, but then there's also hate speech.
And woe to those who engage in it because it's a crime.
That's a lie.
And it's a lie that denies the humanity of the people you're telling it about.
And so any attempt to impose hate speech laws in this country, and trust me, there are a lot of people who would like them.
There are a lot of people who'd like to codify their own beliefs by punishing those under the U.S. code who disagree with their beliefs.
Any attempt to do that is a denial of the humanity of American citizens and cannot be allowed under any circumstances.
That's got to be the red line.
Because again, when they can do that, what can't they do?
And this is something, by the way, that Charlie thought about a lot and that I had occasion to talk to him about a lot.
And I really don't want to make any of this about me because it has nothing to do with me.
But I did have reason to have these conversations with Charlie a lot, many, many times over the past three or four months.
And this began at an event that he held in Florida in July, the TPUSA MFest event, turning point event.
I often go.
I always have the best time.
I always see Charlie ahead of time.
We have a cup of coffee in a hotel room, talk about what's going on.
In addition to being, of course, a conservative advocate, he was also a conservative organizer and a coalition builder, and he was very involved in politics in a way that I'm not.
So it was interesting as hell.
But it was also a way to learn what young people are thinking about talking about because he was on college campuses all the time and what is the state of a couple of big debates that are happening within the Republican coalition, particularly around foreign policy.
And Charlie's views on foreign policy, which I think are fairly well known now, a lot of people lying about them, were evolving, but had really evolved.
And who knows why he reached the conclusions that did.
I think his Christian faith informed them mostly.
It was also the experience of talking to young people, and his views were very much like theirs.
He believed that the war on terror had been a net loss for the United States and it caused incalculable damage, not just economic and physical damage, but spiritual damage to the United States.
And so before that speech that I gave in July, we had a conversation about this backstage, right before I went on.
And I was fulminating and getting all red in the face, like I often do to my shame.
And I was mad thinking about this and thinking about the effort by the neocons in the United States to draw us in to another forever war with Iran.
Not a defense of Iran, of course.
It's merely an acknowledgement that we've done this before.
This happened in Iraq, which we entered into at the behest of those same foreign policy strategists and it didn't work.
And so I was going on at some length backstage with Charlie and I said, you know, probably not going to talk about that.
I'm not going to torture you.
I know your donors hate this when I say that.
And also Epstein was in the news and it was clear to me that, you know, Epstein's probably not like a mossad agent or something, but Epstein clearly had contact with Israeli intelligence and American intelligence and French intelligence, but the only one you're not allowed to talk about is Israeli intelligence.
But it seemed true to me.
And I had done some work on that.
And I knew a bunch of people pretty close to that story.
So I thought that.
And I said that to Charlie.
And I said, but I'm not going to say that because I don't want to make your donors mad.
By the way, I think that that conversation, he had a mic on and so did I. Probably exists somewhere on somebody's server.
But that's, I think, a faithful rendition of what he said.
And by the way, I'm not trying to blame him for my remarks.
You can agree or disagree with those remarks, but I'm saying this only because I was shocked and sickened by the reaction of the ghoulish and really repulsive reaction of the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Charlie's death.
Basically made it all about him and all about his country immediately trying to take the energy, the sadness, the grief that people felt over Charlie's murder and redirect it towards support for whatever project he's involved in.
And by the way, Benjamin Netanyahu is not the same as the nation of Israel at all.
Bibi is despised by many people in Israel.
And if you know people who live there, you know that that's true.
There are huge divisions within the Israeli government.
I mean, there are certain parts of the intel world in Israel that do not support some things that Benjamin Netanyahu has done recently.
So it's not the same as attacking Israel, attacking Bibi, but I don't think I've ever seen anything lower than his attempt to hijack Charlie's memory and use it for his own political ends, particularly because what he said was completely untrue.
He did not like Bibi Netanyahu, and he said that to me many times, and he said to people around him many times.
He felt that Bibi Netanyahu was a very destructive force.
He was appalled by what was happening in Gaza.
He was above all resentful that he believed Netanyahu was using the United States to prosecute his wars for the benefit of his country and that it was shameful and embarrassing and bad for the United States.
And he resented it.
Didn't hate Netanyahu.
He wasn't out there with a placard saying that, but he certainly expressed that to me and a lot of other people.
And there's no question that Bibi's defenders on the internet will call me a liar or a kook, but that's a fact.
And enough text messages exist that I think it can probably be verified in pretty short order, not that it needs to be, because that is true.
Shortly after that speech, there was a very intense attack on Charlie and to some extent on me, not that I really noticed, but on him, I have no donors.
He had $100 million worth of donors.
And so because he was involved in a different project from just yapping on the internet, which is what I do for a living, he was dependent to a great extent on his donors, of course.
It's a nonprofit.
And they went after him and tormented him.
Not all, of course, many were supportive, but the ones who were offended by my speech, and there was a small, very intense group who were, tormented Charlie Kirk until the day he died.
Two days before he died, he lost a $2 million donation because he had publicly pledged to bring me to the next turning point conference in December.
And he told me over the past couple of months that he was losing a lot of donations over that pledge.
They put out a flyer basically saying that I was going to be at this event giving a speech.
And so he would text me and say, man, I'm really taking a lot of heat for this and people are really mad.
The American Jewish Committee called in a statement, Charlie Kirk, an anti-Semite, and quote, dangerous.
Charlie Kirk, an anti-Semite.
He was not an anti-Semite.
He was the opposite and he was not dangerous.
He was a great lover of people and a purveyor of peace.
He was the opposite.
And he was very stung by that.
Those of us who've been called names for a long time are a little bit harder to offend.
Charlie was deeply offended by that and expressed some of those feelings on Megan Kelly's show and in other places.
But that did not let up.
The reason I'm telling this story is because he called me and then came to see me at my house about this topic.
And I said to him every single time, look, I've got my own way to communicate my views.
This is actually not the most important issue to me.
I wasn't fully aware of it, actually, because I don't go online that much, but there was a huge effort by people, some of whom I know and have helped and like Seth Dillon of the Babylon Bee, for example.
