The tragic shooting of right wing commentator Charlie Kirk has caused shockwaves across America and beyond. Piers Morgan is joined by Dave Rubin, Konstantin Kisin, Cenk Uygur and many more to unpack the latest developments on the story. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: Oxford Natural: To watch their full stories, scan the QR code on your screen or visit https://oxfordnatural.com/piers/ to get 70% off your first order when you use code PIERS. Brooklyn Bedding: Enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you! Visit https://Brooklynbedding.com for 30% off & use promo code PIERS! Jacked Up Fitness: Get the all-new Shake Weight by Jacked Up Fitness at https://JackedUpShakeWeight.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Isabel Brown Joins Daily Wire Plus00:02:09
Isabella Brown.
Isabel Brown.
Isabel Brown.
The wait is almost over.
She's joining Daily Wire Plus with the Isabel Brown Show.
Cannot wait for you guys to see how hard we've been working.
I could not be more excited for this new adventure.
You can expect larger-than-life guests, deeper questions to the nerds.
Meeting the President of the United States and the Vice President, and now meeting our new American Pope.
This is Crazy.
Let's jump in.
Join me every weekday for the Isabel Brown Show on Daily Wire Plus or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to a special live edition of Piers Morgan Uncensored on the murder of Charlie Kirk.
This may well be the most significant assassination in half a century, even in a country with a long and harrowing history of them.
And quite fittingly, it's a turning point.
We just don't know yet which way America will turn.
Down one path is a unifying moment, a defense of free speech, shared values, and a rejection of violence.
Down the other, a dangerous mood of resentment and retribution.
Right now, it feels, I'll be honest, febrile.
Hate-filled vitriol on one side, chilling calls for vengeance on the other.
And in the middle of all this, lest we forget, is a grieving mother and two distraught young children who now have to face the rest of their lives without their dad.
Charlie Kirk was a remarkable man.
By the age of 31, he built one of the most powerful organizations in the United States media and transformed the way that millions of young people think about politics.
Many people disagree with his opinions.
But the fact is, he spent his life debating those opinions with the very people who disagree most.
That is actually democracy, plain and simple.
We've heard so much in the past two years about the threat to our democracy.
So let's be very clear.
The greatest threat to democracy is the idea that words in themselves are violence.
This insidious belief that opinions should be crushed, cancelled, or as we've just seen, gunned down in cold blood.
That is violence.
And there are some very dark times ahead if we can't all agree that it's wrong.
In a couple of minutes, I'll talk to our star panel, the host of the Rubin Report, Dave Rubin, the founder and CEO of The Young Turks, Chen Uger, the host of Batia on NewsNation, Batia Ungar Sargon, and in the studio, broadcast and host of the news agents, Lewis Goodall.
Words Are Violence Against Democracy00:15:26
But first, Stuart Kaplan, the former FBI special agent, joins me now.
Stuart, thank you very much indeed for joining me for this special edition of Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Let me just start first of all.
I'm a little bit bemused about what's happened here in terms of how this shooter has done this.
He seems to have fired one bullet with a Mauser Model 98 bolt-action rifle with a scope mounted on it from a roof about 200 yards away from where Charlie Kirk was doing this appearance.
And that one bullet has killed Charlie Kirk.
In your experience, how unusual is it that somebody of 22 who's not in the military is able to carry out that kind of execution with one shot?
Well, look, when you look at it, you would say, boy, that's, you know, hard to understand how this child, young adult at 22, could have pulled this off.
But Pierce, what I've said for many, many years, because I stay in my lane and I only offer my opinion as to what I know, and that's because I have two children myself.
The classroom has become the factories to indoctrinate our children with garbage.
And then the very teachers or professors are the engineers behind what you are now seeing continually, constantly play out over and over and over again.
Young adults getting up on a particular day and engaging in this type of unthinkable behavior.
When you have kids that are basically living their lives in isolation on video games or on social media, they are absorbing all of this garbage to include what is being fed to them in the classrooms.
And when I say the classrooms, elementary, middle school, high school, college, we've seen it play out last year with the anti-Semitic behavior in all of these top universities.
These kids are now indoctrinated to believe that the world just has it wrong, they're right, and they're going to write this wrong.
And so you see someone like this get up, 22 years of age, has a solid family, and just is able to carry this out.
It's unthinkable.
Yes.
Is it inconsistent with what we would think the shooter would look like or what his background would be?
But I don't put it past anybody in this day and age.
The actual choice of weapon, you know, most of the mass shootings we've seen in recent years have been with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, which is very light to use and can fire off a lot of bullets very quickly.
This particular choice of rifle, you know, from a technical point of view, is it surprising that a would-be assassin would use it or is it an effective tool of execution if that's what you're choosing to do with it?
Well, given the environment being out there in Utah, which is God's country with respect to hunting and fishing, this would be a weapon that you would probably typically see in any household where they engage in hunting.
This is a perfect weapon to use for big game hunting.
And so it would be typical to be found in that household.
And I'm sure that's exactly why he was able to get access to this very weapon.
Now, the interesting thing is that we kind of pause a little bit because this guy, Tyler Robinson, you know, went up on that rooftop, was extremely disciplined, stayed focused on his task and assassinated Charlie Kirk.
If he had had an automatic weapon or even if he decided to slide back the single bolt action, he could have reloaded and created a lot more mass casualties.
But obviously his agenda was just to take out this one individual.
Thank God he only used that weapon for its single purpose, but it could have been a lot worse.
What does this mean, do you think, now for protection of high-profile people in the political world in America?
We've seen two attempts on Donald Trump's life in the last year.
We've now seen Charlie Kirk killed.
What should people in the public eye?
I've already been seeing some horrific things on Blue Sky in particular, the new social media platform, with people just brazenly putting other people's names up to be assassinated.
Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Matt Walsh, all these people.
What should individuals like that in that space be doing to better protect themselves?
Pierce, the problem is it's going to come down to how much money you want to spend on your personal security.
I'm in that business, and I can tell you it would not have been anticipated given even the venue.
Now, look, I am critical that when you have 3,000 people assemble in an outside venue, do I think six police officers is sufficient?
I would anticipate crowd control issues, disruptive behavior within the crowd.
Do I think six police officers was sufficient?
No.
Would I have considered a rooftops more than five, 600 feet away as being potential threat to Charlie Kirk in any normal sense of what we perceive as the typical threat of someone rushing the stage or using a knife or pulling out a handgun?
I don't think there was any way to have anticipated a rooftop sniper.
Now, with saying that, now the landscape has completely changed.
It's very, very different because we've now seen that there are people out there that are contemplating utilizing and implementing this type of way to take someone out.
Now, the problem is, how much money could a private public figure be able to expend to have the type of detail that you would need, counter snipers, drone technology, all of those things we see that are similar or consistent with protecting the president of the United States.
If Charlie Kirk had the level of security by way of example that the president has, you're talking about millions of dollars and that would be cost prohibited.
So the question is, what do we do as being public figures?
Is it worth it for us to entertain and expose ourselves in these type of venues?
Or are we going to have to be put behind bulletproof glass or forego these type of events?
That would fly in the face, which is exactly what Tyler Robinson wanted to do.
He wanted to scare us.
He wants to chill our First Amendment right to be free to speak our opinions and our minds.
And I will say that if anybody now is hesitant or now thinks otherwise, he has won and we have lost as a society.
Certainly we need to consider our personal security.
There are ways to try to neutralize those threats, but quite frankly, there is no 100% full proof way to absolutely guarantee anybody's safety in this world.
It's Joe Cavan, I really appreciate you coming on.
Thank you very much indeed.
My pleasure.
Well, let me turn now to my panel.
A lot of different views here on politics we've all had over many years.
I'm sure we're all joined by the same view that this is an absolutely appalling thing to have happened and that the consequence of it could be very far-reaching.
Dave Rubin, let me start with you.
You know, this is a cold-blooded, deliberate, pre-planned execution of a high-profile conservative who, irony of ironies, was the guy probably leading the charge to sit down with people whose views you don't agree with.
In other words, almost the opposite of what this shooter appears to believe that he represented.
What is your reaction to it?
Well, Piers, before we do the political side of this, I just lost a friend.
My friend was assassinated, a man who I spent an awful lot of time with, who I broke bread with many times, who I sat at weddings with, who I toured with and did many of these college shows with, a man who, as I was leaving the left about a decade ago and realizing the hysteria of the progressives, who welcomed me, even though we had various different opinions on very closely held things like abortion and marriage and taxes and death penalty and all of these things.
And in the 10 years or so that I knew Charlie Kirk, I never had one bad experience with him.
I had only good experiences with him.
To your point about the political part of this, yes, Charlie was better at reaching across the aisle than anyone.
I like to think that I'm pretty good at it, but as an apostate from the left, someone who left the left, in some sense, they want less to do with me than even someone like him.
So it became harder for me to reach across the aisle.
