Reaction
An international anti-fascist show run by a Scandinavian nerd, a Slavic alcoholic and an American unc that takes you to the darkest corners of the internet to help you understand the footsoldiers of online right-wing mobilization - content creators.
Reaction
Episode 1 - Charlie Kirk
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Welcome to Episode One of Reaction. Today, we're getting Kirked.
The boys have been working very hard to get this show off the ground and we can't be happier with how it turned out. Welcome, we look forward to your Reaction.
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Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years? Counting or not counting gang violence. Great.
SPEAKER_07The throat helps produce speech by acting as the main passageway and resonating chamber for air coming from the lungs. Air is pushed up through the voice box where the vocal folds vibrate to create sound. No throat means no air, and no air means no speech. At approximately twelve twenty two PM on september tenth, the main instrument of Charlie Kirk's craft was shattered by a bullet. His neck split open. One bang yeeded Charlie and the surrounding crowd out of their false notion of safety, a marketplace of ideas where controversial opinions and attitudes are traded like baseball cards, completely isolated from the effects they produce, suddenly felt the effect. A Mozer 98 Magnum, the forefather of all modern bolt action rifles, perched on a rooftop, clicked once and the world heard it. It was louder than the thousands of ARs, AKs, Remingtons, Glocks, and countless other instruments of death that had plagued American schools for decades. It was louder than the echoes of war and genocide. It was louder than reason, for an American son had died that day, and his rhetoric, his audience, and his power were now up for grabs. This is a story about just that. How a single death in a sea of thousands caused everything, and yet nothing to change. This is a story of us all getting curved. The internet. Ideological caveats, popular figures, niche thought leaders, or content creators. If they're feeding reaction online, we'll be there with a microscope and a g uh I can't say that. I really want to say that. Let me pick up the game. Because I'm the American. We'll be there with a microscope. Uh already battlescarred from years on the digital anti-Chudd front. We now come to you as veteran mentors, drill sergeants, and professors, ready to prepare you for whatever the future might bring. Now, my comrades in arms, please introduce yourselves to our audience.
SPEAKER_09Hello, I'm Freda. I'm a Norwegian nerd of the academic history variety. I studied history at university before starting a YouTube channel where I document and confront the online rights and their use and misuse of history. I also got my first computer at around eight, so I kind of grew up on the internet.
SPEAKER_02I guess I'm the fucking unk, huh? Uh hi everybody. I'm Mike, the polemical Pennsylvanian informer politician turned firebrand. I study political science, history, and law at university and law school, worked in political organizing and campaigning before launching one of the largest political streams at Twitch at central underscore committee. Uh the unk.
SPEAKER_07Oh, and there's uh me as well. Uh call me Hugo, like the shitty car. Uh, your friendly neighborhood, a balcon boy with a formal education political science, obsessed with fascist ideology, the way a doctor is obsessed with cancer. You might know me from a YouTube channel stream or the D Program podcast, which is pretty insane. I I might be the most insufferable one because I do all three. Now you guys do as well. And last but not least, Anne, our darling producer, coming to us straight from Austria. She's the smartest one out of all of us, and like all smart people, prefers pulling strings behind the curtain. Anne is, and I quote from from her, elated to be able to work with our trio and will give her all to provide an enjoyable podcast experience for the listeners. I I I don't know who's getting more glaze here, us or or the listeners. I never want to glaze the listeners.
SPEAKER_06Why are you listening to a pot okay? We shouldn't tell them. No, yeah, that's what a great way to start out. Stop listening right now. Stop listening right now.
SPEAKER_02Listen, they're listeners for a reason, okay? Keep listening.
SPEAKER_07You will not be able to stop. Speaking of which, let's get back to our story. Mike, please take it away.
SPEAKER_02What did Charlie Kirk believe? The hagiography of Kirk, penned by Ezra Klein in the New York Times opinion page, claimed that Kirk did politics the right way. Through reasoned debate, centrists like Klein were quick to take the moment of his death to whitewash the reality of his life. Charlie Kirk was a political entrepreneur whose beliefs were constantly at flux and shifted with the tides of the Republican Party's needs. That single word best describes who Charlie Kirk was and his purpose within the right-wing political ecosystem. He began, like most right-wing influencers, as a teenager, repeating conservative talking points back at the adults who raised him. The innovation that Kirk brought was the idea that attention is more important than accuracy. He was a classic flack in the most disdainful sense of the word. He sought to ingratiate himself with power and money and considered complete contradiction to be a virtue, not a vice. Charlie predated the Trump era. As we'll discuss later, Charlie's entry wasn't with the 2016 Trump wave, but rather the movement that preceded his rise, the so-called Tea Party. This movement rose in 2009 as a reaction to Obama's election and the collapse of the economy brought about by the Great Recession. The right-wing media ecosystem in that time was dominated by right-wing talk radio and Fox News, a division of News Corp. led by the conservative Austrian billionaire Ruper Murdoch. Fox News was helmed at the time by disgraced pervert Roger Dales, a former Nixon man who intentionally developed the network as a mouthpiece for the RNC and the hardline conservative movement. Charlie's larger political trajectory matches exactly the broader path of the Republican Party during this period. His positions constantly shifted in emphasis, tone, and substance as his stances changed from a pseudo-libertarian Tea Party activist to fire-breathing Trump populist culture warrior. This ability to shift between the various poles of the Republican Party as they grew in influence and power was Charlie's modus operandi. He helped push the growing dominance of culture war narratives and politics within that right-wing media sphere. Charlie's founding of Turning Point USA in 2012 was largely a reflection of the anti-Obama libertarian conservative fusion that dominated that moment. The bright yellow Gaston flag with the bold Don't Tread on Me beneath a timber rattlesnake was often hoisted in the Don't Don't Tread on Me was often hoisted in the crowds of right-wing activists protesting against healthcare for the poor or investment in clean energy. Cries of Don't Let the Government touch my Medicare were often heard. And that's who Charlie Kirk tandered to. His rhetoric focused on free market, limited government, low taxes, and deregulation. If you imagine a nerdy white boy in a bow tie, you can imagine the Charlie Kirk of that era. Kirk's positioning at that time was as a pro-business reformer who saw debate on campus as a way to introduce conservative economic ideas to college students.
SPEAKER_01We're far from it now. Let's get back to restoration of liberty and states' rights. More like Texas, less like California. So you have more of a libertarian viewpoint? Libertarian, conservative, free market, freedom.
SPEAKER_02These early efforts to convert college-age kids were a complete flop. And the money garnered from boomer-age conservative mega donors had little to show for it. This all changed with the rise of Donald Trump. Kirk quickly aligned himself with the institutional donors as a never Trump conservative. Early on in the Trump movement, he sided with many other conservative activists as a supporter of Marco Rubio. Early in the 2016 primary, Trump was seen as a joke candidate with little chance of capturing the nomination. However, that changed quickly as Trump's campaign launched with a bombastic racist speech accusing Mexican migrants of being drug dealers, criminals, rapists.
SPEAKER_00When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you, they're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some I assume are good people.
SPEAKER_02This conspiracy was popular among the Republican base and would soon serve as a launch pad for Trump's own popularity with them.
SPEAKER_07Would you say, Mike, that uh he won because he was the first president to actually listen to content creators such as ourselves?
SPEAKER_02I do think that like Trump is an innovator in much the same way as Obama was. Obama's movement was emerging from the internet space. Black what? Yeah, he was but they were both black. They were both black. Uh Trump is the first black president. Um no, in all seriousness, yes, it was it was the ability to kind of talk to the grassroots. And the other thing that I I I think we're gonna talk a little bit about later is Trump himself interacted with social media, you know, 2016 Twitter. I I you know, I'm about to talk about that. Um, and and Trump established himself as the tribute of these like fringe populist conservative views. And if you ever talk to a Trump supporter, their unofficial slogan is he tells it like it is. Yep, and uh posts it like it is. Well, yeah, he tells it like it is, which is really just another way of saying he says stuff that we all believe, but you're not allowed to say. And what is it that conservatives all believe but are not allowed to say? It's the racism. Yeah, it's racism. It's the N-word.
SPEAKER_07I thought it was sister fucking, but yeah, that one works different.