Someone who had his own problems with free speech, who was famously canceled.
And I like Seth Dylan.
I had him on a couple of times.
I had dinner with him to show support.
Seth Dillon was out there demanding that Charlie Kirk take me off the roster, pull me off stage, because I had said things that Bibi didn't like or that he didn't like or whatever.
Shocking that someone whose whole persona is wrapped up in the idea that we all get to speak and if you don't like it, make a more compelling case, that that person and many others like him were advocating for me getting pulled off the stage because they don't like what I'm saying.
This is a trend and one that we should be really concerned about.
It's not just about Israel, by the way, at all.
The trend is really simple.
People with power don't want to hear disagreement.
They don't want to be challenged ever.
That's why we have free speech to acknowledge that even those of us or people with less power still have a right to talk because they're human beings.
You don't own them.
So time after time, Charlie would call me or come to see me and let me know, wow, or show me text messages.
These people are really mad that you're speaking.
And I would always have the same thought.
Like, I feel pretty moderate, actually.
I've never been an Israel hater.
Obviously, I'm not an anti-Semite.
I just don't want more wars.
And I don't want a foreign country humiliating my country and telling us what our laws have to be.
By the way, I'm not accusing anyone of being involved in that murder.
I'm not trying to mutter darkly or imply anything.
There's a lot we don't know about who murdered Charlie and why, but I don't know.
And I'm not going to pretend that I do.
But I think it's important to say that out loud because it's a fact and there are many liars out there trying, Bibi Netanyahu, number one among them, shamefully, who are trying to distort the truth, a truth that I know and can prove.
And the last thing I'll say about Charlie is that his views were changing on topics that had nothing to do with foreign policy, you know, the famous kind of red line, third rail, can't talk about it.
But it's possible that the subject that makes people even matter in Washington, New York, and L.A. than having non-conventional foreign policy views is having non-conventional economic views.
Man, they really don't like that at all.
And Charlie's views on economics and on the way that wealth is distributed in the United States were changing fast, really changing fast and hardening.
Not because he was a socialist, hardly.
He was about as much of a socialist as I am, not at all.
But because he lived here and he spent a lot of time with young people and he couldn't help but notice because he was an observant and honest person that they're not thriving at all and that the chances they'll have lives comparable to the ones they had growing up are very small.
Most of them won't have houses.
They won't own anything.
They'll be in debt.
And for that reason, they won't get married or have children.
And so the people who are born here won't continue their legacy in the United States.
It's the end of our civilization.
And the root of a lot of this is spiritual, but the root is also economic.
And it raises a question, a basic question of fairness.
And I tried to address this in the speech that I gave for Charlie in July.
I don't think I did a very good job and it was misinterpreted, but I invoked Bill Ackman.
And the point I was making had nothing to do with Bill Ackman being a criminal or even being an Epstein friend.
I know much about, I'm not accusing Bill Ackman of a crime and I'm not accusing him of, you know, being a sex creeper or a massage or anything like that.
I don't think that.
I don't know that for sure.
And I wasn't trying to say it.
What I was trying to say is that Bill Ackman is not creative, not particularly intelligent.
Bill Ackman is worth $7 billion.
You have to ask, like, how?
And it seems to me that Bill Ackman is rich for the same reasons that a lot of other people I know are rich, because he's hyper-aggressive and he's well-connected.
And my only point was, if you live in a society that awards the spoils to people on the basis of those two qualities, like the most aggressive, the best connected people get the richest, that's a dysfunctional society.
There should be a reward for creativity and decency and hard work, steadfastness, following the rules.
Like you should have to add to the sum total of your society, you'd think.
It's not an argument against the free market.
It's an argument against whatever we're living through right now.
This is really dark and ugly.
And if people like Bill Ackman are getting the richest, what has Bill Ackman done?
Shorted the market or something?
Talk down Herbalife?
I mean, I'm not even saying that should be illegal.
All I'm saying is, if that's one of the richest guys in your society, you've got a very sick society.
I don't think Bill Ackman's like a drooling idiot or anything, but like when was the last time you heard Bill Ackman say something constructive or creative?
So again, fairness is essential to the gospel and it's essential to any working society.
In a fair society or a society that its citizens believe is fair, people will comply voluntarily with the rules because they don't think the game is rigged.
But in a society in which Bill Ackman, Bill Ackman, makes $7 billion and like the smartest, hardest working, most interesting, creative young people you know can never own a home in a society like that, you're going to get Mamdani as mayor.
You're going to get a lot of bad things because people will opt out of the society because they know it's not fair.
It's rigged.
That's the only point I was trying to make.
And Charlie, not surprisingly, made it much more eloquently, I thought, in an amazing interview, the last interview I did with him late July of this year.
So if there is such a thing as the left in the United States, if it still exists, you would think a message like that would at least get a hearing, a respectful hearing.
Like, hey, what about wages?
What about the ability of young people to just buy a little house with a little yawn and lawn in some subdivision?
Empower, you know, the most vulnerable, the people who try hard and play by the rules.
They called him a Nazi.
They didn't care that Charlie Kirk in real life spent his time trying to stop war, trying to, you know, figure out how young people could buy a little house somewhere.
Aren't those like left-wing goals?
No, they didn't care at all.
And in fact, they hated that because they're for war, because they're for death, because they're for the inequality he described, because it leads to a volatile society that empowers them.
Of course, they're not a check on power, the professional, the trans community.
They're the shock troops of power.
Charlie Kirk was a check on power.
Charlie Kirk, inspired by his Christian faith, stood up to people fearlessly to say what he thought was true.
And for that, I will always love and admire him.
I want to go down to someone else who loved and admired him and knew him well and played a pretty, I think, important role in the final months of his life.
Because I had spent so much time with him over the past few years, just on the air, Tucker.
You know, I never went out to dinner with Charlie.
I didn't know him quite like that, like a personal friend.
But I'd had him on the show more than 15 times.
I'd been on his show repeatedly.