Charlie spent his life trying to widen the tent that is the conservative movement.
He wanted the ex-liberals like me and Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and Tulsi Gabbard and RFK, the thing that Donald Trump represents in a wide tent MAGA movement because it's based in America and freedom.
And I don't know anyone, literally anyone on earth who was doing it better than him.
So I mourn deeply, deeply for my friend and I mourn for America because in your intro you laid it out correctly.
There's a lot of anger right now.
There's a lot of sadness.
I can assure you of that, but there's a lot of anger.
And I feel it's incumbent on me and hopefully guys like you, Piers, to be a little bit better right now, because otherwise this thing, this very precious experiment could veer out of control unbelievably quickly.
I think that's completely right.
Cheng, you and I have talked a lot about the toxic nature of political discourse in America.
And you've been very critical of the woke left, actually, in particular, and the way they've over-demonized everyone, calling everybody Hitler, fascist, and so on.
It seems that this 22-year-old shooter had anti-fascist insignia on his ammunition.
It's pretty clear, I think, that he hated Charlie Kirk and wanted to silence him.
We don't know his exact political allegiance that may or may not emerge in the next few hours and days.
But certainly he was behaving like a fascist.
A fascist at their heart will stifle dissent by murdering people.
And this is exactly what this person has done in the absurd guise of being anti-fascist.
Yeah.
So I think that this is a huge problem in America right now.
So to the point that Dave's making, look, so Dave changed some of his opinions and didn't change others, right?
I didn't change any of my opinions, but Charlie and I had many conversations.
He came on the Young Turks at the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention.
I went to AmericaFest.
I got a lot of heat for going to America Fest, but the part of that that that's left out is that Charlie invited me to it.
And not because I had changed any of my opinions, but because I hadn't changed any of my opinions.
And then once we had those conversations, what we found out was, yes, we still deeply disagree on many things.
You know, state of race relations, power dynamics in America, I could go on and on, right?
But it turns out we actually did agree on a bunch of things.
Housing, paid family leave, how the American people are being taken advantage of by the powerful, corruption, all these things.
So you don't get to there unless you have conversations.
So I know some on the right certainly were shutting down conversations earlier in my lifetime.
Still some today are making that argument.
And in their anger today, and then justifiable anger, some were talking about striking back.
And then on our side, yes, there's way too much censoring, way too much, never talk to anyone else.
Just stick within your own tribe.
Well, how are we ever going to heal a country?
Especially if you're from the left, guys.
We're supposed to be the side that has empathy.
I'm not saying the right doesn't.
I'm just saying that we historically have prided ourselves on having empathy and reaching out and having conversations and healing and uniting.
So the way that this country is going and both sides are going is a deep, deep problem.
And one of the issues, Piers, honestly, is media and algorithms.
It rewards extremeness.
And the more extreme you are, the more rewarded you are.
And so we've got a way to fix that.
If we don't fix it, the money and the spinning out of control of both sides' political fervor is going to be an enormous problem for this country.
We've got to stop right now.
Look, either we could use this moment to hate each other more, or we could use this moment as an inflection point to begin to heal and to unite and realize that we're all Americans together.
There's nothing wrong with disagreeing.
And we could say that fervently without crossing the line into hating each other, thinking that both sides are Nazis of some sort.
And you're right, Piers.
Even I've gotten called a Nazi by some portions of the left for disagreeing on trans issues 5%.
No, that's too much, guys.
It isn't about me.
It's about the hatred that gets built in and entrenched when we can't even talk to the other side and we can't see each other as fellow Americans.
Batsy, I want to play a clip.
This is of Charlie Kirk on Piers Morgan on Censored in November 2023.
At the time, we just had the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
I'd been defending Israel's right to defend itself at that stage.
I've obviously become a lot more critical in this year, certainly.
But at the time, he talked very pertinently about actually the left and in particular in relation to campus colleges.
Let's take a look.
The very same people who've been behaving in this way, effectively supporting a terror group, have gone out of their way to de-platform and shame and cancel anyone who, maybe on the right, it has to be on the conservative side, who've deviated from their worldview.
So free speech to them seems a very complex issue.
No, that's right.
And look, I mean, we have to be disciplined in how we advocate for dialogue and free speech.
And when I go to these college campuses, it's come very clear, and you see this now manifesting in some of the larger censorship regime that is taking over the West, that if a young student finds disagreement with a conservative or somebody on the right, they don't just find the ideas objectionable.
Some, in fact, a majority by a recent Pew poll, want to use force to try to silence and stifle and even censor those differing ideas.
I mean, how prescient, Batsy, are those comments seem now?
Because that's exactly what has happened here.
Free Speech vs Censorship Regimes00:03:38
What's your reaction to Charlie's murder?
And how do you feel about the way things may go from here?
Thank you so much for having me, Pierce.
It's obviously still very raw for a lot of us.
I'm finding myself very caught between, on the one hand, wanting to honor his legacy of unity through debate and coming together to take down the temperature, and then wanting to honor his legacy of telling the truth.
And the truth is, this is not a both sides issue.
The killer killed him, according to police reports, because he found Charlie Kirk to be spreading hate.
This is a view shared by every single prominent Democrat.
Yes, there are people on Blue Sky advocating for violence.
But what actually caused this was the utterly quotidian, utterly ubiquitous demonization of the political opposition from the left.
And it has just led to violence because they said the other side were Hitler and Nazis.
They said that speech is violence.
To combine those two things together is to sign the death warrant of prominent conservatives.
And that is what we are seeing again and again and again.
And it is utterly facetious to suggest that there is any comparison between political violence on both sides.
Every example they bring is not actually showing that, whether it's Governor Shapiro whose attempted assassination was from a free Palestine leftist, or whether it was the Minnesota assassinations, which were from somebody who said he was operating at the behest of Democrat Governor Tim Walz.
There is a culture among Democrats at the highest level to suggest that their political opposition are a danger.
And that suggests that their lives are forfeit.
And I want to come together.
I do.
I love what Shank said.
It brought tears to my eyes.
I had to reach for a tissue while you were playing Charlie's words.
But at the same time, we cannot unite with people who are lying to our faces about who we are, who will not take responsibility for the fact that they suggested that we are Nazis because of totally legitimate views that reflect the majority of Americans.
So what I say is, let the left say we were wrong.
It is legitimate to vote for Donald Trump.
It is legitimate to be pro-life.
It is legitimate to believe that there are only two genders.
And we were wrong to suggest that that was not the case.
We were wrong to say that that is hateful.
When they say that, I am waiting with open arms to take down the temperature.
Lewis Goodall, you are on the left.
And the one thing that's really struck me about this, you know, I don't dispute for a moment that there are people on the far right that commit a lot of acts of violence and can be equally hateful, as my personal view.
But I have been truly shocked, genuinely truly shocked, by the sheer enormity of brazen, dehumanized calls on social media from people on the woke left, the sort of far left, which has been calling themselves progressive, but in my view, are the opposite.
Legitimizing Right-Wing Violence00:15:19
But how they've reacted to Charlie Kirk's death.
We've got a little mashup of some of it.
Ding dong, the witch is dead.
We think that Charlie Kirk just got shot in the neck.
I would say pour one out for Kirky Boy, but I don't waste good beer on little bitches.
Charlie Kirk just got put down like a fucking dog in Utah, and I could not be happier.
I will not ever, feel bad when bad people get what the fuck they deserve.
Fucking stoked right now.
You want to know why I'm so fucking stoked?
Fucking yeah!
CK got ak and he's gone.
He did say that gun deaths were an acceptable side effect of gun rights.
We got Charlie and another.
There are hundreds, thousands maybe more examples like this, but we've seen teachers, we've seen hospital executives, we've seen people who want to run places like, you know, the Oxford University Union, for example, and so on, all coming out with similar gleeful celebration at the murder of a 31-year-old father of two young children.
I find it utterly despicable, but also quite terrifying, actually, that they're so brazenly doing this.
What is your reaction to that?
Well, Peter, my reaction is that I think it's reprehensible.
And I think it is part of a much wider pattern of behavior, driven by partly social media, but in particular, the hyper-polarization of American politics, which is part of a big trend of legitimizing violence, of making violence an acceptable means of prosecuting your politics.
Where I would disagree, possibly with you, possibly with other members of the panel, is that this is somehow just confined to the left or the idea that this is just happening on the left.
Yes, there have been examples of that.
We've just seen it just now.
I was disgusted at the reaction to what happened with Luigi Manzioni earlier in the year.
Very similar sort of phenomenon.
But let's see where it's happened in other parts of the right.
Do you remember what happened with Paul Pelosi, for example?
Nancy Pelosi's husband almost killed to death.
What was the reaction of not just some random left-wing accounts, not some teacher, not whatever, but Don Jr., Donald Trump Jr.
He decided to put out a picture of a hammer and some underpants and say, I've got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume tonight.
This is the wider legitimization of violence that we're seeing.