SPEAKER_02Okay, cousin fucking, all right. Cousin fucking. Uh we gotta have our limits somewhere. Apologies. In online spaces like the infamous R slash Donald on Reddit or poll on 4chan, Trump's racist and xenophobic rhetoric quickly took hold in online spaces dominated by young far-right fans. They began memeing Trump to the White House with images of Trump as Pepe or chance about building the wall another five feet higher. Trump, obsessed with his perception within the base, embraced social media like Twitter to command attention and circumvent the mainstream media gatekeeper. Except for an early speed bump in Iowa, Trump dominated early primaries and had the nomination wrapped up by May 2016. As it became clear that Trump was the presumptive nominee and he was very popular among young online conservatives, Kirk made his pivot fully into populist Trumpism. He rapidly shifted from a libertarian espousing a watchman state toward a vicious crypto-fascist populism that demanded that the government intervene to enforce morality and prevent racial replacement. While other conservative organizations hesitated to embrace Trump's style, Kirk distinguished himself by strongly aligning with Trumpism and completely reoriented his policy set. Nationalist and populist themes became central to his appeal, and he embraced viral social media as a strategy to reinforce gains Trump was mating with young Fuck, I can't speak now. You're fine. He was trying to.
SPEAKER_06I don't know if you've ever seen him talking about his favorite plays on on Broadway, but mating with young men is often on his mind. Okay, hold on. Just randomly standing up to show people his ballroom. I love this ballroom. It's an incredible.
SPEAKER_02He loves cats and phantom with the opera phantom of the opera. I don't know if you know that, but Trump is a big Broadway guy.
SPEAKER_09I didn't know which ones he liked, but I do know that he loves Broadway, yeah.
SPEAKER_02He loves the slop. Like the most like over-the-top flamboyant slop. That's Trump's favorite shit. He loves show tunes as well. You know, the idea of him as an espouser of masculinity, you know, we had a word for it, okay? And there is no way. And and I often speak about this to my, you know, my audience is Donald Trump would be happiest if he was currently receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Tony's. Like he was never able to actually put together a play that was artistically valid, but he had started so many people's careers. Imagine if he had just been able to embrace who he was and be the, you know, play guy, the the billionaire fail son who took his inheritance and funded a bunch of plays. That's what he's really for. And that's why he renamed the uh JFK Performance Center in DC to the John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump Memorial Center. Because that's what he cares about. That's what he loves. Anyway, sorry for getting distracted, but Oh no, please. Nationalist and populist themes became central to his appeal, and he embraced viral social media as a strategy to reinforce gains Trump was making with young right-wing men. Kirk embraced the most extreme rhetoric centered on national identity, opposition to immigration, hostility toward political institutions, and distrust of the media. The language of free markets was increasingly overshadowed by appeals to cultural grievance and resentment toward perceived elites. He began to question the legacy of the civil rights movement and attacked Martin Luther King Jr., formerly a canonized secular saint of America, incorporating white nationalist politics firmly into the mainstream of the American right.
SPEAKER_01Where MLK, in my personal opinion, and based on every objective analysis, he actually gave us more race focus and less emphasis on character and conduct. Because here we are 60 years later. Do we talk about race less or more in the last couple of decades? I'm not only blaming MLK for this, but his core driving philosophy was not about a colorblind society. That is a line in one of his speeches. He would actually be closer to a race Marxist, almost akin to a DEI type philosopher, if you go deep into his writings, especially later in his life. So um, and I think we as conservatives and Christians must reconsider some of the mythologies and some of the icons and the symbols that we hold up, especially as we try to reorient our reorient ourselves in a broken culture.
SPEAKER_02As Kirk's position as a Trump stalwart grew his platform, cultural conflicts became the defining feature of his politics. He focused on issues related to gender, sexuality, and virulent opposition to immigrants. During this stage, Kirk's positions hardened against feminist movements, anti-racist scholarships, and LGBTQ rights. He spoke out against women using birth control, claiming that it screwed up female brains, increased depression and anxiety, and urged listeners to discourage loved ones from using it.
SPEAKER_01A lot of them are on birth control too, and birth control like really screws up female brains, by the way. Every single one of you need to make sure that your loved ones are not on birth control. It increases depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation. Birth control is the number one most prescribed medication for young ladies under the age of twenty-five. They will give birth young ladies birth control for pimples, for acne, for to control their moods, their period. It is it is awful, it's terrible. Um and it creates very angry and bitter young ladies and young women. Um that then that bitterness then uh manifests into um a political party that is the bitter party. I mean, the Democrat Party is all about bring us your bitterness and you know, we'll give you free stuff. It's like we'll trade you, you know, bitterness for stuff, essentially. That's like the Democrat Party.
SPEAKER_02Universities were reframed not simply as sites of ideological disagreement, but as adversarial institutions engaged in social corruption. These issues were no longer treated as secondary debates, but as an existential threats to social order. This shift coincided with Turning Point USA's increasing emphasis on viral confrontations, public shaming tactics, and ideological policing within academic spacing.
SPEAKER_09So do you think that he kind of popularized the idea that universities are these like woke Marxist um like breeding grounds uh nowadays, like on the online rights?
SPEAKER_02It all goes back to there's there's a book that I always recommend people read by Nancy McLean, who's a history professor at Duke University called Democracy in Chains. And this ideological crusading against American universities is really the product of the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 60s and 70s. There was a Nobel Prize winner in economics, James Buchanan, I believe is his name, uh, who worked with the Nixon administration to basically try to destroy American higher education. Back then, in the 60s and 70s, it was basically free to go to a public university or very low cost. And they intentionally said that, and this is a quote, that an educated proletariat was dynamite and they needed to filter people towards having an education who were already, you know, a nerd to the system or had debt so that they were focused on like an education as a um vocation for making money, right? When you have that big yeah, you know, five-figure, six-figure debt hanging over your head, you can't question the system, you can't protest, you have to focus on your you know economic viability. And so this is this is kind of a Nixon-era crusade. Are you familiar with the Powell memo? I'm wait, remind me? I might not be. Uh Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, uh, Powell, wrote a memo to the conservative movement saying that they needed to basically build up their alternative media ecosystem and they needed business to get more actively involved in politics. It's a really infamous in American scholarship because it was a you know conspiracy led by some of the most highly positioned people to build a you know countervailing reactionary force to contain, you know, the radical politics of the 60s and 70s, which many people consider to be a refounding of the United States based on racial equality. And so that is kind of where this comes from. It's it's the Nixon administration and those people that were involved in it, they've built this up over time to continue to attack, you know, universities, the press, and incorporate what previously had not been part of, you know, the the Republican Party's framing of institutions. So I think Charlie Kirk is really like the the modernization of these ideas. Yeah. And like the way that it is now being used uh in the Trump administration. Like, for example, they're going after universities and like forcing them to do ideological purges. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09So you're saying like he he brought this shit from the 1970s into you know 2020 or into the 2010s. Like he brought it online.
SPEAKER_02Oh, definitely. He brought it online and he's and he's helped make it a a core tenet of right wing politics in America, which is you know, as I said, universities reframe not as sites of ideological disagreement, but as adversarial institutions engaged in social corruption. You know, and and Donald Trump says. Press, and if you listen to Hitler's speeches or you've studied Nazi Germany, Lugan Presse, you know, is is a key aspect of fascist argument against like an objective press or free press. And uh ultimately, like this is where Charlie Kirk became Charlie Kirk, is he's grabbed onto the grassroots right wing reactionary energy and focused the popular movement on these so-called existential threats to social order. You know, you talked about univers we just talked about universities being a viral threat, and Turning Point USA started Professor Watch List, which is a website that calls on young college students to report professors for sharing liberal or left-wing views or for teaching classes in forbidden areas like gender studies, critical theory, or any form of Marxist analysis. As other conservative political entrepreneurs went viral for direct confrontations with young college students, I'm specifically thinking of Steven Crowder's Change My Mind viral video set where he would go into the like quads of universities and he would put some sort of provocative statement like women don't know math, and then encourage people to come up to debate him on those, you know, ridiculous positions. And then he would post that online having a conversation with an 18-year-old college freshman and showing how he owned her in the marketplace of ideas.
SPEAKER_07Famously the smartest people in the world. Yeah. You guys remember yourself when you were freshman? Yeah. I was so smart, man. God damn it. I was like, these homeless people deserve to be homeless because the free market uh because they never adapted properly to the free market. Us here in the Balkans are our dirty savages, our culture is inferior. We must all aspire to be John Smith from New Jersey, Wisconsin. I miss being a freshman.