I'd been to multiple turning point events and talked with him backstage quite a bit, just done a lot with him professionally, a lot.
And I mean, I wonder if he's been on anybody's show as much as he was on mine over the past couple of years.
And I got to know his thoughts on virtually everything.
And I saw what people are seeing now: how they were all infused with his Christian faith, that he was a truly happy warrior, that he gave almost everyone the benefit of the doubt.
And everything he said was from his love of humanity and his belief that they could do better.
I mean, I am much more like, no, they can't.
Let's move on without them.
Like, we've got to, you know.
And Charlie, I mean, in all of these college campus exchanges, whenever talking about most people, he would feel like everyone could be redeemed.
And if he could just get to them, if he could just talk to them, if he could just buoy them up with hope, they would do better.
They could see themselves as Charlie saw them, as God sees them.
And I just ran into that optimism and that positivity from Charlie so often that I really did see him as God's messenger, Tucker, as an angel sent to us.
And it's like, we didn't deserve him.
I feel like he's gone now because we didn't deserve him.
Um, why, why, why was that so offensive to people because it was power, it's it's so much more powerful, frankly, than negativity, negativity, and anger.
It's infectious, you know, it's a contagion.
It's like a magnet for people, whether they like him or not.
They're drawn to him, and he was converting people.
It's this magnetism from him, this positivity, this aura, like that this angel-like aura around him that was so incredibly threatening, way more threatening than the rest of us, because it was powerful and it was winning people over.
It was converting people at a rapid rate.
And not just any people, but young people.
You know, the people who had never been converted before, the people for whom people who talk like you and talk like me had never even tried.
They weren't even players on the field.
It was, they were seated in the whole battle.
And he said, no, we're not seeding them.
I'm going to start at 18 to speaking to them in a way that they can hear and understand me.
And I'm going to practice it.
You know, for the past 13 years, he practiced.
He went out campus after campus.
In the beginning, he wasn't as good as he was in the end.
He was good, but he wasn't as good.
And so it was a skill he developed over time that made him more and more threatening, more and more effective.
And you look at the numbers just in the presidential election.
It's not an overstatement to say that Donald Trump has Charlie to thank for his election in November 2024, swinging the youth vote by nine points.
We've never seen anything like it in the past hundred years.
You don't swing the youth vote toward a Republican.
Nothing in modern presidential politics.
So he was a really integral, hugely important player, even though he was so understated and projected zero ego.
So you didn't see him like that.
He didn't have sort of the swagger of that in most of his public appearances.
He was quick to subjugate himself to whomever he was talking to.
But he was way more important than he ever let on.
And I think that's why he was perceived as such a threat.
That's why him saying the things others would say carried an extra layer of threat, both to this shooter and to Charlie's many detractors.
And I just want to add as a period to this, as a footnote, I guess, to this, Tucker, you have a lot of it too.
And it is the reason why Charlie is not the only one who's been threatened or was threatened to cut ties with you or not platform you.
I too have gotten that, especially since you've been more outspoken on Israel.
And I couldn't care less the amount of pressure they put on.
Why would you want to silence such a powerful, important voice just because you disagree with them on one subject, one on which we've all watched you sincerely evolve as you grapple with principles you've been espousing for years, like America First, like what's happening to Christians?
Like what's best for us and our kids here?
How do I keep them safe?
That's my number one priority.
And I've been just absolutely disgusted and recoiled from people who have tried to pressure me on it.
It, of course, never happened.
But I know from speaking to Charlie, he felt it too.
You've heard it from Charlie that he felt, and there is a layer here of nefarious pressure to have certain narratives go only one way that must be called out and must be fought.
Well, I should have said in my open that when Charlie was denounced as anti-Semitic and quote dangerous by the American Jewish Committee, you were too.
That was a press.
I don't know if you've ever even seen it.
And I just remember when I read that at the time thinking, okay, these are like two of the most pro-Israel, basically pro-Israel people on the internet.
And let me just underscore for your audience what I had said.
I mean, the sum total of what I had said when they started coming for me, just to show the absurdity of this.
I had said on Piers Morgan that Israel was losing the PR war, that they had lost the Democrats and the Independents and were starting to lose the Republican Party in America.
And it was time to wrap it up, which was a quote from Donald Trump, who had said it a year earlier when he was still a candidate.
Time to wrap it up.
That's what I said about Israel.
And then at turning point at the Student Action Summit with Charlie, we talked all about Epstein and my appearance there.
It was all about Pam Bondi, frankly.
And we talked about whether he might possibly be an asset for someone.
And I said he might be.
And Israel, yeah, would make sense to me, didn't know, but that's one of the things we should consider and look at.
And that will conclude the list of things I said about Israel.
That after two years of going on the air and defending them every week, turned some weird crowd into, she's an anti-Semite.
So, I mean, F these people, because it's a lie.
It was even more of a lie about Charlie, who had said even less than me.
And they use those terms about him because he was on the other side of me when we had that discussion and because he hosted you and because he had the nerve to invite Dave Smith in a debate because he allowed one side to be represented and he had the Israel side fully represented too.
So this was just such an unfair accusation.
And I don't know why these very ardent advocates don't accept friendship when you offer it, when you've proven that you are genuinely a friend.
I've said openly, Tucker, there's no, I'm not, I don't want to debate.
I'm on their side.
There's no reason to put somebody on the show so they can convince me that Israel's right.
You know, he was young and wasn't used to being attacked like that by people who supported him and people whose donations are actually really important to the ongoing existence of his organization.
And it took a lot for him to say no to them.
And it took a lot for him to be honest about the fact that his opinions had evolved.
And let's face it, Charlie was like an unofficial spokesperson for the youth of America, in particular, conservative youth.
And I don't know if people have checked, but they no longer support Israel.
Everybody under 30 is against Israel.
Charlie was 31.
And so as a friend, he's saying to them, and the same way I, as a friend, I'm saying, I am telling you, you've lost Dem's independence and you're starting to lose Republicans.
You need to wrap it up.
You've had a two-year long leash.