And let's just have a look.
I mean, you know, let's talk about some accounts that I've been looking at.
You've been horrified what you've seen on Twitter, some stuff I've seen on Blue Sky, some stuff I've seen on X over the course of the last 24 hours.
Liberals can never be allowed to run this country again.
How can you coexist with people that want to murder you?
If you vote Democrat at this point, you're a demonic, evil person.
I will support whatever saves our country.
Trump has a blank check as far as I'm concerned.
I could go on, I could go on, and I could go on.
And I could give a list of all of the many occasions we've seen in recent years of right-wing, hard-right, far-right terrorism that we saw against.
What happened in Minnesota?
I mentioned Paul Pelosi, Josh Shapiro.
In fact, I disagree with just as a matter of fact, investigators found in the Shapiro case, online activity and writings that included extreme right-wing, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and rhetoric against Shapiro, who is of course Jewish and a Democrat, and in Michigan.
And even in the last 24 hours or so, what do we see from Laura Luma on Ilan Omar, the Democratic congresswoman, Laura Luma being a very senior MAGA person.
At the end of the day, everyone needs to realize that Ilan Omar is a bloodthirsty Muslim terrorist sympathizer who has no place in our country.
Her presence in Congress is a national security threat and she's an enemy from within.
So please, the idea that there is some sort of asymmetry on this, the fact of the matter is America and indeed the UK as well, we've got into a really negative cycle here where basically the temperature goes up and it goes up and it goes up.
And then sometimes some of the people who are responsible for that turn around and go, God, I can't believe it's so hot in here.
Everyone needs to pull back from the brink.
Social media needs to actually be reformed and needs to be changed.
Elon Musk has been pretty responsible for some of this stuff that we've seen as well.
So let's not pretend, if we pretend that this is just a problem of the left or of liberalism or of wokeism or whatever you want to say, this problem is not going to be any better or get any better.
Let's use this as a moment for all of us to look within ourselves and decide to be better.
Okay, we've been joined on the panel by PBD podcast Angry Patriot Vincent O'Shana.
It's been great to have you back on our sense.
I'm sorry it's in such awful circumstances that we're talking on this Friday.
But your response to what Lewis Goodall's just said, that this is a problem on all sides, that political violence has been ratcheting up and that there's a collective issue that needs to be dealt with.
Well, Piers, thank you for having me.
And hello to everybody on the panel.
Piers, I'm sorry, but trying to compare a photo of a Pelosi hammer for a Halloween thing to somebody getting shot in the neck in front of his family at a campus is unbelievable.
The fact that you're trying to make the two comparison is absurd, okay?
And if we want to, since you're on the left and you have those beliefs, give me something that the left is positive about.
Because from what we're seeing, they're pro-abortion, they're pro-celebrating assassination, they're pro-open border.
Give me something positive that the left is running on.
Because at the end of the day, they're at the Democrats 35-year-old approval rating.
And Piers, I have to go a little bit deeper.
I have to go, this isn't about left.
This isn't about right.
Charlie was a proponent.
He was a Christian praising Jesus Christ everywhere that he went.
And I think that's where we are, Piers.
Ephesians chapter 6, verse 12 says, for we not wrestle with flesh and blood, Piers.
It's principalities, it's evil, it's dark forces in high places.
And I'm, it drives me crazy, Piers, that we've gotten to this point.
And when Tim Wallace and these people are like, well, I woke up.
I wanted to hear bad news.
Hearing TMZ lying when their freaking people are back there cheering.
Cheering of a murder of a guy that did what, Piers?
He went to college campuses.
He was peaceful.
He just wanted to have a debate, a conversation.
And it is the left.
Okay, when Joe Biden got diagnosed with colon cancer, who was celebrating?
How many thousands of people were out there praying and hoping for this guy to recover?
Okay, no, there's something that's captured, Pierce.
That image, that almontage that you played, did you see the eyes of these people?
They are captured by something dark and they don't even know it, Piers.
That's where we are.
And I want to say something, Piers, before I give it back.
Charlie was not murdered.
He was martyred.
And I want to say this in the Bible.
And I'm sorry.
I never was this guy, Piers, but we're at the tipping point.
We are here.
We have to understand that it's God or you're on the opposite side.
And Revelation chapter 6, verse 9, 10 basically says, when a martyr's blood hits the throne of heaven, it turns the vengeance of the king towards the evil ones on earth.
So for all the people that want to get mad and do something, stay calm and be easy because God, at the end of the day, Piers, has vengeance on all these people that are spilling innocent blood.
Are you really saying that the American right, the Trump right MAGA, has not got a problem with political violence?
Are you comparing?
Wait, are you comparing us who, by the way, how many years, have 10 years?
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Are you comparing the two?
Hold on.
I'm not saying that the right doesn't get violence, but show me where they're celebrating the murder of a father on a campus.
Give it to me.
Who celebrate Luigi Mangioni where he's in magazines and girls want to marry him and want to be with him?
No, you just have the president of the United States son.
You just have the president of the United States son tweeting out a picture of a hammer, making fun of a guy who nearly got killed because of a right-wing maniac.
Please, do not tell me that somehow one side is more morally superior than the other.
This is not going to be a good idea.
No, I'm just not going to say that.
But who's doing the murdering?
Who is doing the assassination?
What about January the 6th?
What about January the 6th, where a MAGA decided to try to use violence to overthrow democracy?
Do I have a favorite definition of that?
How many people died on January 6th?
How many people, excuse me, since you're such an American historian, how many people died on January 6th?
Anthony Davis, a fellow United States Air Force.
Excuse me, excuse me, let me finish.
A United States Air Force veteran got shot subsequently in her freaking neck.
Hold on.
Why?
Because she was unarmed and she was advancing to a hall.
Please, please, I'm 100%.
Let's have some statistics.
I don't condone any violence, but the comparison is not even close to what the left does.
So let's have some statistics from your own government.
Please promote it.
Let's have some statistics from your own government.
Now, I know you might not want to listen to the facts, but this is the facts.
A study from U.S. government itself says that the majority of political violence in the United States occurs from the right, not the left, from the right.
We have also seen in my own country from the Labor MP, Joe Cox.
We saw what happened in Norway with Anders Bering brave.
All violence on the right.
I do not say, as you seem to say, sir, that one side or other is morally superior to the other.
I do not say that there will not be political violence on one side or the other.
What seems, and I find curious, is your belief, your fervor, that somehow one side of this debate is uniquely morally repugnant, one is superior.
The statistics are wrong.
That's not right.
It doesn't support what you're saying.
And the fact after fact after fact and occasion after occasion after occasion shows the same thing.
And like I say, January the 6th itself was literally the legitimization from your side of political violence at the highest of levels.
And what did Donald Trump do when he got back into office?
He pardoned the political message.
Were you political?
Were you there?
Were you, excuse me, are you in the United States?
Are you in the American city?
I just returned to the United States as a matter of fact, but I don't need to be in the United States.
Okay, so wait, are you an American citizen?
No, are you an American citizen?
Are you an American citizen?
Nope.
No, I want to ask you a question because you're looking down there, you're reading stats and facts, and I don't know where the hell your sources are from.
But guess what?
As an American, from seeing what they did, excuse me, I let you talk.
Please let me talk.
Okay.
From what?
You mean to tell me what the left, your darling left, has done to the Republican Party and Donald Trump alone for 10 years, the calling for violence, the Hitler, like Bach just said, all the negative rhetoric.
Hold on to the impeachments, to shooting him in the head, and him saying, I want peaceful protesting.
I want peaceful protesting.
And then the FBI informants, all the confidential human resources inside the freaking cart on January 6th.
That's a whole different argument debate that you don't want to get into.
But as an American who lives in America and is a veteran, we see what's happening.
I don't care about your Chad GBT stats.
The left care about the party that is inciting the violence and causing the problem.
Okay, I want to bring in another guest now who will then join the panel for the rest of the show, Konstantin Kissing, author and host of Trigonometry.
Constantine, I've seen from your posts that you've been very personally affected by the death of Charlie Kirk.
Where does this horrific murder leave us in relation to political discourse and the safety of public figures as a consequence?
Do you know, Kiers, I don't know if I've been personally affected, but I know that I've received messages from hundreds of people at this point, ordinary people, many of them, nothing to do with politics, never paid attention to politics, never really cared, who were horrified and shocked by this in a very profound way.
And I think it's a number of things.
You know, you've just had this very fierce discussion about political violence and we're talking about politicians.
But people forget that Charlie was not a politician.
This is a 31-year-old guy who went around college campuses and now his two young children.
I mean, I was putting my son to bed last night and I was thinking of his kids.
And I know that millions of people around the world are thinking about that because they didn't see Charlie as a politician.
Because I guess with America's history of political violence, all the way back to Abraham Lincoln, we kind of know that these things can happen.
But I think what this has done is it's taken violence into a whole new realm.
It's taken violence into the realm of people who just have conversations, for God's sake.