SPEAKER_02And, you know, these debates and this content, you know, it took on a name of its own in the online space. These women and these people debating these conservatives were called SJWs. And SJW compilations rapidly grew in popularity among the online right, and Charlie Kirk was quick to pivot. And that's how he started to really blow up on social media. He built one of the most extensive social media followings among U.S. political commentators using TikTok and debate clips. And that was a key part of the expansion that he's had over the last couple of years. His ability to generate that short-form video content helped him reach audiences that traditional conservative media previously struggled to engage. And if you remember in the 2024 presidential election, young men in particular shifted toward the right specifically because, in my opinion, of this form of content, which was short confrontational clips of in-person debates, often with a college student or person of color, usually a young woman. And this success on TikTok was part of that right wing's broader strategy of meeting Gen Z and younger millennials where they actually were, rather than relying on traditional outlets like TV or radio. Over time, Charlie Kirk also incorporated more explicit religious language into his political worldview. Christianity was increasingly portrayed as foundational to American identity rather than as one value system among many. Political disputes were framed in moral terms, dividing society into forces of good and corruption. This flirtation with white Christian nationalism was a key feature of politics near the end of his life. And if you remember, he was engaged in this kind of triangulation between uh Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens. Charlie Kirk himself was constantly harassed by someone who I'm sure will be the uh target of our podcast at some point in the future, Nick Fuentes and the Groipers. He was pro-Israel and wasn't calling as openly as they'd like for white supremacy. And that was the pressure that Charlie Kirk was facing. Uh, this development, you know, it showed the clearest departure between what he started at, uh, you know, that more secular, economically focused conservatism of his early years, and then religious identity became a source of political legitimacy, and secularism was treated as a threat rather than a neutral framework. And the framework, really, if uh honestly, of the founders, who themselves were oftentimes deists and who accepted, you know, the religious diversity of Europe as a given. That was one of the key elements of the founding was to try to leave those sectarian conflicts in the past. His emphasis on Christian moral authority aligned his politics more closely with religious white nationalist movements. And as his influence expanded, Charlie Kirk's role shifted from that of an outsider activist to an institutional power broker. Turning Point USA developed extensive donor networks, campaign operations, and ties to Republican leadership. His rhetoric continued to invoke anti-establishment themes, but his position increasingly reflected proximity to political and economic power. And there's nothing more that demonstrates that than his funeral itself, where the president of the United States, the vice president of the United States, Tucker Carlson were calling for what amounted to an American Christian jihad against the left. Herc occupied a key position in the right-wing ecosystem as an intermediary role, linking political elites, conservative donors, and conservative grassroots by controlling algorithm-driven media environments. This tension between outsider language and institutional authority became a defining feature of his later politics. Opposition was framed as rebellion, even as his organization functioned as a central node in conservative political infrastructure.
SPEAKER_07Isn't that why he pivoted so much to like uh Christian identitarianism from uh doing the whole free market spiel? Because the the the more you represent like uh classic establishment talking points while still wanting to sound like a rebel, uh the more you have to engage in just like pure ideological speech for the sake of ideological speech. What do what do I mean by that in particular? Is like we are the good guys, they are the bad guys because the book says so, right? And you do not have to argue post that point. Well, if you're doing, you know, uh Hurder uh uh free markets, you actually have to make your point against the establishment from time to time, which uh will then make your make your shilling relatively mute.
SPEAKER_06It's uh it's interesting.
SPEAKER_02I think Charlie Kirk was a knowing fascist, and he was pursuing a Schmidtian friend-enemy distinction, and he knew that in order to have a like popular base, they weren't going to be able to do like the pro-corporation, pro-rich rhetoric. They needed to find enemies and they needed to find cultural others. And in America in particular, there is a significant cultural divide between Christian white people and non-Christian or non-religious white people. And Charlie Kirk, you know, and that much of the conservative movement finds its home in this like watered down Christian identity, which fundamentally doesn't mean anything. Because if you know anything about Christian theology, you understand that all these sects have wildly contradictory beliefs about Jesus or the way to live life or what religion actually means. So they have to water that down into this, you know, what they call the Judeo-Christian values, which is an empty set. It doesn't mean anything, but it gives them the identity label of Christian, and that's how you divide the you know, the good people from the bad, the friends from the enemy. And and you know, Charlie near the end of his life was fully embracing the most pestidential, virulent, and open white nationalists. You know, uh he was defending Candace Owens as she promoted like some pretty blatantly anti-Semitic ideas, and he did so to remain floating on the top of the popular base. There was no level that Charlie Kirk would not sink. He was institutionally powerful, but he was focused on remaining atop the heap of the conservative media sphere and linking that with institutional power. He promoted white supremacist theories of great replacement, something that started on, started out in the fever swamps of of web white nationalist websites like Stormfront. He slandered and disdained the legacy of of Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights. He said he wasn't even a good person. He attacked women's reproductive rights and status in the workplace and called for the wholesale targeting of immigrants by Trump. Hell, in the very moment of his death, via gunshot, it was interrupting a debate where he was calling for less control of guns. And infamously, he has said that gun deaths were the necessary cost of freedom. They were worth it.
SPEAKER_01You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won't have a single gun gun. That is nonsense. It's dribble. But I am I I think it's I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost of unfortunately some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal.
SPEAKER_07So how did we get there? How did Charlie become the Kirk? Well, it's time for unlicensed psychology hours with Hugo. Let's dig deep into his life and discover what made Charlie into Kirk. His trajectory from a rejected West Point applicant to one of America's most influential conservative youth organizers within a single decade. His entire life represents a striking example of an almost industrial scale at which paid right wing propaganda operates, and that's exactly what makes him extremely fascinating to me and the boys. Kirk's life was one of remarkable contradictions. A teenager who built a nearly $400 million organization captured the attention of a sitting president and became synonymous with a particular brand of right-wing agitation, all while remaining a loyal servant of big money. He was born on October 14th, 1993, in Arlington Heights, Illinois, a well-to-do Chicago suburb, raised in what he called a moderately conservative home. His father, Robert Kirk, everybody called Kirk from that day is so fucked. His father, Robert Kirk, was an architect with his own firm who had designed and built middle-class luxury estates, including participating in Trump Tower construction. His mother, Catherine Kirk, had been a trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange before retraining as a mental health counselor. His father was a major donor to Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign, but his parents characterized themselves as moderate Republicans, whatever that's supposed to mean, rather than ideological warriors. The political awakening that Kirk himself would later mythologize began in middle school, not as a result of principled engagement with conservative thought, but rather through a very specific cocktail of circumstances and resentments. He read Milton Friedman, as we all do at that age, and became drawn to libertarian economics. But the real wake-up call was the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent bank bailouts. Events that his architect father and trader mother likely discussed around the dinner table with considerable bitterness. When Barack Obama, Obumna, was elected in 2008 and took office in 2009, Kirk, then a high school freshman, experienced what he would describe as a political awakening. Though closer examination suggests it was less an awakening than a hardening of resentment built at home. His classmates would later describe the teenage Kirk as rude, arrogant, and sometimes with a superiority complex. He called teachers he disagreed with neo-Marxists and was frequently dismissive of his superiors in class. When a teacher asked whether guns make people violent, Kirk, as legends say, responded with a rhetorical kick. Do forks make people fat? At least that's what I thought think he sounded as a line that would become characteristic of his entire rhetorical career. False equivalencies masquerading his intellectual rigor. Also, as we all know, most conservatives and in general right wingers, especially men, are just perpetually stuck at the arguments they learned at the age of 15, never allowing themselves to question them. But I know a lot of you are sitting there asking yourselves, uh, how did bro how did 2008 make his parents and him even more right wing? Wasn't that the era when massive banks and corporations stuck it to the little guy and ended up getting away scot-free? Wasn't that the era that made a shit ton of boomers left wing? Well, uh, congrats, you probably had a lovely upbringing, my American friend, if that's what your parents taught you. Conservatives during that era pitched 2008 and its consequent bailouts of banks as free market infringement, and basically blame the whole thing on an overreaching hand of the state, coupled with pinning the fallout on poor people and minorities who would have never gotten their mortgages in the first place had the banks not been, quote, forced to give handouts. Just absurdly ahistorical garbage, making excuse after excuse for the nature of the system, and all of those feelings over facts really bled into young Charlie's mind.