I know you want your hostages back, but this cannot go on until you have every hostage.
That's just not going to, you're going to lose every friend you have.
And that's what he was saying because that's what he was hearing from his constituency.
And so what he did to them was brave and noble to the donors who were very, very pro-Israel.
It was brave and it was noble.
He did not deserve to be smeared over it.
And look, I, like you, have zero belief that this had anything to do with his death, but it's part of the larger narrative that you're making that he was a truth teller, that he was a fearless truth teller, and that there were a lot of pockets when he turned to them and said those truths that grew extremely uncomfortable.
And whether it was some too online, disgusting, messed up 22-year-old in Utah, or somebody who couldn't stand his messaging that was very frank around race or around Islam, whatever.
Take your pick.
He said the hard picks, hard truths on all of these things.
I think a lot of people have to have a really ugly conversation with themselves now in the wake of his death about whether they added to the hate surrounding him.
I had the opportunity to interview him a couple of months ago and I declined.
I'm just, I'm just not, no, I just don't want to.
I didn't want to platform him.
I didn't actually, frankly, want to do all the work that I would have to do to sufficiently interview him in a way that would be, you know, tough, as I do when I have any foreign leader in my crosshairs.
It was deeply, it was a moral wrong to sit out there and read part of Charlie's letter and try to have the final say on Charlie's pronunciations about Israel.
And he knew that they weren't the full story.
And he's a foreign leader.
He's not an American leader.
So how dare he?
You know, at best, you come out there, you say, I'm so sorry for this loss, my prayers to his family.
So on the hate speech comments, that was an absolutely ridiculous comment she made today.
I mean, it was absolutely foolhardy.
There's just no way she doesn't know what she said is legally unsound.
There's just no way she was attorney general of the state of Florida and became U.S. Attorney General and doesn't know that.
So it does worry me because does that mean she's actually pushing for a policy change?
Because there's just no way she doesn't already know what she said is wrong.
There's been reams of Supreme Court precedent on it.
And she knows that.
So is this about policy change?
She tried to wiggle off of her original point as the day went on, as incoming came almost universally from the right, that she had said something very, very wrong constitutionally and vile as a moral principle.
And we've been fighting against this for decades on the right.
Like, what is she saying?
She sounded like a Merrick Garland.
She sounded like an attorney general Kamala Harris would have put in place.
And so she tried to pivot off of it as the day went on and tried to make it smaller into, no, all I'm saying is violent threats, criminal threats are going to be punished.
Well, yes and no, it depends on the threat.
There's actually only a sliver of threats that is actionable under the law.
So you're getting closer, but you're not quite there.
You're giving, again, still too wide a berth to attacking free speech.
But yeah, it is true that certain threats, true threats, can be ruled unconstitutional.
You could go after somebody.
So she does worry me.
And, you know, Trump was asked about it and he kind of made a funny joke about it going after the ABC news interviewer who asked him the question.
But I think Trump will see that there's so much resistance to this on the right that he won't let her do that.
He won't let her push for it and he won't let the Republicans do it.
I just have to think Trump reads his base better than she does.
And speaking of reading your base, and I've got to thank the presidents for this.
I don't know why Speaker Mike Johnson has held it up, but we don't let kids get tattoos or smoke cigarettes, but we do let ghoulish doctors who are getting money for doing it mutilate children.
Like, why can't Marjorie Taylor Greene get a hearing on this legislation?
I mean, like this, they chalk this up to, oh, it's a spending resolution.
We're just going to continue the spending that's in place until, right?
It's like, okay, you're funding mutilations of children and not just the mutilations that are done with surgeries.
You're funding with these puberty blockers into cross-sex hormones, sterilization of minors who cannot possibly consent to that.
And not just sterilization, but actually the end of all potential for sexual pleasure.
How does a 12-year-old understand that he's sacrificing that with your weird experiments on him?
It is truly a moral scourge what we're doing to our children.
And I don't actually, I'm sorry to say I don't have a lot of faith that that's going to get a ban at the federal level, which means it'll be left to the states, which means if you live in a blue state, it's go, you know, have at it.
Go ahead and mutilate children and sterilize them and deprive them of sexual pleasure because it makes you feel good.
It's not dissimilar to the left saying Trump shouldn't add additional law enforcement.
They shouldn't accept additional law enforcement where he wants to send it because it's racist to let black people live.
It's racist to let them live in peace, not be carjacked in these inner cities, which are predominantly African-American.
That's what the left is telling us, that it's racist for Trump to send those troops or even volunteer.
And they're saying the same that what's good for children, what's kind, what's the honorable thing to do is to let deranged parents chop off children's healthy body parts and sterilize them because that's what an evolved person would do.
And so that's another thing that this angel sent to us would speak very frankly about and threaten all these people who have a constituency, whether it's someone with a last name, Pritzker, who actually has money invested in the transit of children.
That governor's cousin is one of the big funders of all these school pushes on the trans issue, or somebody who just gets a Jones out of saying they're going to open the prisons and let black people not get arrested for the crimes because they just think that's beneficial, I guess, somehow to other black people who are usually their victims.
Never mind the race of the victim, it's not beneficial to any of us.
In any event, I don't have hope on that front.
We're going to keep fighting.
But if they don't ban it at the federal level, which I don't think they're going to, we're never going to get all 50 states to ban it.
I think it'd be worth reading a daily roll call of the people standing in the way of that because that's the kind of crime that historians will reel in horror that we allowed.
I think your remarks about Charlie at the beginning were like some of the wisest I've ever heard.
And I'm actually going to look at the tape because I was so impressed by what you said and moved by it.
So Megan Kelly, thank you for taking time late at night to do this.
Well, you know, one of the big questions is how did somebody get to that place where it seemed perfectly reasonable for them to get a gun and shoot a living human being?
But imagine being a young kid and growing up when the news, the people in nice clothing would go on TV and they would say, in all seriousness, he's basically Hitler, the Nazis are coming.
And you would create a mass hysteria.