And I think this changes everything in a very profound way.
Of course, it has the potential to chill the debate, to scare people away from saying the things that they believe, the things that they think are important to say.
I hope that doesn't happen.
I know that my experience and the experience of many other people who do speak in public over the last few days has been a shock and horror and perhaps fear too that has morphed into resolve and an unwillingness to let this become the way that our conversations become silent, which I think is what Charlie would have wanted.
But as for the debate we've just heard, look, I'm in a very conciliatory mood and I think it's important that we're all responsible with our words.
But I found it difficult to sit there and listen to this preposterous conversation you've just had.
I don't understand what, I mean, this time last year, I sat across from one of your guests, Jenkin, on that particular occasion, in which he tried to persuade me for 20 minutes that Donald Trump was a fascist.
That's how the left talks about their political opponents.
And I'm someone who's not politically affiliated.
I'm just looking at the facts of what I see.
We have had for the last 10 years, what has happened to the word Nazi as a result of the word, the woke left's behavior is completely unacceptable.
This is a word that we had for a very specific group of people that was supposed to describe people who believe in national socialism and fascism.
These words have very specific meanings and the meanings that they had were very important for being able to describe people who are actually of that opinion.
And instead, both in America and here across the Atlantic and Britain, we've had, and we're not talking about people on Twitter or people on Blue Sky.
I'm talking about David Lamy, who's the current deputy prime minister, talking about a group of conservative Eurosceptics and saying they're worse than Nazis.
We've had this for decade, for a whole decade now, the complete dehumanization of people for simply having political disagreements.
And so when I see that the killer of Charlie Kirk had these anti-so-called anti-fascist inscriptions on his ammunition, I'm not surprised.
I'm not shocked.
Of course this would happen.
And people like to pretend that this has no consequence.
Well, think about it, Piers.
You're a man.
I'm a man.
If you and I thought that fascism was actually here, as we keep being told, wouldn't it be our duty to stand up and fight?
So can we really be surprised then when some deranged guy picks up a rifle and shoots someone who people on the media, people on TV keep saying is a fascist, keep saying is a Nazi, is completely irresponsible.
And I'll just make one other point on this, because, you know, we've had this conversation.
Cancel Culture and Radicalization00:02:30
Lewis has talked about, well, there's violence on the left and violence on the right.
He's right.
Of course, there are deranged people on both sides in a country with easy access to firearms.
There will be that sort of violence like we've had seen in our country.
It's not just Joe Cox who's been killed in this country.
We also had Sir David Ames, an MP, be killed in Britain too.
And he was a member of the Conservative Party, killed by an Islamist, and on and on we go.
But there's one thing that I've noticed.
A great mentor of mine once told me, he said, Constantine, the greatest insights come from looking at what is not there.
And the one thing I have noticed that hasn't been there in my mind, you tell me if this is different for you, Piers, over the last few days, I've had no expectation that there would be burning, looting, riots in the streets, attacks on police officers across America or Britain or the rest of the West.
We haven't seen any of that and we haven't expected any of that.
And that's because political violence has been normalized on these far extremes of the left.
And when you see those people celebrating, what they are expressing is now a widely held opinion, particularly among young people on the woke left, that if they don't agree with somebody, if they're not getting their way politically, they're entitled to use violence to achieve their aims.
We took cancel culture away from them when Elon Musk took over X and opened up the conversation and forced other social media platforms to open up the conversation.
So now instead of using cancel culture, we've got violence culture.
And everybody has to pull back.
And I'm not calling for any kind of censorship because censorship will not solve this.
But the people who have spent the last decade calling their political opponents fascist, Nazis, and so on, they have blood on their hands and they need to look in the mirror now and stop.
Yeah, I mean, Dave Rubin, I've been on this theme for a long time on this show.
And I've got a book called, Ironically, Woke is Dead coming out next month.
And one of the themes of the book is how radicalized so many on the woke left have become.
And I don't for a moment dispute there are people radicalized on the right.
But as somebody who used to identify quite happily as a liberal, I found myself completely disassociated from the woke left in a way I just never thought possible, where people on supposedly my side would start to become science deniers, biology deniers, but also develop this incredibly hateful mindset that if you didn't go along with everything that they believed, you would be cancelled, you'd be destroyed, you'd be shamed, you'd be vilified.
Woke Left Becomes Radicalized00:09:23
And now, as we've seen with Charlie Kirk, you will actually be murdered in cold blood simply for having opinions that they don't like.
It is, as I said at the start of this, it's unnerving.
It's quite scary, actually.
And when you see those TikTok videos of them so proudly talking about this, joyously celebrating a murder like that, I really do fear about what is going on.
Well, Piers, it's not even that it's about his actual opinions.
It's about the opinions that many thought leaders on the left purport that he has, which are complete lies.
So look, I am in somewhat of a reconciliatory mode here.
So I'd like to ask Jank, I have 10 headlines here he has put up about Charlie Kirk.
They are on his channel right now.
And let's see if Jank believes that these are true.
Charlie Kirk says prominent black women took white people's spots.
Charlie Kirk boasts about his all-white basketball team.
Charlie Kirk gives piggish advice to high school girls.
Ex-employee exposes Charlie Kirk's grift.
Charlie Kirk embarrasses himself.
Charlie Kirk's brain melts explaining anti-vax conspiracy.
Charlie Kirk rants about women in their 30s.
Charlie Kirk has literally no clue how the real world works.
Charlie Kirk gets triggered, declines appearance over pronouns.
Charlie Kirk doubles down on women hating backlash.
I am telling you, Piers, Charlie Kirk was one of the best human beings I ever met.
He did not have a bone of racism, misogyny, or anything else in his body.
But liars lie and they gin up otherwise good people.
From the little bit we know about this shooter, he had a stable household.
He was going to college.
He was fine.
We'll find out where he got radicalized.
But please, please, let's not pretend we don't know where this stuff is coming from.
And please let's not pretend that this thing is going both ways because it is absolutely not.
I also have a, well, you know what, Jank, I'll ask you a question directly, actually.
Do you think Charlie wanted to be martyred?
Do you think Charlie wanted to be martyred?
Do you think Charlie wanted to be killed?
Yes or no?
Of course not.
What kind of asking question is that?
Oh, you don't?
You don't?
Because that's pretty interesting.
Because here's a video of you, Jank, talking when Charlie was at a breakfast.
And they don't deserve it.
But I do also want to point out, as they're in the middle of crying now, although Charlie was smiling ear to ear throughout the entire video, thinking, yes, I'm now the victim.
And I'll get to claim that my rights have been abridged.
Did you catch the beginning of that, Jank?
Listen, we'll do it again.
No, I didn't.
And that's totally out of context.
No, we're not going to do it again.
Totally out of context.
I don't even know what the hell you're doing.
No, Listen, listen, bro.
Are you trying to harm on me?
Is that what you're trying to do?
Jesus Christ.
No, no, no.
I'm trying to do conciliation.
That's what he's not like you.
Look at the last two things of your last two guests.
Piers.
Jesus.
No, what they said was, yes, we should have reconciliation, but it is not without any contrition, right?
It's not without a mea culpa.
Charlie was accosted by Antifa at a breakfast in Philadelphia, and the video that I just played is you with a cartoon of him as Charlie Brown saying that he would love to be martyred so he could be the victim.
Well, I guarantee you, his wife, who now doesn't have a husband and his kids who don't have a lot of people, did not want him to be what you said, brother.
It's exactly what you said it was.
Let's do it again.
No, it isn't.
Let's do it.
We just heard it.
We just heard it.
It's not.
It's not.
No, let's do it again.
Cut this crap out.
No, we're gonna do it again.
Piers, can we talk about reality?
This is something he's going back to like 10 years ago.
I think Cheng should be perverting what I said there.
And they don't deserve it.
It allows for easy martyrdom for these guys, and they don't deserve it.
That was when Antifa was going after him at a breakfast.
Okay, so that's like Cheng Maspawn to that.
No, that was about words, you moron.
Okay, Jesus Christ, man.
All right.
So easy martyrdom.
Exactly.
Okay.
Shut up.
Let's get to reality.
Okay.
So your last two guests, while pretending to be conciliatory, one of them started talking about me and started talking about blood on their hands.
And then this idiot brings out a clip from 10 years ago that's about words and is pretending it has to do with violence.
No show in America has called for nonviolence more than the Young Turks has.
Hey, can I talk after being accused of terrible things that I didn't come within a million miles of doing?
Who did Charlie invite to have these conversations?
Me.
Why did he invite me if I'm so bad when it comes to these issues?
No, it's because Charlie and I are trying to work it out.
We disagree.
David, let me speak.
So we understood that we could have vehement disagreement and we offered it.
And look, guys, you're but without AJ.
Are you going to delete any of those?
We didn't even talk to you.
Are you going to delete any of those photos to one another?
No, I'm not.
No, I'm not.