SPEAKER_02One of the things that I think is really important to jump in here and say that the Tea Party movement itself that I mentioned in my section was founded by a Wall Street trader ranting on the trading floor about how he shouldn't have to pay his neighbor's mortgage during the financial crisis when home values were crashing, and that he was protesting against Obama pursuing any kind of stimulus package to prop up the American economy. That is who started the Tea Party movement. And it is unbelievable that the right wing coalesced around such a laughably stupid person.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, absolutely. Like speed up a little bit, and by his junior year at high school in 2010, Kirk was already volunteering for the campaign of Illinois Republican Mark Kirk. No, no relation, I swear. Uh, listening obsessively to Rush Lamb Limbaugh. How do I pronounce that? Limbaugh? Limbaugh. What was it? Limbaugh? Help me here.
SPEAKER_09This this one is on you, Mike. Limbaugh.
SPEAKER_07Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh. Thank you. Rush Limbaugh. Listening obsessively to Rush Limbaugh and becoming steeped in the grievance politics of the Tea Party movement that our friend Mike previously mentioned. He wrote an opinion piece even for Breitbart News, the super infamous right-wing misinformation outlet, in which he and follow follow me on this, alleged liberal bias in high school textbooks. Did we did we learn something now? This essay, which was basically an over-emotional, puberty-ridden Reddit post, led to his first media appearance in Fox business at the age of 17, launching what would become an endless parade of Fox News segments that would sustain his public profile for the next 13 years. Guys, uh different times, right? Like you could make a career out of being a Redditoid. Uh today, I guess there's too much competition. That's that's why we're in the podcast game. Not a lot of competitions. We are going to monopolize the podcast space. All the podcasts will be ours. This is a call to war against every other podcast. Uh there can only be one. We were starting with the program.
SPEAKER_06Oh fuck, shit. Yeah. They they die last.
SPEAKER_02Fuck us on, okay? Fear and you're going down.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Okay, jokes aside, his start as a political shit poster tells us a lot about the entirety of his future trajectory. He did not earn his way to prominence through some sort of original thought or intellectual rigor, but rather by performing outrage on camera for an older cohort of conservative media figures who are hungry for young people's validation. He was an unironic DEI hire, taken up not for the quality of his thought, his skill set, or something else, but because he was young, hung and dumb. Okay, I don't know about the second part, but it just sounded better.
SPEAKER_06Anyways, he could not be hungry back at this point. Uh that one should stay in.
SPEAKER_07I mean, the the the the speed the the the speed.
SPEAKER_02Structural integrity has been undermined.
SPEAKER_07I'm sorry. Okay, I don't know about the second part, but judging by how fast his wife moved on, maybe maybe it might not be correct. Anyways, my boy really starts drinking his Kool-Aid and applies to West Point, the United States Military Academy. He gets rejected, of course. Why? Well, can anyone guess? I'm serious. Guys, can you can you can you guess what this conservative white kid who got his first job handed to him blamed for not getting into university? I'll give you two tries. Try, please. DI. I'm serious. Well, what he would call DI back then. Affirmative action. Jesus, you're so good at your fucking job. Yes, affirmative action. He was passed on by the academy, quote, for a far less qualified candidate of a different gender and a different persuasion.
SPEAKER_02Bullshit. I mean, can I can I just say something here? I know how these processes work because I myself was accepted to West Point.
SPEAKER_06Bullshit.
SPEAKER_02I don't know if you know this.
SPEAKER_06What the fuck?
SPEAKER_02Who the fuck am I working for? I didn't go to West Point, but my point is that he's a dummy and I'm as white as can be.
SPEAKER_07Yep. 100%. I mean, I don't I don't even think we needed to say this, but I completely but thank you. Okay, this is a conversation for later. Yeah, I'll explain some shit later, sure. No, it's very cool. Let's no, this is very good. We're we're developing uh like show lore now. This is very good.
SPEAKER_02Oh no, no, maybe we should cut this out. Cut this out.
SPEAKER_07No, don't don't know. We're developing show lore. This is really good. This is really good. But yeah, definitely uh entrenches eternal victim mentality at that point in his life if he hadn't already done so probably earlier on. But yeah, let's boom, speed up. It's 2012, the same year Kirk graduated from high school and was rejected from West Point. Two seemingly chance meetings would alter the trajectory of his life. The first occurred when Kirk met a gentleman called Bill Montgomery, a 71-year-old retired Tea Party activist and businessman who became his political mentor and a father figure. Or maybe not only a father figure. Montgomery convinced Kirk not to pursue a traditional college education, but instead to quote work the political circuit, a decision that would prove foundational to Kirk's entire career. Using money received as a high school graduation gift is what one does from extremely wealthy 71-year-old men that are basically in charge of the country's third most powerful party.
SPEAKER_02I don't know about you guys, but when I'm 71 years old, I meet 18-year-olds, and I'm like, I can't wait to give this 18-year-old millions of dollars, and I want to spend a lot of alone time with this 18-year-old boy. Continuously, non-stop. Yes. There's there's and then we're gonna work hand in glove. A lot of travel around the country where we have to stay at hotels. Just something to ponder.
SPEAKER_07I I don't know. Freda is from the more liberal part of already exceptionally liberal Europe. Is this normal? Do you think this is this would be normal up there in the north?
SPEAKER_09I don't I do not see any reality in which it is very normal for a 71-year-old to be traveling with an 18-year-old who is, you know, pumping $400 million or whatever it was into and maybe pumping something else.
SPEAKER_02I mean, no, but literally, like this is this is the foundational story, according to Turning Points USA, is that he met an 18 year old boy at a tea party rally and decided he was going, he wanted to spend a lot of time with him and he. He's gonna give him millions of dollars.
SPEAKER_09Like I he's like, he's so bright, he's so mature for his age.
SPEAKER_03He's so mature for his age. Oh no.
SPEAKER_02I mean, he has to be really mature to be lining up with a 71-year-old on politics.
SPEAKER_07But yes, they end up uh co-founding Turning Point USA in 2012. To repeat, when Kirk was only 18. Uh the organization was technically a nonprofit dedicated to educating students about fiscal accountability, free markets, and limited government. But in practice, it was a vehicle for mobilizing young conservative activists and building a personal brand for Charlie. The second crucial meeting, though, uh came later that year at the Republican National Convention, where Kirk, then a political nobody, managed to approach Foster Fries, a wealthy former investment manager and prominent Republican donor. In what Kirk himself has described as a chance encounter in a stairwell, he convinced Fries to finance the young organization with an initial contribution of $10,000, a relatively modest sum that would prove to be seed capital for what became a financial empire. This moment was transformative, not because those ten thousand dollars were especially large, but because it taught Kirk his business model. Extract cash from rich people and parrot their talking points. You don't need grassroots funding, you don't need Patreon supporters, wink wink, in the description below. You don't need 10 side gigs to fund your political activism. You just need uh rich dudes. And it worked. Beginning in 2013, the organization began to attract a steady stream of wealthy conservative benefactors, many of whom remain anonymous or poorly documented to this day. By 2019, TPUSA had grown from roughly 52k in annual revenue to $22 million. With Kirk claiming the organization had chapters in 1,000 high schools and colleges and employed over 40 full staff members. But the real financial explosion came during the Trump years, as we learn from Mike. By 2024, Turning Point reported an astonishing 85 million in annual revenue, a 142% increase over five years. Over its entire existence, from 2012 through mid-2023, TPUSA accumulated nearly 400 million in total donations. An investigation by Forbes revealed the architecture of this funding network, and what emerged was a system of remarkably untransparent processes fueled mostly by a small cohort of ultra-wealthy right wing donors. Yes.
SPEAKER_02That's it. It's just Astroturf. Yep. Hardcore. Yep. The one thing I would say, and and I don't have my notes in front of me on this topic, but there is a right-wing donor network in America. Fuck, what is it called? Um, but basically we have these, you know, the Coke network, we have the Mercers who are a billionaire family, we have, you know, they we have these kind of right-wing fascists that are, you know, super rich billionaires that are funding constant AstroTurf operations. You have like uh there's the fracking billionaires that are pushing, what is that called, with the old dead guy or dying guy? Prager you. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So these networks kind of they just fund everything. And they're looking for anything that pops because they're desperate for a popular base for their unpopular positions.