Now, a mass hysteria would be worse than TDS or Trump derangement syndrome, because that would be sort of what happens to an individual that could have TDS.
But if you have a lot of people who have TDS and they start talking to each other, pretty soon you've got a mass hysteria.
And the mass hysteria created this, what I call a Hitlerian bubble, meaning that a lot of people are living in what they think is a reality that is just completely Hitlerized.
They see Hitler everywhere and they see it in Trump.
They see it in his lieutenants.
And this is different.
So this is not like what we've seen before.
All it takes to completely brainwash somebody to believe ridiculous things, even things that their observations should tell them are not true.
All you need is people in good suits whose job makes them seem incredible to say day after day, it's the repetition that matters, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler.
And you convince people that they're living in a hellscape and they better do something about it.
So the main thing I saw was that.
And once the bubble is formed, it's hard to get out.
You mean you can't talk people out of it.
There's no amount of information that will change their mind.
Cognitive dissonance will kick in if you show them a counterexample.
And the weird thing about Charlie, who I never met, by the way, I didn't have the pleasure.
The weird thing is that when I started hearing all the accusations, and there were a lot of them, I said to myself, well, I'll bet some of these might be a little bit true.
So I started to look for the original quotes, et cetera.
None of them are true.
And there were a lot of them.
They were all either a made-up quote or a quote and a context and nothing else.
And when you hear people talking about it, especially the young people, they'll say things like, he was a bad hater person, but there's no example.
So that's sort of the sign that it's a mass hysteria because they can't give reasons and they don't seem too interested in the reasons.
They're just sure that something has to be done.
Now, on top of that, for the young people, there's probably also an economic pressure.
They might feel that life doesn't have a positive path.
So that might be playing into this a little bit as well.
But I do wonder what will happen.
And I predict that there's going to be another big bubble of psychological distress when the people who have said such bad things about him in public realize that none of it was true.
Because over time, it looks like he's going to be talked about so much that we'll finally have a complete body of information about him so we can understand them.
And it won't happen to most people.
Most people will just have cognitive dissonance.
They'll still believe he was Hitler Jr.
But there will be some people, not a big percentage, who are going to realize that they did something so shameful that it will haunt them for the rest of their lives, that they were part of saying something terrible about one of the best people that we've witnessed.
I mean, he genuinely was a high character person, and you can see in everything he did.
So there's something big coming up.
But then another thing that happened that was fascinating to me, because I didn't expect it, which was the Democrats have always had what I'd call a machine, which is that since they worked with the media, they had the media in their pocket, you would see it happen when they'd have some, all right, our message this week are these words.
And then everybody would say the same words.
And then the media would just pump it out.
So it was like this big, well-functioning machine.
And then they had the NGOs and all the funding tricks, et cetera.
But when Charlie Kirk died, you could almost feel this massive energy being released.
You know, he sort of controlled it.
But when it was released, his mortal coil was no more.
I feel like that energy just went into people.
And suddenly, tens of millions of people simultaneously said, what can I do?
I'm going to hunt down the people who said bad things and cancel them, but I'm going to do something.
We're going to figure out how to start another chapter of TPUSA.
And all of that's happening.
And it doesn't seem to be slowing down, the vigils, et cetera.
If anything, the energy, it might be growing.
And I've never seen anything like it in my life.
I've never seen the Republicans turn into their own machine.
And now it is a machine.
And it's going to be incredible.
So, you know, I was thinking yesterday, it sounds like a joke, but it's quite serious.
The thing that protects the Democrats from, you know, also having some kind of problem like this is that they don't have any leaders that are worth taking off the board.
I mean, if you said to me, somebody's got a plot to take Tim Walsh off the board, I would say, oh, no, no.
If you're a Republican, you ought to keep him there because he's not doing a good job.
You're Jasmine Crockett, your Chuck Schumer's.
I say, please keep them right where they are.
They're doing a great job.
Nobody needs to harm them.
But on top of that, I don't believe that Republicans, conservatives ever even think that way.
I've never heard one say anything suggesting violence.
Like not even in just a casual conversation, the joking way you might do it in private.
Nothing like that.
And I think it has to do with the fact that overall, the conservatives, the Republicans, MAGA people tend to look at Democrats almost as if they're clowns.
They say things that literally make me laugh.
No joke.
I sound like Biden here, but I literally, that frightened me a little bit.
I literally will watch the news and watch Republican, you know, prominent people talking because I think it's funny.
And when they watch, when the left watches the right, they think they're watching monsters.
So you can imagine how somebody wants to kill a monster, but nobody wants to kill a clown.
Well, maybe somebody does, but so far, Republicans have not wanted to kill any clowns.
And I do think, well, first of all, the cancellations we're seeing, I have a little bit of mixed feelings about it because my point of view is that the people involved who are getting canceled are themselves brainwashed.
And I don't mean that in sort of the, I don't know, the hypothetical way or anything.
Like, I mean, actually, literally, they've been exposed to the strongest brainwashing you could have, which is about eight years of wall-to-wall, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler.
And, you know, Charlie's one of the generals.
So if you can't get to the Hitler, you're thinking, well, maybe one of the generals will be less protected.
And that was the case.
But I feel a little bit bad for them because they're victims too.
But at the same time, the way society works, you can't let them get away with that.
So there has to be some reckoning.
And I am enjoying, I have to say, being a canceled person myself, I am enjoying the Schadenfreude or the catharsis of seeing that it can go both ways, at least for now.
And by the way, I do think that the violence goes in both directions, but I don't think that there is an equivalent to a massive machine that's been creating a situation that guaranteed there would be violence.
If you just keep saying Hitler and you're selling it not as hyperbole, but you're selling it as absolute fact, the people who don't have access to alternative theories are going to believe that and they're going to act on it.
So, and I like the fact that there's a little mutually assured destruction.
The left is getting to see a little bit of payback, reminding that the Republicans aren't going to take infinite abuse.
You know, there's going to be a point where it's going to come back.
I kind of like that.
But I just, you know, overall, I wouldn't be proud of it, you know, the cancellations.