Because, Dave, what you're doing is, Dave, will you let me disagree?
Did you think he was a white supremacist?
Was Charlie a white supremacist?
No, listen to me.
Listen to me.
Well, if you're not going to let me answer, what the hell's the point of this?
Okay, listen.
Do I still disagree with the things that Charlie said?
Of course I do.
I'm not changing my opinion on that.
And all the titles that you just read were very normal political disagreements.
And none of the titles were there call for violence because there never is on the Young Turks.
And I abhor what happened to Charlie.
I met his wife.
This is a human being.
Look, guys, there's two things that I propose.
You guys go back to the bottom.
Don't headlines imply that Charlie's blindness of both sides.
No, now I talk.
Now I talk.
Enough with the accusing and then not letting me talk.
Okay.
So listen, this whole idea, both sides are blind.
You know, we, and Piers, you know this better than anyone.
I call out Biden and I say, all right, Democrats, are you crazy?
He's obviously old.
He's obviously lost his faculties, right?
And now this absurdity about how the right are all angels.
Are we kidding?
You guys didn't see January 6th.
You didn't see them attacking cops, raiding the Capitol, chanting, hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence.
But that leads to my point, not that the right is more guilty.
And I'm sickened by the trend that has now appeared on the left of violence.
I'm sickened by it.
So I'm proposing two things, guys.
No way should we ever shut down speech.
No way.
Not right-wing speech, not left-wing speech.
You don't shut it down with the government and you don't shut it down with violence.
So first thing is easy.
The second one is hard.
The first one is on all of our shows, as we do every day, call for nonviolence.
The minute you see someone saying something violent, say, don't do that.
That is unacceptable.
That is not who we are on the left.
That is not who we are on the right.
That is not who we are as Americans.
You can say anything you want.
For example, did Charlie say things that were anti-Muslim?
He did.
Did I still talk to him?
Yes.
And I got heat for that.
But guys, we're never going to convince each other if we never talk to one another.
And now, if we start killing each other, it's madness.
There's nothing wrong with disagreement, but there's something terribly wrong with violence and shutting down conversations.
And then the hard one.
Piers, I just think the left.
I just think the right obviously.
There is no such thing.
Hold on.
Last thing.
We're not ready.
There's no such thing as the left or the right.
There is only there are people that are a giant range.
And we explain this on the young turkeys all the time about the right wing, which is, guys, are there radical right?
There are, right?
But are they the entirety of all of the Trump voters?
Of course not.
There's so many good Americans who voted for Trump, who, by the way, some of them voted for Obama before.
Some of them voted for Bernie before.
Same thing on the left.
This guy's a lunatic.
Are there extreme left-wingers?
By the way, the clip that you showed, Pierre is no prominent Democrat or left-wingers on there, but that clip sickened me.
It sickened me.
So it's not a good question.
Okay, but no, but check, but change elements in the middle of the morning.
Okay, but Morse.
Hang on.
Hang on.
But hang on.
You mentioned that.
And in fact, there are clips, though, of high-profile people saying that stuff.
Matthew Dow got fired by MSNBC within minutes, literally, of saying this on the night that Charlie got killed.
Talk to me about the environment in which a shooting like this happens.
Yeah, and again, I emphasize what you just emphasized.
We don't know any full details of this.
We don't know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration, or so we have no idea about this.
But following up with what was just said, he's been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups.
And I always go back to hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.
And I think that's the environment we're in.
That people just you can't stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place.
And that's the unfortunate environment we're in.
In other words, Cheng, you know, he had it coming.
And I found that despicable.
Increased Threats After Murder00:05:15
I said it in the moment.
He then got fired and quite rightly, but there were lots of other high-profile people actually who weren't just TikTokers saying bad stuff.
Just hold fire panel for a moment.
I'm being joined now by Republican Congresswoman Lauren Bober.
Lauren, thank you very much indeed for rejoining me on Uncensored.
What impact is Charlie Kirk's murder going to have on the ability of political figures, either politicians or political commentators, to go about their business talking to members of the public without massively increasing their security?
I mean, have you, for example, had to up your security since his murder?
Well, first, thanks for having me on, Pierce, to talk about my friend Charlie and the ramifications of this.
I feel like our First Amendment rights were assassinated, or at least attempted to, just a couple of days ago, and has certainly been difficult.
And conversations of security for those of us who are in the public eye have definitely increased.
They've been increasing all year.
I even talked to my Democrat colleagues.
Jared Moskowitz is someone who has also received death threats and even a man parked outside his home where his wife and children are.
And so we have increased some security.
I don't believe it's enough.
I think that we need more.
And the ability that we have right now, the resources that we have right now, won't cover what we need.
But it's not going to slow us down.
I'm not canceling events.
I'm continuing to go exactly where I was scheduled to be and talk to folks.
It would be a dishonor to Charlie if I were to close my mouth and sit back and quit now.
We have got to continue forward in this movement that he really pioneered the way for and continue to speak truth.
Charlie would bring on his adversaries, folks who disagreed with him, And have that dialogue, have that debate and that discussion, and give them a platform, even.
Certainly, Charlie has given me a platform over the years, but he gave folks who completely opposed his point of view a platform as well to express that.
And I believe that through his vision and his faith, we will continue to see that with the millions of young people that he has touched.
I hope that there are 10 million Charlie Kirks who are born from this moment.
But certainly, the political violence has to stop.
And we've been saying this for years now.
You could have compilation after compilation of Democrat politicians saying to get in their faces, to take them behind the barn and punch them, punch them in the face, and all of these things by elected leaders.
You are called to lead, and you're telling your constituents, your voters, and your followers to actually be aggressive physically.
And this is just unacceptable.
This is not something that you hear from my conservative colleagues.
And, you know, if they do say it, I absolutely condemn that.
But this is a time for truth and for standing up.
And of course, there are concerns.
Listen, Pierce, we had a mandatory in-staff meeting that was called by the sergeant at arms at the House of Representatives.
They flew to Colorado to meet with all of my district staff.
And it was announced in that meeting that I am number three on their list for targeted members of Congress.
And, you know, we certainly have increased security since then, but it hasn't stopped.
And even to add to that, this week, I would have never expected any kind of calls coming into my office or emails of a threatening nature.
And we have sent in more threats to Capitol Police and FBI this week than in the past couple of months, and maybe even longer than that.
And so, you know, when we're hearing things like Charlie Kirk rightfully was murdered and you should be too, this is what has to stop.
And I would have never expected Americans to continue down that path, be joyful that such an amazing, Christian, faith-filled father, friend, man, leader was assassinated, executed in front of our faces.
And they would continue with that rhetoric and rejoice in it.
This is a disgusting, dark time.
And I hope that we could bring light and joy and true unity.
We don't need an enemy to unite around.
We live in America, which is the greatest country.
Sorry, but this is the greatest, I'm not sorry, this is the greatest country.
And we have so much to be grateful for and honor and respect one another that that alone should be what unites us.
Lauren Bobert, thank you for that.
Very fascinating, I mean, disturbing actually that you've had more threats since Charlie Kirk was murdered than you have done for many months.
I found that a particularly disturbing thing that you revealed there.
But I appreciate you coming on a sense.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Pierce.
Guns, Fascists, and Fight Like Hell00:14:52
Well, to go back to the panel, I mean, Batia, the thing we haven't discussed in all this, I guess, is the guns.
Obviously, every time there's a gun, a big action of gun violence, there's a big debate about it.
It's well known that I was, when I was at CNN, got into many debates about this.
I got into debates with Charlie about guns.
In fact, he tweeted something which, you know, now you look at it and you sort of wince when you read that.
Hey, Piers Morgan, I thought guns don't save lives.
And actually, he was talking about an Uber driver who'd had a concealed carry weapon, which saved his life.
So Charlie and I debated guns.
We came at it from different perspectives.
And I respected that.
And he did.
And he then came on my show to talk about other things.
So we didn't let that mean we couldn't debate things.
Where are we with guns in America?
I sort of felt I learned the lesson when I was debating with the NRA and so on.
This is an American problem that can only be resolved by Americans.
It's not a UK problem.
And actually, we used to all have guns in Britain and we gave them all up.
So we don't have a gun violence problem here.
Certainly nothing that could be compared to the United States.
But, you know, there's always a, this is not the right time to discuss it, but people are discussing it.
What do you feel about the guns debate in this?
Oh, gosh, I feel like it's so irrelevant.
I mean, one side of the political aisle in America is heavily armed, and it's the other side that commits the vast majority of political violence.
You know, there's a tacit admission from the left that their side is the violent side, because if somebody, God forbid, if a big left-wing influencer, God forbid, was killed, what they would be doing immediately is boarding up every single major city in America because there would be rioting and looting.
People would die.
We know that tens, if not hundreds of people died during the BLM riots.
And obviously, none of that has happened and none of that is expected to happen, despite the fact that the right, whose avatar was just murdered in cold blood, is heavily armed, right?