SPEAKER_07And and organizations like Charlie Crooks are constantly pretending they're popping in order to uh accrue uh pay-to-win levels of money. That that's arguably his his entire genius. He looked at funding first, not content first necessarily, and then just started looping it the same way overtly hyper like overinflated like AI companies do it. You know, you just have to get enough people to believe in it, which then stimulates other people to also believe in it, makes the bubble bigger and bigger and bigger. He just applied this to a media company uh because he knew that uh all of these guys have so much money just laying around that they would really like to give uh right-wing agitation media companies, um, or even individuals, uh, because to an extent they have a relative level of class consciousness and they understand that, you know, in order to keep the status quo going the way it's going, you gotta you gotta have uh have mouthpieces. And he was a very willing mouthpiece. He was able to drain them very effectively. Absolutely. Let me let me read out the top leaderboards here for you. The largest direct donor to TPUSA turned out to be the Wayne Duddelstein Foundation, a relatively obscure Texas foundation established by a deceased Houston property developer, gave $13.1 million. Drack Roth with $8.7 million, Home Depot co-founder, 7.1 million, Charles B. Johnson, former CEO of Franklin Templeton and his wife, combined 46 million. Holy shit. Additional significant backers included William Dunn, founder of Dunn Capital at 4.5 million, Dean Buntrock, founder of Waste Management at 4.1 million, and an array of billionaire connected foundations representing interests in all kinds of corporate sectors. Critically, however, a substantial portion of TPUSA's funding came through donor-advised fund entities that aggregate money from multiple donors but hide who actually gave the cash. Basically, me and Freda hire Mike to run the big money good guy donators fund. Then we put a couple of million in there and let Mike donate to Nazi Man3000, massively limiting our association to said Nazi Man 3000. What's called the Bradley Impact Fund by itself funneled 236 million to TPUSA between 2014 and 2023. I don't know about you, but that is actually an insane amount of money. But you know, we should always remember to mention the little guy, right? Because the organization also attracted approximately, and this is going to fucking murder you, 350,000 to 500,000 small dollar grassroots chud donors. That's not dollars, that's the number of normal everyday Chuds. People who contributed modest amounts, creating a veneer of grassroots participation while the organization was in reality bankrolled by billionaires and their foundations. Imagine donating your last $50 to an organization that has billionaire investors. Some new level of cuckoldry right there, my friends. You need two chairs when you walk into a hotel room, one for your ass and one for your debit card. What Kirk understood, perhaps better than any other figure of his generation, was that the real power in 21st century conservatism lay not in ideas, but an easily exploitable pay-to-win content model blasted all over social media. By the mid-2010s, Kirk had built a media empire that extended far beyond mere campus organizing. He launched the Charlie Kirk Show, a podcast that would eventually become one of the most listened to programs in the conservative media ecosystem. He accumulated millions of followers across social media platforms, wrote books with titles like The MAGA Doctrine, and appeared with absurd frequency on Fox News, where he became a reliable mouthpiece for conservative talking points. But enough about his work. A man isn't what he does, he's what he eats, what he drinks, where he travels, and who he sleeps with. In 2018, while Kirk was operating his nonprofit empire and building his media presence, he met Erica Lane Franzwe, or however the fuck you pronounce that, a former Miss Arizona and college basketball player who was at the time running her own faith-based clothing business called Proclaim in New York City.
SPEAKER_09That entire sent like uh paragraph is insane. Like that's some shit that can only happen in America.
SPEAKER_02Did you see that she was in a CIA video? Yeah, I just said like 2015. Did you see? Like, so uh there people are starting to get even more schizo based on maybe she was an agent.
SPEAKER_09I think you it was proven or whatever that it was literally just like she was hired to to speak, like she was just meant to present something or whatever.
SPEAKER_02Mm-hmm. That's a job that you just get from your faith-based clothing business.
SPEAKER_09Which sounds like a front to me.
SPEAKER_06It it doesn't sound like a real business. It would in any other country, but it would in any other country.
SPEAKER_07But like only in the States can you say this shirt is very Christian. Buy it, it's so fucking Christian. Oh my god, it's so Christian. And then somebody just buys it because it's so Christian, right? I gotta show you Trump's. I would believe that it isn't uh a front. You know what would be a good idea. But that does happen, that does happen in other places well, and with other people. Have you seen Trump's spiritual advisor? Oh, yes.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay. We should do something on those people.
SPEAKER_07That's a that's a great fucking idea. But now I want the producer to uh roll some sexy music. Dootom doom to doom. Okay. One steamy morning, Kirk and Erica met at Bill's Burgers in New York City. He had invited the foxy miss Arizona for a job interview. Reaching out passionately, Kirk spoke words of incredible conservative sexual prowess. I'm not going to hire you. I'm going to date you. I have enough friends already. His words echoing through the burger joint, a sex god's ultimatum. Date me or leave. Uh uh boom. She she's wet, she's down, he he scores. Yeah. Uh uh problematic as uh what you kids like to say nowadays, right? Uh uh, but I leave the the the judgment to to you, I guess. He proposed to her in 2020, just two years after they began dating, and married in 21 in Scottsdale, uh Arizona. The wedding reception uh was funded by TPUSA. I looked at some of the photos, looks like an interesting wedding where he kind of makes it all about himself and his organization. Uh fucking weirdo, dude. You know, it coined yeah, yeah, it coincides.
SPEAKER_02Scottsdale is like getting married in a retirement home. How is it how are you getting married in Scottsdale? Like what?
SPEAKER_07You know what date he did it on? On the fucking ninth anniversary of TPUSA. He made a whole wedding about TPUSA. What but isn't that like That's what every young girl dreams of? Yes. Absolutely. But it's but it's also I know this is cliche, but like it spits in the eyes of the Christian lord he speaks for so often. Like this is the holiest of holies, the binding of two humans into a new entity, the holy family. And yet he allowed business to interject in this holy matrimony. I j I like it's not only cringe as shit, it's not only unromantic, but it's also a perfect symbol of general right wing uh under the umbrella of religion hypocrisy. But yeah, Erica's incorporation into Charlie's Empire was systematic and total. She became a frequent presence at his speaking engagements and public appearances. She co-hosted podcast episodes with him. She launched her own initiatives, but her life would change again. Just eight days after her husband's assassination, she was appointed CEO and chair of the board of Turning Point USA, positioning her to inherit and continue his empire. And that's it. A kid bred to anger, who then did the most he could with his one main quality complaining. He complained his way to journalistic, conservative mainstream. He complained his way into dark money and agitation in the name of regression and bigotry. And he complained his way into his marriage. A professional complainer who, and I'll give him that, I truly will, managed to monetize it. Capitalism sometimes really is a beautiful beast. Complaining for money. What a life.
SPEAKER_01Because of DEI, it begs the question when you see a black pilot, you wonder, you say, I hope they are qualified.
SPEAKER_02Uh you know the one thing is the one thing that I was gonna shoot in and say, but I forgot to, which is Charlie Kirk, his early career was all about how universities are brainwashing people to the left. And he traded on the fact that he was young and people assumed he went to college, but he never did. So he was he was making up shit after having no experience himself at university, at least when he was making these complaints. And so I always found that really funny that you had this guy describing something that was really a fever dream of his own mind.
SPEAKER_09Yeah, like literally an outsider to these spaces he's going to, being like, this is what's happening to your university right now. He's telling to people attending those universities.
SPEAKER_02Right. And he was saying it to boobers who existed in a university environment that was far more radical and far more left-wing than the university experience that we millennials or Gen Zers or, you know, eventually Gen Alpha are experience. And it's so funny because it's like, who is he? He's talking to boomers about an environment that just did not exist. And it it always I always found it really fascinating how successful it was with those generations.
SPEAKER_07Well that that that's his whole spiel, right? And you covered that in part, I covered that in part. He he just uh the people complaining want to hear a particular thing, and you just fucking say it, and uh you get paid a hundred gajillion fucking dollars for it. That that's the whole mechanism, and it's as cliche as it gets, but uh for certain people I guess uh I guess it works. Especially when you're a DEI hire, when you're a young person in this case, so that they can they can confirm their biases because it's not just another boomer saying it, it's now a kid saying it. So yeah. I agree. Freda, go on, my love.
SPEAKER_09It's September 10th, 2025, 12.43 p.m. Mountain Time. Beanie clad conservative influencer Tim Poole posts to Twitter professing insider information, saying, quote, sources tell me Charlie is stable. Please God. It's highly likely Charlie Kirk was already dead at that point. At 2 40 p.m., the president of the United States of America himself announces the death of the podcaster. Quick question to the boys. And you might already know the answer to this. How long did it take for right-wing content creators to start exploiting his death for profit? Hmm. Well, two hours? No, it took seconds. Oh wow. It literally took seconds. There was a TikToker there, or like an Instagram streamer or something at the event. No, you haven't you haven't seen this?
SPEAKER_07Oh, we don't think so. Blood is still blood is still not dry on the ground. It still smells like brains in the air.