Well, you know, it's unpredictable because the cognitive dissonance will cause people to think in a way that's non-standard.
That's exactly what it is.
So there might be a lot more of that coming.
But one of the things that's going to happen is it might be the last, what would you call it, the last straw that makes the entire Democrat situation collapse.
Because if you look at their situation, they're running out of money.
They don't have good leaders.
They don't have ideas that can beat the competing ideas.
And they don't have momentum.
They don't have the podcast world.
The conservatives have that pretty nailed down.
Basically, they have the best talent for just about everything right now.
Just an amazing amount of talent in the right side of the world.
But then you add on top of that the emotions and the feelings that people got because of Charlie Kirk's death.
And that was probably the only thing missing was no matter what, I'm going to get to the voting booth.
You could have a hurricane and conservatives are going to crawl through glass to get to the voting booth.
So I suspect we will see a number of votes from the Republicans like we've never seen before.
I got a text earlier today from someone I sort of know saying, Chenk Uger, why is he on your show?
The Young Turks guy?
Isn't this a tribute to Charlie Kirk?
Why would you have some screamy lefty on your show?
Well, precisely because Charlie Kirk's life work was speaking with, not just to, but with people he disagreed with vehemently.
I thought that our next guest, who's run the Young Turks for probably almost 20 years now, I think.
You can correct me if I'm wrong, who is one of the most visible daily broadcasters on the left.
The fact that he had this kind of amazing exchange with Charlie Kirk, well, a couple of them, but one pretty recently, I thought it'd be worth hearing what he thought.
So it is with pride that we announced our next guest.
And Charlie was debating my nephew, Hassan, Soundpiker.
But I couldn't help myself because that's who I am.
And I, in the middle of their debate, I said something to Charlie when I wasn't on stage.
I was in the crowd.
And he yelled at me, I live like a capitalist every day, Chank.
And by the way, some people then thought that it was a racial slur.
No, that was just my name.
He was just slightly mispronouncing it.
So then actually, something happened in between that moment and Turning Point USA, America Fest.
So we were at the RNC in 2024 and Charlie came by at our booth and said, hey, do you guys want to talk?
And we were a little bit taken aback by that.
We were really surprised by it.
And Anna and I, Anna Kasperians, my co-host on the Young Turks, talked it over and said, yeah, yeah, we would like to talk.
And so he came on the show.
And so we had our disagreements.
So for the, it's interesting that you have me on here, you know, partly for the reasons that, you know, your friend texted you about, oh, well, that's strange, right?
Left and right.
And so I don't agree with everything that you, Megan, and Scott said about Charlie.
You're also worried about corporations having too much power and right because that, Tucker, you can understand that was a that was a left-wing position for a long time in this country.
It was, but but the battle has been joined.
And so that is an incredible development in American politics that mainstream media, I think, has chosen to ignore because it's inconvenient for them.
Then we got into a specific topic, which was banning private equity from buying residential real estate.
And the idea behind that is private equity is the biggest bankers in the world, basically.
They're the biggest financial institutions.
And they've started to buy all of our homes.
Now, that creates a huge number of problems.
Number one, it drives up housing prices.
That is why they are artificially high because so much more demand has come into the market.
And I went to Wharton Business School.
So this is not complicated, though.
This is Econ 101, supply and demand, right?
And so secondly, the number one wealth creation asset that the American family has is their homes.
That is how we created the greatest middle class the world has ever seen.
And they're taking that from us.
And they're going to turn us all into renters.
And then we're going to be indentured servants to them.
And the way that they are doing this is they are giving collectively billions of dollars to our politicians.
So this issue connects actually the money and politics issue connects to everything, connects to corporate rule, it connects to capitalism, by the way, which I want to get back to, connects to Israel, because it isn't about Israel or any other particular lobby being evil or dastardly or in charge.
It's the money that's in charge.
And so if Big Pharma, Pfizer, Johnson ⁇ Johnson, et cetera, give money to our politicians, well, then they pass absurd laws like we're not allowed to negotiate drug prices.
Agreements and Impulse Control00:08:32
unidentified
Right.
What in the world?
In capitalism, you're not allowed to negotiate prices, right?
We were actually the longest running show in internet history.
And in that time, we've had, you know, we've been on for 23 years.
We've had about 21 to 22 years of hardened battle, right?
Fighting back and forth, fighting back and forth, right?
And as anybody who's seen me online knows, I can get emotional.
I can get passionate.
And I'm not a wilting flower.
I fight back for sure, right?
So what was amazing, though, was all of a sudden I didn't have to fight back that on those issues, not every issue, and not on all the culture wars, but on these economic issues, we have begun to agree.
And why?
Because the average guy is getting screwed.
Period.
It doesn't matter if you're on the left or the right.
You're both going to get screwed.
You're both going to have higher housing prices.
You're both going to have lower wages.
You're both going to have higher drug prices.
And the people that brought you that is the donor class.
And so when we agreed to that, then I said, okay, well, now conversation has become productive.
We're not just yelling at each other.
For the first time ever, we are talking to one another.
And more importantly, we are listening to one another.
So we did it again at the DNC.
And then Charlie invited me to America Fest.
And I went there.
And again, we disagreed on gun rights.
We disagreed on some trans issues, but we wound up agreeing on Dick Cheney and Mitch McConnell, for example.
Neither one of us like them, like either one of them.
Like you almost don't care who's agreeing with you.
You believe in the idea, the principle.
So you're willing to make common cause with people you don't agree with in everything.
You're not partisan.
And the second thing I should just, I just want to say it out loud is that Young Turks, whatever you think of your politics, has had a stated commitment to nonviolence from the very beginning, and you mean it.
And I just want to say that for people who don't know that.
And I want to thank you for that because I think it's really important.
And anyway, but so let me ask you, how were you treated at Amfest at Charlie's event?
So when we go to war, that is in a sense weakness, saying we could not use our minds to resolve this issue.
We could not resolve this issue as fellow human beings.
So now we're going to kill each other.
So that is why we're anti-war.