So there is this tacit understanding from the left, even as they call the right, the source of all the political violence and fascists and Nazis and what have you, that actually the right will not pick up their arms and turn on their leftist neighbors, right?
They rely on the forbearance of their conservative neighbors who are much more heavily armed not to actually take revenge.
And we all know that this is happening.
They just won't admit it.
It is so amazing to sit here and have people bring up case after case after case that has been like thoroughly debunked.
You know, just because Josh Shapiro is a Democrat doesn't mean the person who tried to assassinate him was a Republican.
That guy did it, he said, because Josh Shapiro is killing his Palestinian friends, okay?
And we have cases like that again and again.
They have to keep going back to January 6th, which as Vince pointed out, no one was killed except Ashley Babbitt, who was one of the protesters to compare a meme posted of a Halloween costume to people actually saying the things that murderers then use to justify their killing,
like the guy who killed that couple outside the Jewish Museum in DC, or like this killer who killed Charlie, saying the exact same things you hear from the most prominent Democrats is facetious.
It is facetious to compare an actual justification for murder that turns into murder with a photo that gets posted.
And this is why conservatives are so frustrated because they know that even as the left is demonizing them, the left is tacitly acknowledging that they're not actually in danger from their conservative neighbors.
Louis, I don't know, you've got to go.
Vinny's had to go as well, sadly.
Lewis, you've got to go, Sid.
Just final words from you.
Have you been influenced at all by anything you've heard tonight?
I sort of feel, and maybe we all are, maybe this is the problem.
It appears as if I'm living in a different world here, a world where the only invective that we ever hear, the only hostile language, the only violent language, and indeed call to arms, come from one side of the political debate.
I would just go back to this point.
U.S. government figures show that a majority of political violence, politically related violent incidents, actually come from the right, not the left.
Now, I'm not sat here saying that there isn't a problem on the left.
I've been the first one, quite literally, to say that.
But by definition, if there are politically inspired violent incidents on the right, then what is causing those?
Are they all just nutters?
They all just mad?
Or how can it be that the left, left-wing ones, are the ones who are inspired by language?
Something must be happening and causing the right-wing violence.
And so by definition, presumably, that must be, must be something that is happening in terms of the language of the other side.
And just let me finish.
And just, I mean, I think we heard from Kristen earlier as well when he said the left have imbibed this idea that to get what you want, you are able and should be able to use violence.
I mean, come on.
Yeah, go back to January the 6th, because MAGA at that moment quite literally decided to use violence to overturn an election result.
And let's just talk about violent language as well for a second here from the very, very top.
Donald Trump, fight like hell.
If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.
Rudy Giuliani, let's have trial by combat.
Republican Representative Mo Brooks, today is the day American patriots start down taking names and kicking ass on the Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot.
Instead of condemning it, didn't condemn it.
What did Trump do?
He said, maybe it was a problem.
Maybe it wasn't.
She locked down her state.
Even on Mitch McConnell, his own Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, on True Social, Trump said McConnell had a death wish for supporting bipartisan legislation.
If that's not legitimizing violence, then I don't know what it is.
Constantine, your response to that.
I have to agree with Lewis.
He is living in a different reality, one that has no connection to actual reality.
What's wrong with you?
What are you talking about?
You're comparing somebody saying fight like hell in the context of a political campaign.
In the context of a lot of crisis, can I speak now?
Are you capable of listening to an alternative point of view?
Well, shut up then.
Shut up and listen if you're capable of it.
Now, you can't compare somebody saying fight like hell in the context of a political campaign with what I explained earlier, which is when you call people Nazis.
Shut up and listen to an alternative opinion.
Why is it that you people have a complete inability to listen to opinions that you don't like?
Why can't you just sit there and actually hear what I'm saying?
You can't, oh my God, you can't compare somebody saying fight like hell with somebody explaining that the country is an imminent threat of a fascist takeover because an imminent threat of a fascist takeover is something that would actually legitimize you picking up a rifle and heading to the front line.
So when you and Jenk and people like that call people you don't like far-right, hard-right, Nazis and fascist, you are creating an environment in which some crazy people, yes, of course they're crazy, will feel that they're entitled to use violence to prevent the fake fascist takeover you keep banging on about.
And it's no, there is no equivalence between these things.
I disagree, by the way.
You know, Chenk is entitled to criticize Charlie Kirk and his positions on the show.
That's absolutely fine.
But when you label and smear people as fascists and Nazis, that is taking it to an entirely different level.
And that is where I hope there would be some self-reflection.
But I'm not seeing any on this panel tonight, I'm afraid.
No, and it's interesting.
You know, I remember the Madison Square Garden rally just before the election.
And I went to that because I'd never been to any political rally for anyone.
But Trump said, why don't you come down?
I went down.
And I was really struck by the fact that it was being branded by the left, from Hillary Clinton to MSNBC and others, as a neo-Nazi rally.
They compared it to one in the 30s at the Madison Square Garden, which was indeed a neo-Nazi rally.
And I thought then it was incredibly dangerous, but also incredibly stupid.
There were many Jewish people in the audience.
There was a Holocaust survivor, a prominent one in the audience.
Donald Trump, his son-in-law is Jewish.
His daughter converted to Judaism.
The idea that he is the new Adolf Hitler has always been utterly preposterous.
But to take your point, Konstantin, I completely agree.
If you are telling people all the time that Trump is Hitler and his followers are Nazis or fascists, then it makes absolute logical sense to a warped mind that they should be stopped and that the only way to stop fascists and Nazis is with violence.
And actually, in their heads, they are doing society a favor.
This is the right thing to do.
So the over-demonization constantly of Trump in particular and people that support him, I've always felt is extremely dangerous.
Are we saying that Donald Trump has never demonized his opponents?
Not at all.
And in fact, I completely agree with you when you say that there are many examples on the right of violence amongst the far right.
But I do think that there is just over-demonization from everybody.
And it does lead disturbed minds to believe they are doing the right good thing.
You know, I haven't heard what this shooter has to say.
Apparently, he's not cooperating with authorities now.
He's got lawyered up and is now saying nothing.
But, you know, if he was to say, I believe that Charlie Kirk is a fascist and that Donald Trump is a fascist and I was doing this to save America from fascists, then you could understand how his diseased mind is viewing this.
And it will be because, Lewis, he has heard repeatedly on the airways for a decade now that that is the case.
Well, sure.
But my point is this, Piers.
Both sides in America, and we're seeing it in the UK as well, increasingly treat, and I don't welcome this at all, increasingly treat every single election as if it is an existential moment.
I.e., if our side loses or the other side wins, then the country as we've known it will be gone.
Now, yes, the left has sort of parts of the left have expressed that in terms of fascism or far right.
The right have its own vocabulary and its own way of describing it.
And we go back to again what Donald Trump said at the time when he said, if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore, which is exactly, I mean, Piers, you're talking about what depraved minds hear or demented minds hear, and they're going to turn to violence.
That is precisely what we saw with January the 6th.
That is what we see again and again and again.
And what I just find not only distasteful, but frankly demented, is the idea that somehow we can say that this is a problem which is unique to one side of politics.
It's a problem which actually begats each other.
It's a problem which each side, it metastasizes this problem of political violence.
Each side each time adds fuel to the fire and it gets hot.
It gets hot inside the building.
So the truth is we've all got to acknowledge, acknowledge, and you're talking about what happens in the far right and so on in different parts of the world.
We're braced in London right now for what might happen tomorrow in terms of violent protest on the streets of London with Tommy Robinson.
We saw what happened in terms of violent protest all throughout the course of the last year.
This is a problem which happens on the left and it is a problem on the right.
And it must be acknowledged in order to do anything and something about it.
Okay, Lewis, thank you for joining us today.
I know you've got to leave us.
We really appreciate it.
I'll come back to the panel for more in a moment.
We're going to be joined now by Alex Marlow, the close friend of Charlie Kirk, right by editor and host of the Alex Marlowe podcast.
Alex, first of all, my deep sympathies to you as a friend of Charlie's.
I wasn't a friend of his.
I knew him.
I'd interviewed him a few times.
I had a lot of respect for the extraordinary empire he built for himself.
And I had a lot of respect for the fact that he would willingly, regularly go into the heart of the people that vehemently disagree with him and have open debate and do so often very respectfully and politely, but he would allow them to challenge him and he would challenge them.
And we saw him do that over here in London a few months ago.
And it was extremely interesting to watch.
I like that about him.
And the fact that he has been singled out for this brutal, senseless murder to silence his views when he never sought to do that to other people with their views is a hideous irony of this.
What is your feeling about where this leaves America and political discourse?
That's an incredibly poignant point, Piers.
Thank you for having me on and getting to remember my friend Charlie.
The fact that he was gunned down on a university campus where there are 99 to one left-wing viewpoints that are shared with young, impressionable minds.
And he was sitting down.