SPEAKER_02There is a guy who was running up to steal all the hats from the table.
SPEAKER_09Yeah. Ultimately, yeah, like it's insane. The the fucking grift took milliseconds before it began. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_07And but like the speed at which like you see him dying, you see the hats, you see the cameras, you're like, oh my god, it's gonna go so fucking hard on Amazon. Oh my fucking god, I'm gonna pay so much rent. It that is that wow, that that is special forces. Hire that man immediately and deploy him somewhere.
SPEAKER_09Everyone's like everyone is content brained. Like something big happens, you gotta broadcast it. What you just heard was the Mormon influencer who goes by Elder TikTok, who was there when Charlie Kirk was shot. He's standing right next to the gift shop where another attendee had just tried stealing merch right after Charlie Kirk got killed. With panicking attendees taking cover around him, Elder TikTok is likely the first person to grift over Charlie Kirk's corpse. And he will not be the last. All across the internet, creators seized the moment and shifted their output towards Charlie Kirk. The grift started kicking into high gear and a sort of Charlie Kirk cinematic universe started taking shape. The day after, on 9-11, his body was flown to his memorial service at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, on Air Force II, the aircraft that carries the vice president of the United States. The memorial service was attended by virtually the entire US government cabinet, including President Donald Trump, as well as Elon Musk.
SPEAKER_07I must repeat, on 9-11, that's fucking peak cinema. That is peak cinema. What would be the only better date that this happens on? I mean, uh 1488, but no, we don't have 88 months. Yeah, there's no What calendars are you using?
SPEAKER_06The Aryan calendar. The dagger of the calendar.
SPEAKER_09I'm surprised somebody somebody hasn't made that from where you're from. I mean, I'm sure, you know, I'm sure Vargas up to something, you know. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_06Oh, foreshadowing cards.
SPEAKER_09Yep. As his grieving widow walked onto stage to a massive pyrotechnic show, the turning point USA stream of the memorial service featured scrolling text that read, quote, for a gift of any amount, receive a We Are Charlie Kirk wristband.
SPEAKER_08What the fuck is wrong with this country? Sorry, please. No, it's crazy.
SPEAKER_09And as Hugo told you, Erica Kirk would become the new CEO of Turning Point USA just days later. As the widowed Kirk dried her tears, Moore text scrolled by, reading, Text freedom to seven se to seven 1776 for ways to take action. I'm sorry. It's insane.
SPEAKER_02Oh man, when she walks out on stage and she has the completely bedazzled uh pant suit, it's like Jesus.
SPEAKER_09Yeah, it's it's crazy. It's a memorial service. Like it's it's insane. And I'm not American.
SPEAKER_08If you believe that Charlie Kirk will still look hot in heaven, it's 50% of all money sent to us goes to Fourth Amendment right defenders near you. Like, oh my god, I love this shit.
SPEAKER_09Yeah, it's it's wild. Like, I I'm not American, and I know that everything is a little bit turned to 11 in America, but it's bizarre. Like, this isn't normal even for America. And on the other side of the Atlantic, in my home country of Norway, the state-owned broadcasting service was broadcasting the entire memorial service live, with zero interjection, no additional context about his life, nothing about his actual beliefs beyond what was being said on stage. And before this, most Norwegians probably had no idea who he was, and now virtually everyone was uncritically regurgitating his eulogy exactly the way his allies had wanted. Painting him as a champion of truth, open debate, democratic values, and so on.
SPEAKER_02Can I just pop in and say, imagine the the way that conservatives have reacted, and normal people and institutions have reacted to Renee Good's murder, right? There were actively moments of silence at NFL football games for Charlie Kirk. And you have an innocent woman murdered on the street, and there's basically nothing but conservatives saying how she deserved it. And look at the way that your country's government received. It's like he was a head of state or something.
SPEAKER_09Technically, it's not the government. They're like meant to be uh independent from the government, but it's like it's a government-funded media. Like they're meant to be terminally neutral. So what they did was, you know, they were like, Well, we're neutral. We're just showing what you know they're saying at the memorial service. Which isn't what neutrality is. That's a propaganda event, and you're just showing it to everyone.
SPEAKER_02I'm sure they'll show Xi Jinping's funeral and propaganda unedited.
SPEAKER_09Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, exactly. Like in the exact same way.
SPEAKER_07It was insane how like uh international his uh his funeral was, and his death in general. Like uh to talk about my part of the world, and it was an absurdly viral uh post on X, a photo of a massive mural of Charlie Kirk as a Serbian basketball player or something. But then the only thing that out viraled that mural where it said R.I.P. and he was just as a basketball player because like once he said that like the Serbian team is really good, like Serbian players are really good at basketball, which they are, but of course he co-opted it into some white supremacist bullshit about oh, they're beating black people, which obviously all of these Serbian athletes would never say. So what the fuck? Why are you speaking in their name, right? Nor do they believe it. But yeah, they they painted a massive fucking Kirk basketball player guy. I would argue that's how the that's how the meme started. It started with the first uh the first Kirkification. But uh I felt proud of my uh region because in like seven hours later that was covered in uh in just penises, like all over, all over the the that that graffiti. So I was like, okay, and then Atifa and stuff.
SPEAKER_03He was violently killed because he spoke for freedom and justice, for God and country, for reason, and for common sense. That's so cool.
SPEAKER_06Thank you. That's so fucking good.
SPEAKER_09Everyone was engaging in what's called hagiography, and Mike mentioned this earlier on, from the Christian tradition of writing about saints. Quoting from Charlie Kirk and the making of an AI-generated martyr by associate professor of sociology Art Gibson from the University of Dayton. Quote The person becomes a secular martyr who made a heroic sacrifice. They are portrayed as morally righteous and spiritually pure. It doesn't matter what Charlie Kirk actually believed or what he actually said. When constructing the saintly image, he is transformed into a symbol to be used by the people who are still alive. Another example of this from American politics, which the professor also brings up, is Martin Luther King Jr., whose critiques of capitalism, militarism, and structural racism are often downplayed in favor of a universally palatable story of unity. Quote The elevation of a figure into a saint does more than honor the individual. It turns a political struggle into a sacred one.
SPEAKER_02I think that they really were trying to turn Charlie Kirk into the conservative Martin Luther King Jr., and that's what this project was. And ironically, I think that's what has made him into an object of mockery. Because the kind of like almost inquisitorial enforcement of a religious significance to this killing, when in reality, it was a dumb, annoying astroturf meeting at a Utah university, and he was killed in the moment saying that guns shouldn't be controlled. He's shot by a gun. It's just self-mocking. Like he, as an individual, is a self-negating, self-refuting individual. His very death proved his arguments wrong. And so it what can you do but laugh at somebody like that?
SPEAKER_09I think also the absurdity, like the absurdity of like the fact that the image being presented obviously does not correspond to reality, and the fact that they're trying to make someone, this holy saint-like figure, in a like online ecosystem where everything is ironic and everything is mocked. Like it kind of made it inevitable, I feel like.
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah, trying to that's that's part of why the right wing was able to make some gains in 2024 is mocking the the way that Ernest Millennials said, you shouldn't say this, this, or this, because it's bad. And zoomers in their brain rot fever dreams, they want to mock everything that you hold sacred. So Charlie Kirk has given us all kind of a new moment to say, conservatives are actually worse at being annoying skulls.
SPEAKER_07Exactly. The least cool thing you can do is really, really care about something, especially online. And now we have the entire right-wing ecosystem, not only caring about this guy's death, but trying to, as Freda eloquently put, deify them. That is the least fucking cool thing you can do. And the internet reacted appropriately.