And that is why one of the most encouraging developments of my life is how anti-war the right-wing movement has become.
So that another great day in America.
So still plenty of things we disagree on.
But agreeing on anti-war, agreeing on how the donor class is robbing both of us blind, I mean, those are huge developments, right?
So now how was I treated at Amfest?
I've got to be honest with you.
And so the reason why I preface it by saying I got to be honest with you is because sometimes when we go and talk to the right wing, and as you say, we haven't moved on a thing, right?
So folks come to us and I have a simple principle, take the win.
So we want to end tonight the way we began by talking about Charlie's faith and the effect on all of us from a spiritual perspective of his life and particularly his death.
There were reports that this Sunday church attendance was up dramatically as people suddenly felt stirrings within them that this had cosmic significance and that God is real.
And this is a reminder that he is, which he is.
Jose Trenham is a Christian minister, and we are honored to have him now to put this in a broader spiritual context.
Thank you very much for coming on, Father Trenham.
So how would you say we should think about where this goes from here?
Like people seem to have a heightened spiritual awareness in the days after Charlie Kirk's murder.
But for us to respect this Christian tradition, to pray, typically in the Orthodox and the Catholic tradition, both during the 40 days, we do good in that person's name.
We actually do alms.
We do charity in that person's name.
In fact, you're doing that.
Maybe you weren't intentionally trying to do it in a traditional Christian way, but that is what you're doing by trying to help Erica and support her.
I was very, very happy to see that you're doing that because it's what we do.
It's what we do in this period.
We usually also pray for the person.
We don't think that a person, when they die, bing, they've made the transition to the next life instantaneously.
There are some in the Protestant tradition who think that.
Not all Protestants think that, but there are some.
But the vast majority of Christians, Catholic, Orthodox, and some like the Anglicans, we actually pray for the souls of the departed.
And we think we use the image of the story of Lazarus and the rich man from the Gospels, where Lazarus is the poor beggar.
He's neglected by the rich man.
And when he dies, what happens?
An angelic escort comes and picks him up and takes him on the journey to the bosom of Abraham.
For us, that is a journey.
This process is a journey for Christians of going towards the kingdom of God, but we don't think that it's instantaneous.
And so we're collaborating.
It's part of what our funerals are, too.
Our funerals are us gathering around the person and asking the Lord in his great mercy to receive our brother or our sister and place them in paradise until we can see them again.
And we're also learning the lesson of sobriety.
We're learning the lesson of death.
We have to think about death and stare it in the face because one of the great reasons we are so undeveloped, spiritually speaking, as a nation is because we don't face death.
One of the reasons that we have an incredible revival going on all over the United States right now is because of COVID.
COVID faced, it caused us to face death.
We had been hiding it.
You know, we've moved our old people, our parents, and the sick into old folks' homes and hospitals, and they die there, usually not surrounded by their family members.
And then some Christian traditions now even do funerals without the body.
That is just nuts.
It's just nuts.
And it steals.
It steals from us the very, very important process of mourning and facing death.
You know, in the Orthodox tradition, in the Orthodox Christian tradition, the funeral service was written by one of the great theologians of the church.
His name is St. John of Damascus.
He lived from 650 to 750, an incredible hymnologist, incredible scholar.
He actually was a very important political figure at the time that Islam, his father and grandfather governed the city of Damascus.
And when it was taken over by Islam in the 7th century, the Muslims left the Christians in place for about 50 years because Muslims were Bedouin peasants.
They didn't have cities.
They didn't have development and they couldn't run a city like Damascus.
So they let the Christians do it for about a half a century.
And then about 706, that was it.
And no more Christians in leadership.
And he became a monk at that time, John of Damascus.
And he wrote this incredible funeral service for one of his dear brothers.
And it's used to this day for the last 13 centuries.
And it's a deep reflection on the misery of death, where John is looking into the grave and he is contemplating how horrible it is for a Christian person to die and hit to see his soul be removed from his body, which is what death is.
It's the separation of the soul from the body.
It no longer animates the body and it's lifeless.
And to see the body decay.
And he says it happens to the rich and to the poor exactly the same way.
All of the human, you know, differentiations that we make to honor the rich and to neglect the all gone, all gone, all normalized, all brought to the dust by death.
So I don't mean to belabor this, but I think it's important for us.
It's important, of course, for the immediate family, for all of Charlie's close family and friends to take their time, not expect that they're going to be able to just bounce back instantaneously and get right back at Turning Points work.
No doubt they will eventually, but I hope that they'll take the time right now to pray, to mourn, to think deeply about the future and about how they can honor Charlie's name.
And anyone who has been present at the death of loved ones, I think it confirms that it's one of the most powerful and obviously crushingly sad, but also beautiful and inspiring things.
I mean, it absolutely changes you.
And it's hard to remain an atheist after something like that.
You know, I would say before hope, the sorrow of what has happened to Charlie is so illustrative of a descent into a level of violence that at least in my lifetime, and I'm only two years older than you.
I have never seen anything like the violence that exists today in our towns.
When I grew up in Pasadena, I, as a young boy, I went walking to school.
My mother let me stay out every night until the lights went on.
When the lights went on, I had to be home for dinner.
If I wasn't home for dinner, I was in trouble.
But she had no worries.
She had no worries.
No, in this last period, 10, 15 years, especially, violence has just absolutely exploded.
You know, Charlie reposed on the 10th of September.
Of course, the next day was the horrible remembrance of 9-11.
He died on 9-10.
We have 9-11.
This coming December is going to be the 10-year anniversary of the terrible terrorist attack right here in the inland empire, just 10 miles from where I am right now, when 14 people were murdered and 22 people wounded by a Pakistani Muslim couple that thought that they would do something for Islam by shooting their co-workers.
They were from a mosque one mile from me right now.
That mosque already had two of their members in prison because of terrorist ambitions.
My own parish, just four months after that, was visited in the middle of a Sunday liturgy by a group of Muslim young men who thought it would be fun to bring bullhorns in the middle of our service and come outside the church and scream Allahu Akbar at our church.