He wasn't towering over people.
He's an extremely tall person.
He's a very powerful person, extreme alpha guy.
And he sits there and he debates people and he encourages people who disagree to come to the front to have civilized, vigorous debate with him.
And he was shot in the throat while he was doing that by some nothing of a person.
A person will know is completely insignificant in every other way.
To take out Charlie, who had become a giant in both media and activism and did so with just the power of his words and his willpower.
It's deeply profound moment and embarrassment for the entire country that is supposed to value freedom of speech.
And the fact that there isn't a universal understanding of that symbolism to me is very dark as well.
Yeah, I completely agree.
I mean, I remember last week, we had a comedian called Graham Lenahan who was arrested at Heathrow Airport for jokes he'd put on X three months before, which I found an outrageous abuse of his free speech rights.
And Americans, quite rightly, were very critical of the UK and have been about our general attitude towards free speech over the last couple of years with people being imprisoned for stuff they've put on Facebook and so on.
But we look at, you know, in the UK, we would look at something like this and go, well, you can't imagine a more heinous attack on free speech than what has just unfurled with Charlie Kirk, you know, to murder somebody for their opinions, as the police are now suggesting that this was the motivation for the shooter is genuinely terrifying.
It is genuinely terrifying.
It's going to have a chilling effect on speech in the country.
Our university system has already become a cesspool of leftism where it's completely one-sided and decent parents of all different political stripes send their children there just to get one-sided radical ideas from an extreme secular perspective as well.
Charlie was an evangelist for Christianity and Judeo-Christian values, which I think are severely lacking in American dialogue these days.
Charlie Kirk as Christian Evangelist00:03:07
And I think that he was a voice for that as well.
There is something happening in this country where people are normalizing violence an extreme level.
You saw the fantasies of people wanting to kill Donald Trump.
I know you've gone through on the show some of the examples of violence against conservatives that have taken place.
It was inevitable that this was going to happen.
That's the problem here, Piers, among all others, is that this is not a surprise.
They've been targeting us.
They've been fantasizing about killing us.
The dialogue online is completely insane.
And it was just a matter of time before they take out one of our field generals.
You know, many felt that Charlie was on a fast track to potentially becoming president of the United States one day himself.
We'll never know now that would have happened or even if he particularly wanted it to happen.
But on a personal level, you knew him better than probably anyone I've had on the panel today.
What was Charlie like?
He was exactly what meets the eye.
He was a wonderful, wonderful person who had such a spirit for Western values, for Christianity, for his faith, for family.
I met Charlie when he was just a teenager.
He approached me and my colleague, Joel Pollock at Breitbart with an idea about bias on campuses and biasing textbooks for a story.
And I think we surprised him when we suggested he actually write it up himself.
And he found himself on TV and on radio and he got the bug and he wanted to be out there publicly evangelizing his views.
And he used that to build Turning Point USA.
I tried to hire him about 10, 11 years ago.
Turning point was just barely big enough where he resisted coming over to Breitbart and he kept building Turning Point to the behemoth that it became.
And all along the way, a tireless work ethic, someone who was ruthlessly efficient with his time and an incredible friend, always encouraging.
I just put out a book and he was one of the most supportive people, encouraging people to go buy it and supporting me.
He was always offering encouraging cacts and he knew it was going to be dangerous that day.
Piers, one of the last communications I had with him was concern about this particular event about how Intifa could be there specifically.
And he still was brave enough to go out there.
He didn't need any more power or any more wealth.
He just wanted to bring the message that he believed in, he believed he was put on earth to convey to people who needed to hear it.
He was a good man.
He was a pure man.
He was not a drinker or a smoker or a cavorter.
All he wanted to do was preach what he knows to people who had never heard those messages before.
Alex Marlowe, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
I appreciate it.
Let me go back to the panel here.
Dave Rubin, I thought he summed it up well there.
There's a massive loss here on a human level of a very bright, successful young man who, like you said, he didn't smoke.
He didn't take drugs.
He didn't, you know, he wasn't a party guy.
He was committed to his beliefs and he was committed to spreading the word of his beliefs, but also allowing people to debate with him about those beliefs.
That's what a democratic society should be about.
And yet here he is now dead at 31 because somebody was incapable of listening to his beliefs without wanting to kill him.
Yeah, Piers, look, this is a guy.
Fighting Back Against Misleading Anger00:10:56
You know, I don't talk about it that often.
I happen to be gay.
It's not a big deal.
I've been married for over 10 years.
And I've sat with Charlie and my husband and his wife and talked about marriage and talk about the differences there and all of those things.
And we talked it out.
That's what Charlie was great at.
I do have to say, though, on the political side of this, for where this conversation has got heated, it seems to me that everyone agrees that Donald Trump is not Hitler and his supporters are not Nazis.
So with that in mind, I'd like to read some other headlines.
These are video titles from Jenks' channel.
And in the spirit of reconciliation, maybe he wants to delete these things.
Trump cuts anti-Nazi program.
Trump spreading Nazi propaganda.
Nazis encouraged by Trump's Charlotteville response.
Trump defends Nazis, very fine people.
That is the biggest hoax, political hoax ever.
Trump retweets a neo-Nazi again.
Trump disappoints neo-Nazi supporters.
So these things don't come out of nowhere.
I only blame one person at the end of the day for these murders, which is the crazy person who does the murders.
But pretending that what is wildly asymmetrical, I think I have laid that out with evidence here.
Pretending that it's symmetrical is deeply, deeply dangerous.
Piers, you know this because we've discussed it on my show.
Even on your show, you have found it way more difficult to find rational, decent people on the left who will explain themselves thoughtfully and calmly and everything else.
While the panoply of people you get on the right who shouldn't even be on the right, I would say certainly someone like me.
I don't know exactly where Batya considers herself, but people with a variance of political opinions that now broadly are part of the MAGA thing is because of what I just read you, the endless hysteria of the left that has ginned up people to do crazy things.
It's not to say you can't say the worst things.
You want to say the worst things, Donald Trump's a Nazi.
It's so tough to say.
You want to say that?
Go ahead and say it.
It falls on the person who pulls the trigger.
But if we're all sitting here saying, yeah, it's not true that Donald Trump's a Nazi and it's not true that his supporters are Nazis and he's not Hitler and all of those things.
Well, then before you get to reconciliation, a little bit of a mea culpa by some of us might be valuable.
Jank?
Yeah, I mean, look at this.
This is disgusting.
So this guy pretending to do conciliation.
And I was going to be conciliatory towards Dave if I spoke first, but apparently that's not what he's doing at all.
So what he's trying to do is get people angry in a misleading way against me.
Are you trying to do violence?
Are those the titles that you're disgusting?
No.
So no, no, no.
Let me explain.
Let me explain.
Those are your titles.
No, let me explain.
You're asking me a goddamn question.
So let me explain while you're trying to get people to do violence against me.
You're disgusting.
So those are 80% of those titles.
I've never called Trump a Nazi.
And those titles were about neo-Nazi reactions.
So what do you want us to do?
Not telling what's actually happening.
And so look.
Did Donald Trump side with Neil?
Yes, he did say that.
So Charlottesville.
So as Pierre, how about you hate the Young Turks?
Can I just talk?
So this monster is trying to egg on violence.
What did Donald Trump say after your very first time?
And he won't even let me talk.
He's talking about the neo-Nazis or the white supremacists who should be condemned completely.
It's the biggest debunked conspiracy theory of all time.
You're still pushing that now?
You're still pushing the very fine people who now?
I'm shocked even for you.
Dave, no.
Dave, shut up and let me answer your stupid question.
So on that day, which now we're going back to that for no goddamn reason other than you're trying to get people angry at me for misleading things.
I'm reading your title.
He did.
Shut up and let me answer.
So did he say there are verified people on both sides?
He did.
So that's a fact.
Now, who was he referring to?
As we've explained on the Young Turks, he might have been referring to the people who were in favor of the Confederacy and came out there to support Confederate generals.
I didn't find that to be any better.
Those people were in favor of slavery.
Those people lynched black people.
So I'm not going to ever cheerlead for them.
And I'm not ever going to shut down.
In the very next sentence, did he say I'm going to write white supremacists?
So you're not going to get me to shut off.
And you are against speech.
And you're the one trying to smear people.
So let me be super clear and let me outrage every title on both sides and then try to bring people together.
You've already talked.
So now, look, if you're on the left, I'm going to say something that's going to piss you off.
So Charlie said things that were against Muslims.
I'm from a Muslim background.
Laura Loomer has said tons of things against Muslims.
Ben Shapiro has, et cetera.
So what?
We fight back with words.
Now, Dave is trying to say, don't fight back with words.
Don't fight back at all.
The left should unilaterally surrender.
Hell no.
But you fight back with words.
Don't fight back with words.
That's insane.
That's insane.
Shut up.
Now, did I say Jenkins blamed you guys?
Did I say shooters that Trump shut up?