SPEAKER_09Yeah. Now, criticizing a saint is taboo. And this mythmaking around Charlie Kirk very quickly and deliberately transformed into a right-wing offensive against the left. Quoting Morgan Trough in the Ohio Capitol Journal. In the wake of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk's death, his supporters have started a social media campaign, reporting critics to their employers, if users deem they posted negatively about Kirk or celebrated his death. But it's not just perceived celebration of his death that sparked these campaigns to have people deplatformed, lose their jobs, get evicted from their apartments, and so on. You could also say nothing, and that was enough to cause them to come after you. Quoting Rachel Coyle from Ohio's Against Extremism, we are seeing people respond in ways that are very threatening to individuals who maybe do not like the person, but they are not mourning the way they think they should be. If you didn't like Charlie Kirk, if you didn't mourn his death, or if you quoted things he said and believed word for word, which painted him in a negative light, you could be targeted. In Lexington, Tennessee, on September 21st, a 61-year-old retired police officer was arrested for, quote, threatening mass violence. He had posted a Facebook meme of Trump saying, quote, we have to get over it, in response to a vigil for Charlie Kirk in Perry County. We have to get over it was what Donald Trump said about a mass shooting at a high school in a different state. The retired cop was pissed off about kids being murdered in mass shootings, and Charlie Kirk, as Mike pointed out, had famously said, quote, I think it's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment. His criminal charge was obviously dropped because it was bullshit, but only after he had already spent 37 days in an American jail because he couldn't afford a $2 million bail. Like, that's insane, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, typically when you get put into jail in America, there's a cash bail system, and you can go to a bail bondsman and they will put up your bail for you in exchange for a 10% fee. So this man either had to come up with $2 billion cash, which would be returned in 37 days when the charges were ultimately dropped, or he had to just pay $200,000. I don't know about you, but most people don't have $200,000.
SPEAKER_03I don't have that much lying around. Nope. Even a Norwegian doesn't have that lying around.
SPEAKER_07We got insane. He's lying. He's lying. But often you gotta, especially if you're being put in in uh in prison systems and jail systems that are absurdly violent and like underfunded and so on. Uh you are deciding often, even if you have the cash between financial stability and like getting shanked, which is often increasing choice to make or you know getting bed bug bites or whatever.
SPEAKER_09Like Yeah.
SPEAKER_07And even more fucked up shit that I just don't want to say because it's disgusting. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_09Now Vice President Vance even encouraged Charlie Kirk's followers to call people's employers. Adam Goldstein of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said, quote, the government involvement in this does inch this closer to looking like McCarthyism. Joe McCarthy, of course, found not a single communist spy in his rabid search for Marxist infiltrators in the 1950s. But he made a lot of people lose their jobs or destroyed their reputations. I've seen plenty of outrage campaigns like this against people for celebrating someone's death or joking about it, but I've never seen people come after people for not mourning enough. To give an indication of where this backlash is heading, now months after Charlie Kirk's death, a theater professor in Tennessee by the name of Darren Michael was suspended by his university after a whole ass U.S. Senator by the name of Marsha Blackburn put pressure on his university because the professor had reposted Charlie Kirk saying, gun deaths are worth it. His tenured position was reinstated on December 30th, and he was awarded a $500,000 settlement. I think those things are going to keep going in that direction, where firings and such will be overturned because they were quite frankly fucking ridiculous. But not everybody is a tenured professor with money to hire a lawyer. For the people who got doxxed and had their landlord a victim because of the harassment, the damage is already done. The larger voices of the online right who condemned the left for celebrating Charlie Krog's death were, of course, months later all gleefully celebrating when an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Good, a US citizen and a mother of three, in January 2026. You could make an entire episode investigating and contrasting the ways the online right reacted to Charlie Kirk's death, elevating him to sainthood, and the way they demonized this woman and celebrated her death, because she was perceived as an enemy, because she wasn't pro-ice, and she had pronouns in her bio.
SPEAKER_02Did you guys just see that six federal prosecutors have resigned because they were pressured to investigate her widow? The way that the right wing is so disgusting, and the way that they rushed to judgment on this case, they didn't even put out a pretext of investigation of the killing, and instead are investigating the victims, is a surest example of how the fascists are completely and totally uninterested in truth or justice or morality or humanity.
SPEAKER_09Conservative podcaster and former Deputy Press Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, Katie Miller, called legacy media, quote, complicit in violence against ICE officers. Because they quoted the victim's mom and neighbors who had nothing but nice things to say about her. Like, what similar to the Charlie Kirk thing, you don't even have to, like, say anything bad about him, you just have to not mourn him here. If you say something nice about a person who is dead, you are now complicit in violence. Charlie Kirk was one of theirs, and when he was killed, he was elevated to sainthood. Renee Good, meanwhile, was killed by an ice officer, one of their guys, and the circumstances of her death necessitate that she be dehumanized and demonized in an act of retrospective justification. The online right-wing propaganda machine spins into action to retrospectively find reasons for why she deserved it. It's obvious and transparent that there are zero principles involved here. It's all cynical and opportunistic. In Oklahoma, just twelve days after Kirk's death, state lawmakers proposed a bill that would require all state colleges to build a Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza, and to describe him as a civil rights leader. Any college not found in it's insane. Any college not found in compliance would face monthly fines. As you said, uh they want him to be their MLK junior.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and and and obviously he is a complete fraud and didn't even believe in debate. It's just an embarrassment that how degraded the conservative movement it really is when you look at it unabashedly and without any sugarcoating.
SPEAKER_09The way people on the right jumped to elevate Charlie Kirk into a martyr and to use his death to crack down on the left drew a lot of comparisons to the Nazi horsed vessel, who was turned into a martyr for the Nazi Party in 1930. Before any suspect had been apprehended, Joseph Goebbels' newspaper, Der Angriff, was quick to announce it had been a communist attack, and threatened that one of these days it would, quote, eradicate root and branch of the poisonous brood, like one exterminates rats or bugs. This, of course, mirrors many of the conspiracy theories fronted by the online right in the immediate aftermath of Kirk's death, when we knew next to nothing about the alleged shooter. Let me read a quick quote from Daniel Seaman's book on Horst Vessel. Wessel had barely passed away when Goebbels began a targeted effort to build him up as a role model for young people and a future National Socialist Germany. Quote, a new martyr for the Third Reich, he wrote in his diary. The funeral was turned into a major propaganda event by the Nazis, and a lot of important figures of the movement were present, like Goebbels and Hermann Göring. Hitler did not attend. Quoting from Goebbels' diary entry on the 1st of March 1930. Hitler isn't coming, had the situation explained to him over the telephone, and he actually declined. Oh well. Oh my god. At least they got Trump to go to Charlie's. Literally. Though he did spend a lot of time talking about like himself, didn't he? Of course. Yes. Yep. As he does.
SPEAKER_07So is the competition, even with the dead man, okay?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he was visibly annoyed over if people kept talking to him about Charlie Kirk after a couple days. He's like, I like right-wing grifters who haven't been murdered.
SPEAKER_03Maybe I should have been murdered. Maybe you'd have cared more about me. You only talk about the dead guy. Do you want me to die? Listen. Listen, God made sure the bullet missed my ear. It was close, but I dodged it. Someone tried to take a shot. I dodged it. Charlie, he wasn't uh God didn't want him alive. That's it's tough stuff, but it is the truth. Loser.
SPEAKER_07Oh it only sounds like a beef between two gaslighters in a in a in a relationship. Like one, like, I don't know, really cares about a movie character. And that movie character I don't know went through a scene where they were tortured. And like you're watching a movie with your partner, and your partner says, Oh my god, I have such a crush on on this character. Look at like what they experienced. And you immediately like, this is this is Strumpian brain, this is Hitlerian brain. Immediately respond with like, Do you want me to be tortured? They only like him because he's dead. I am not dead. This is why they do not like me as much as him, type of shit. It's it's uh it's truly incredible.
SPEAKER_09Now, I'm not making this comparison to paint Charlie Kirk as a Nazi necessarily. They were both figures of the political right whose death is- Ah no, you're not dead.
SPEAKER_02Okay, Joe. Yeah, right. What is they were both um Charlie Kirk would have been a Nazi in Germany. I don't even think.
SPEAKER_09Like, come on.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_09But like, uh obviously, you know, he's not in Nazi Germany, he's now a new thing, which I think is obviously also really fucking bad. But I don't think like it's productive to just say, like, oh yeah, Charlie Kirk and Horst Vessel, they're the same guy. For one, no, Horst Vessel was a successful martyr as well. I don't think Charlie Kirk was. Vessel was a musician as well, and wrote a song which later became known as the Horst Vessel lead, or the Horst Vessel song, which became a part of the national anthem of Germany under the Nazis. The closest to this that Charlie Kirk got was an AI-generated song called We Are Charlie Kirk.
SPEAKER_02It's curling in the corner. We better play a clip of this right now. We better play a clip of this.