And then, and this is, of course, Muslim terrorism, but now we also have this rise of very, very serious leftist violence.
And the whole country, I think, is reeling from the assassination attempts on our president and now an attack on Charlie, who wasn't a politician at all.
So I would say that if we're going to look for hope, it can't be fake.
It can't be fake.
We have to assess where we are.
And violence has a special, as a sin, violence has a very special, serious place.
You know, if you read the patriarchal histories in the opening books of the Bible, if you read Genesis, for instance, chapter six, this is the account of God regretting that he had made the human race.
What could the human being have possibly been doing to make God regret having made us?
And the consequence, Moses tells us, is that he sent a worldwide universal flood.
When you attack another man, when you attack another man, you attack God.
Because every human being, as you were just saying so beautifully, is made in the image of God.
And so to attack a human is a direct divine offense.
Violence is extremely serious.
I'm not surprised that we have this level of violence in a culture that murders unborn children at the rate that we do and have sustained it for the decades that we have.
I would say that from without a belief that God is merciful and that he loves the human race and that there's no sin so great that if we repent of it, he will not send his love and forgiveness.
Without that belief, certainly we have no future.
The statistics are horrible for our country.
We are so captured by an ideology that is hopeless, atheism, strict secularism, which is running our country now.
And without a major reconsideration on the part of our people, a return to classic American virtues, a recovery of Christian faith, without that, certainly we're doomed.
But we know from Christian history that repentance is possible.
And it usually takes, in a national sense, in a personal sense, it's up to us to repent and to believe.
In a national sense, it takes leadership.
Leadership that is willing to address the important things at the heart of a national catastrophe.
And we have been living through national catastrophe.
We have lost our faith in God.
All of our institutions have been captured by strict secularism.
Our law is godless.
Our universities exclude God.
Our country has gone down a very, very serious, deep hole.
If we're going to get out, if we're going to have hope as a nation, we need leadership, leadership in the likes of George Washington.
I think our forebears, our forebears are ashamed.
My grandparents and America, they're ashamed at where we are, Tucker, as a nation.
Our relationship to faith, our explicit commitment to God, are excluding him from everything that's important in American life.
Give us someone like my patron saint, Josiah, who was the last great king of Israel, who himself lived at a terrible time.
His father and his grandfather were both awful kings who had completely apostatized, abandoned the heritage of Israel, led the people to copy the pagan practices of the surrounding nations.
And forgive me, we're way worse than pagans.
I always tell people: look, don't call the secular nonsense that's going on in America pagan.
That's an insult to the pagans.
The pagans believed in the divine order, they believed in the gods.
Okay, we don't believe that there are gods.
There is one God.
But the pagans at least knew they were accountable to the divine order.
They were accountable to the gods and that they had to live with respect to the wishes of the gods.
To call America, which has no reference, most of our leaders make no reference to God at all.
They act as though they are not accountable to God's law.
And I think that's far, far worse than paganism and a full-blown insult to pagans to call it pagan.
No, unless we have a leader who's going to address this, it needs to be addressed right directly.
We need to repent and we need to recover our faith.
If we do that, times of refreshing will come from God.
We can be changed.
A new day can arise, but it's not going to be with a little fix.
It's not going to be with a little something here or a little something there.
I've never seen, I've been a priest for almost 33 years.
I've never seen the radical interest in faith that we're seeing right now.
I'll tell you, if I use my parish just as a little example, I have maybe, I don't know, a little more than a thousand active parishioners that are here regularly.
And over the years of my ministry, I've catechized, I've instructed and prepared people for baptism.
You know, maybe 20, 30, 40, a really great year would be 40 people.
I have over 200 people in catechism right now.
And this is happening all across the country.
People are moving towards God, moving towards faith.
If this continues and it translates into lives that are rooted, lives that are where faith is important, where true repentance has happened, where this quest for just biological life, as though that's somehow the sum total of value is rejected.
You know, if you study the scriptures, there's three types of life that are described in scriptures.
There's biological life.
In Greek, it's called vios, from where we get biological, right?
There's the life of the soul.
Many Americans don't even know that that exists.
That's called psiki.
It's the life, it's the most noble part of you, right?
Even the Greek pagans, to use this again, knew that.
The body is like a chariot and the soul is like the charioteer.
Leading the person in nobility said that the body does virtue.
The body does something beautiful, right?
If you don't think you have Siki, if you think you're just a body and you don't have a soul, which, by the way, is the worldview of the major tech titans of our country.
This is why someone as noble as Elon Musk is becoming would stand up and speak to the protesters in England when they were saying, what can we do?
He interviewed a friend of mine, Father John Strickland, who's a very respected Orthodox priest and a Russian scholar who's published extensively on Russian history.
And Charlie was very interested in that.
And I watched that interview and a few comments that he made afterwards in which he actually got very much into the mind of us Orthodox Christians and explained why so many people are converting to Holy Orthodoxy.
And I thought actually he was spot on, very much spot on.
He said, people are becoming Orthodox because they want something that is time-tested.
They want something that's substantial.
They want something that actually informs culture, something that isn't just a plaything and can be categorized over just here.
Or Orthodox Christianity, traditional Christianity in general, it is a lifestyle.
It impacts everything because Christ is king and he's king over every aspect of our life and over civilization.
This is common knowledge.
Europe, of course, you take a train through Europe.
Every town you go through, you're going to go through a town that has the best land given to the church and the church is going to be the highest building because everyone knew if you don't enthrone worship at the center of your community, if you don't make the heavenly attachment to your earthly life, you're robbing yourself of significance and you're trivializing yourself to just be limited to time.
The best thing that can happen in America is that people go to church, root themselves in the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church because the river of life comes from the altar out the doors of the church and vivifies society.
For anyone who's made it to the end of this, I never do this, but I think what you said is so wonderful that I know that people are going to want to follow up.
J-O-S-I-A-H, Trenham, T-R-E-N-H-A-M, senior pastor and director of your church.
So I know that people will want to know more about you.