You guys are pretending that Trump doesn't have authoritarian tendencies when the man wouldn't get out of office in 2020.
My God, his chief of staff came in and told him that they were threatening to murder his vice president.
And according to not me, but Trump staffers, he said that he didn't mind that Pence deserved it.
He's a guy who's super vitriolic and continues to violate due process.
I've never called him a Nazi.
But if you just say, hey, don't call him a fascist, just call him authoritarian.
Fine.
Because he keeps doing authoritarian things.
Okay.
So now, finally, to the part that brings us together.
Guys, this entire conversation's framing is wrong.
It's not the left versus the right.
98% of the people on the right and the left are not at all violent and hate the videos that you showed and hate the idea of not leaving after you lose an election, et cetera, et cetera.
Hate what happened to Paul Pelosi, hate what happened to Charlie Kirk.
We should all be united against the extremes, extreme right and extreme left.
It should be the middle against the extremes instead of having the extremes have opposed one another and pretend that the most extreme elements on the left represent the left, the most extreme elements on the right represent the right.
On the young Turks, we're saying that is not the case.
The great majority of Americans are good, decent people.
And under no circumstances, no matter what our opinions are, and no matter how angry you are about those opinions, should we ever do violence?
Or should we ever think of the other side as evil or devils or any of that nonsense talk?
So just do not go authority.
There's a lot of Nazis according to your title.
And you certainly shouldn't do it on the left either.
Listen, you're talking about that.
Honestly, I get death threats all the time.
You know, the number one group that I get death threats from?
Pro-Israel people.
They feel entitled to violence.
Of course, everything's about the news.
And my co-hosts, everything's about to be available.
Well, I can be you.
I can beat you, Chenk, because I've had death threats from pro-Israelis and I've had death threats from pro-Palestinians.
So I've had the whole shebang, which probably means I'm doing things about right.
Batia, look, it's been a very, it's been a fascinating debate and conversation.
But as we've just seen, you know, passions still run high.
What do we do to try and lower the temperature?
Do you agree with Cenk in his summation there?
Can I ask you something, Ching?
Because I agree with the idea that the extremes don't represent the mainstream.
Like, I have not tweeted about the blue sky celebrations because I don't think they matter.
I don't think they're significant.
I don't think they're representative.
But I guess, Shank, my question to you would be: when a shooter repeats the exact phrasing or language that is in the mainstream on the left,
whether it's the guy in DC outside the Jewish Museum who was chanting Intifada Revolution, and I did, that's why I did it, or whether it's this guy who his family said that they found that he said Charlie Kirk is hateful and hate speech and a danger, which is stuff that you hear very much from mainstream Democrats.
When language that is in the mainstream on the left is repeated by killers, does the left not then, the mainstream, have an obligation to do some soul searching about that kind of language?
And does Gavin Newsom, who said punch them in the face last week, not owe people an apology?
Does Senator Chris Murphy, who said this is war, do these people not owe some sort of apology?
And does the mainstream of the left not owe it to the other side to take some stock of its phrasing?
Like what is owed in the moment that it is the conservatives who are the victims right now?
What's owed to us?
I'm asking this totally, you know, from the bottom of my heart because I want to get to the unity place.
But Dave is totally right.
Like, what is owed?
What acknowledgement is owed?
Cheng?
So I actually think that is a good question.
And it will lead to a maya culpo.
But let me get there, okay?
So we've done a lot of segments on the Young Turks about right-wing language.
And nowadays, there's a tiny amount of things that I agree with Tucker Carlson on, Laura Ingram, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
And we've had some of them on the show, et cetera.
But in the past, I think that they used language that you're talking about, Batya, that got people riled up.
And then you see in some of their manifestos, the guy who went and shot Latinos in Texas, Dylan Roof in South Carolina, political manifestos from the right-wing.
Now, what I said back then was Tucker should be careful with his language because it's riling these people up to do these terrible things.
That's what I want to apologize for.
No, we are not responsible, and Tucker is not responsible.
Nobody on this panel is responsible for psychos.
We have to make our political points.
We cannot stand down.
And there's nothing wrong with the fights that we have on political stuff, right?
And so we have to value freedom of speech.
We have to have those conversations.
We have to meet in the battlefield of ideas, right?
And I can't go and say, hey, I'm adamant about this, but Tucker was adamant about that, and he's wrong, and I'm right.
No, we are not responsible for the actions of extreme people.
God Bless Charlie in Heaven00:05:56
But we do have a result.
So when I said to the right wing, you guys are responsible for those words, that's what I'm apologizing for.
No, we are not responsible.
None of us are going to jump in for the actions of these guys.
But guys, I've got to jump in, Chuck, because we're actually on our show, stop the violence.
I agree with you.
I agree with it.
Look, we've run out of time because it's a live show.
I've only got five minutes left.
I've got Reverend Franklin Graham waiting.
I want to thank my panel.
You've all been great.
It's been a really fascinating debate about all the issues here.
And I really appreciate you taking so much time to be with me.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
God bless.
Thank you.
Well, joining me now is Reverend Franklin Graham, President of Samaritans Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
Franklin, thank you so much for joining me.
It's such a sad week, isn't it?
To see a young man murdered in cold blood in the way that Charlie Kirk was, whatever your political opinions, doesn't really matter.
He was a man of strong faith.
What's been your reaction to the killing of Charlie Koch?
Well, Piers, I don't feel sorry for Charlie because he's in the presence of God.
And I feel sorry for his wife and his children.
And my prayers are for them.
But Charlie, he said, I'm nothing without Jesus.
And he said just the day that he died, he said, Jesus is the way, the truth, and life.
He said, he tweeted, I believe, tell somebody today about Jesus.
His whole life was about Jesus Christ.
And he's an incredible guy.
He's not only deep faith, but he wanted everyone to know that Jesus Christ was the way, the truth, and the life.
And there was no other way to God except through him.
And Charlie was ready to stand before God.
There's a lot of hate in this world, Piers.
There's evil.
And the young man that pulled that trigger, his heart was filled with anger and rage.
And Charlie was a nice person.
And he invited the people from the left or anyone who had a different opinion to speak.
He gave them the microphone.
And he listened with respect.
And some of these people would come to the microphone and curse him and say all kinds of vile things.
And he would just look at them.
And when they were through cursing him, then he would answer the question.
An incredible person.
And he's going to be missed.
But I don't feel sorry for him.
He's in heaven, at the presence of God.
He said he accepted Jesus Christ when he was five years old.
He said it was the greatest decision of his life when he confessed his sin, told God that he was sorry, and asked Christ to come live in his heart to his life.
You see, Jesus Christ didn't come to condemn us.
He came to save us, Piers.
And he came from heaven to this earth on a rescue mission to save prisoner.
And you are too, Piers.
And Jesus Christ died for our sins, shedding his own blood on that cross.
And on the third day, God raised him to life.
And so that's what Charlie believed.
That's what he lived his life for.
And I was proud to have known him.
And I thank God for his life.
And I think out of this, Piers, there may be thousands of young people who will come out of this and who will pick up that banner and take the message of the cross of Jesus Christ across these college campuses.
And that's where Charlie was so strong with these college campuses.
And I think we're going to see thousands of people pick up that banner.
And even though the devil meant this for evil, I think God's going to take this and use it for good.
How do we stop people, Franklin, from wanting to kill those who they disagree with?
Oh, Piers, only God can do that.
You see, our evil is in the world and it's all around us, Piers.
And I think what we do is we try to live a life that will please God.
Death is going to come for all of us.
It's just a matter of time.
We're all at different stages of dying.
But death is coming.
We cannot escape it.
I don't care how rich you are, how good you are, how famous you are.
Death is coming.
And we need to be ready.
And when that hour comes, we need to be ready to stand before God and for him to receive us.
And the only way that he'll receive us is, Piers, if we confess our sins to him, tell God we're sorry, and turn from those sins and by faith believe on his son.
We have to accept his son, Jesus Christ.
See, God is offering forgiveness and salvation, but it's a gift.
You don't work for it.
You can't buy it, but you have to receive it by faith.
And so Charlie did that.
And when that bullet went through his neck and silenced his voice and ended his life, he was in the presence of Almighty God at that moment.
And so, again, I don't feel sorry for him.
And he wouldn't come back, Piers.
He wouldn't come back if God said, would you like to go back, Charlie?
Charlie's not going to do it because we're going to be with him one day.
For every one of us that put our faith and trust in Christ, I'll see Charlie again.
Reverend Franklin Graham, I really appreciate you rounding off this live special edition in such a perfect way.
Thank you very much indeed for joining me.
Thank you, Piers.
God bless you, sir.
Well, that's it for our special live show about Charlie Kirk and his brutal murder.
I hope people listen to the words of Franklin Graham.
People listen to the people on my panel who made it clear that we need to collectively come together and preach a more peaceful way of debating than taking a gun out and shooting someone who you don't agree with.