SPEAKER_09Yeah. That song was released six days after his death. Which I'm also pretty sure, and I'm not making this up, it plagiarizes Israel's Eurovision song from the same year. I'm pretty sure it was AI generated in Israel. Yeah, people said like probably the same prompt. Now, Vessel's death allowed the Nazis to construct the image of a martyr to utilize for years in their propaganda. With where things are going right now, I don't see the same happening for Charlie Kirk. Speaking of AI, that brings me to another real part of his legacy. That's fucking weird as well. I mentioned the hagiographers, and Hugo mentioned Kirkification. Um Ted Cruz, Senator from Texas, posted AI images of Charlie Kirk being embraced by Jesus, while others posted pictures of him, portraying him as a literal 13th apostle. Alongside this, a lot of people started AI generating satirical images, replacing people's and characters' faces with Charlie Kirk. Wikipedia's dictionary has its own entry, unquote, Kirkification. Because of the way AI image generation works, by scrubbing the internet for patterns that it imitates, the sheer amount of Charlie Kirk images being posted around the internet is possibly causing an incestuous loop where AI models pull from other images of Charlie Kirk, which effectively could poison the dataset. AI models can over time become inaccurate as the data they pull from is also generated by themselves. This creates a feedback loop that compounds. This is also why a lot of AI pictures got that piss filter from that Studio Ghibli trend that happened like a year ago.
SPEAKER_02You call it feedback errors, I call it a a delight. Or Charlie Kirk eating hamburger.
SPEAKER_09Burkir, Charlie Kirk, Burkir, or in this case, the feedback loop is causing your grandma's AI-generated Facebook posts to bear a striking resemblance to Charlie Kirk. So where is the Grifter-powered Kirk cinematic universe now? Charlie Kirk's best friend, Candace Owens, despite their genuine relationship, is also a strong contributor to the KCU. In early October, as the story started settling with an alleged shooter arrested and a lot of the early conspiracy theories debunked, she said the following. She suggested She suggested that there was a federal conspiracy surrounding the murder and investigation. She's right. She later would go on, yeah. I mean, where's your evidence, Mike? Right now, where's your sources? My sources are Israel did it!
SPEAKER_07Candace is right. His sources are the uh Candle Sowen's YouTube channel.
SPEAKER_02I mean a reputable source. Come on. She is one of the leading right-wing influencers. Are you saying that right-wiggers would follow a moron? I mean who has who just says they're the truth comes to them in a dream. Is that is that what the right wingers would elevate as their top influencer?
SPEAKER_09Come on. Of course not. They're smarter than that. Anyways, so she did go on to suggest Israel had something to do with it. And that the alleged shooter was not solely responsible. This also is tied into some weird shit with um the stuff that Candace Owens has been bringing up about how Emil and Lacron's wife is supposedly not like that she's supposedly trans or something, and that uh the French Foreign Legion is trying to assassinate Candace Owens. It's a whole like other Candace Owens uh cinematic universe thing. Uh that's for a different time. Erica Kirk even met with her to get her to shut up about her dead husband, which seemingly did not work. After their meeting, Candace Owens reaffirmed her belief that Charlie had been betrayed by insiders, specifically also TPUSA insiders, the government, and possibly Israel. She called the evidence presented in the police affidavit, quote, fake and gay, which I hadn't heard since like fucking 2014 or whatever.
SPEAKER_03Fake and gay.
SPEAKER_02She's so right on this, though. Um I don't know about you guys, but I think we should stop funding Israel because they killed Charlie Kirk. True. True story. Holy shit. Like it's a it's what could he even say? I mean, this is gonna be the reason America stops funding Israel. It's like 20% of the country thinks Israel did it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Imagine the incredible plot twist, dude. That would be the complete annihilation. Obviously, that's not gonna happen, but that would be the the all the the the most cinematic end to the Kirk Cinematic Universe. The one cause their endgame never give up on eventually became
SPEAKER_09Okay, um all of this has created drama on the right, of course, and drama means clicks. Clicks that are keeping the Kirk Cinematic Universe alive months after his death. Tucker Carlson and Meghan Kelly, both formerly working for Fox News, now turned podcaster, as everyone does eva eventually, have defended Candace Owens, while the Beanie clad Tim Poole and the neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, also podcasters, have described Candace Owens' actions as quote, evil. Quoting L. Reeves' article on this on CNN. Nick Fuentes has said she's a narcissist hurting America. Which is a funny thing for him to say. Charlie Kirk popularized narratives and mottos that have harmed marginalized people. He's been a prominent figure in American white Christian nationalism. He spread falsehoods about history, particularly about the US Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, in ways that have destroyed right-wingers' ability to understand that history. But in my mind, the real legacy of Charlie Kirk is content. From his so-called debates on campuses, where he cut content of himself owning students with prepared talking points, to how his death itself became content within seconds of him being shot, or how Candace Owens, still to this day, is turning his death into content. To the AI-generated videos of Jeffrey Epstein intercepting the bullet that killed Kirk, or the fact that zoomers are using his name as a byword for getting shot, or turning his name into neologisms of low-key, Kirk, and genuinely becoming low Kirk annually. It's all content. Somehow his person, as terrible as he was, has become subsumed by content. Charlie Kirk, both to the right and the left, is just content to be used for profit or to advance someone else's political project. In a now deleted post, I saw someone else compare Charlie Kirk to Horst Vessel, which is why I brought it up. They pointed out how the Wright desperately wanted Kirk to be an equivalent martyr of the right, but instead he became a zoomer brain rot meme. They described Charlie Kirk's legacy as a quote, far less sympathetic version of Harambe. And that's low Kirk canuinely true. That's where we're at right now. The Wright seems to have failed to create their martyr, or at least utilize him as a pretext to carry out a violent backlash towards the left. The backlash we did see, amounting mostly to a social media bullying campaign, turned out to be a flash in the pan. The quote, million Charlie Kirks, they promised, ended up being AI generated.
SPEAKER_07Well, dear listeners, I hope you enjoyed the first episode of the Reaction Podcast. I, for one, felt extremely proud of what we managed to do in episode one, which, to be perfectly honest, should work as a teaser of a teaser of a teaser of what we will be bringing to your beautiful eardrums in the coming days, weeks, months, years, or if you allow us that privilege, decades. Boys, are you happy with how today went? Is this what you expected? A podcast production experienced feels like. Was this uh Loki cringe or low-key croked up?
SPEAKER_02I just want our audience to bring us their favorite reactionary figures, and I want them debating over who we should go after, or excuse me, uh, explain next because I feel like this is a desperately needed part of the internet today, is an understanding for normal human beings. What exactly is going on in the right and who these people really are. So that's what I'm desperate to do, and I feel like this first episode really, really pulled it off well. You guys did an amazing research, and you brought incredibly funny uh examples of why Charlie Kirk is who he is and why he's received as he has been. And so thank you guys so much. I'm really excited to keep this project going. So I hope the audience is as responsive and as supportive as I know they will be.
SPEAKER_07Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Freda.
SPEAKER_09Uh I I have not done a lot of podcasts, and this went so much better than I could have like hoped for. I think I think you guys like knocked it out of the park. I think we've got something fucking awesome here. And I think, like Mike said, this stuff is important because one of like the big battlefields in the culture war and like in politics and stuff like uh right now is on the internet. And there are a lot of people out there who uh kind of like are doing politics the old-fashioned way. They're not talking about what's happening on the internet, they're not like understanding it. And uh it kind of makes it so that you have moments like, you know, 2016 where some people claim they memeed the president into the White House, and uh media is like kind of following like years behind, not like understanding what happened.
SPEAKER_02The other thing is I I hope to see this I hope to see this podcast as a place where we play offense. So much of the online right is random disgusting critons going on the offense and attacking people and dredging up a slime-covered pile of incels who are constantly harassing people. I want these people to be the target. I want these people to receive incoming fire. I want them to become targets of mockery, you know, and I feel like a lot of the time the left is so earnest in explaining our worldview or trying to defend against slander that we don't spend enough time going on offense. And I desperately feel that people want to see a counterforce to this kind of right-wing reactionary harassment, you know, regime we're all living under. And I hope that this podcast can become the battlefront, the vanguard of a pushback against the far right. Beautifully put. Absolutely. One one more thing that I want to say is I want the audience to be part of this creative process. I will if you're listening to this and you know a reactionary that we should target or a person who would be fun to come and talk to us about their personal nemesis. I want to hear those people. And I want you to point us in those right directions. I want this to be a two-way street, not just us lecturing an audience, but an audience who's part of the creative process. I want you all to have ownership. So when you invest in this podcast, I want it to feel like something you're a part of, not just something that you're, you know, giving tokens of appreciation to, but rather an investment in. Link in the description. Participate. Help us make a better show and help us push back against the right by going to our Patreon at uh the reaction pod, a reaction cast. I can't remember what it is.
