Charlie Kirk and the Rise of Political Violence

0:00The way that we go back to the era that we all look at and say, wow, we could raise our kids without fearing for their lives, or we could go to church without seeing an armed police officer, or go to our synagogue without having to worry about having private security. The way that we get back to that is speaking up. It's doing exactly what Charlie did. And of course, he practiced martyrdom in the most extreme way, which hopefully none of us will ever have to experience, but we can practice it in small ways every day. Today, we're sharing a conversation from Honestly with Barry Weiss at the Free Press, featuring A16Z general partner, Catherine Boyle.

0:34In the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, Catherine reflects on courage, martyrdom, and what it means to speak up in a political climate where words and debate are increasingly met with violence. Let's get into it. From the Free Press, this is Honestly, and I'm Barry Weiss. Yesterday in broad daylight, in front of a crowd of some 3 ,000 people at Utah Valley University, Charlie Kirk was murdered. Charlie was not just a husband, not just a father, and not just one of the most prominent young conservative voices in the country. He made his name for doing something fundamental to the American project, debating and disagreeing out loud.

1:18He famously said, when people stop talking, bad stuff happens. His thing was going to campus, setting up a tent, and asking people to talk to him to change his mind. And people, tens of thousands of them on campuses across the country, would line up to do so, to challenge him, often fiercely debating. And that was the point. I don't think you can think of someone in American life, whether you agree with him or not, who was more of a living embodiment of the First Amendment. As our columnist Matt Continetti wrote in the Free Press, the attack on Charlie Kirk didn't just deprive a family of its center.

1:59It struck at the ties that hold a free society together. Open assembly, civil debate, viewpoint diversity. And like every terrorist attack, the shooting was meant to instill fear. In this case, fear of speaking out, fear of exposure, and fear of making a difference. As shocking as the murder is, and it is very shocking to see that video, perhaps more disturbing or as disturbing is the response. Some of our fellow citizens celebrating, yes, celebrating his death, just because they disagreed with his politics. I have felt very shaken by this event, and I wanted to talk to people who elevate the conversation and who I learn from.

2:52So today, as a Free Press Live, I head on Ben Shapiro, Senator Mark Kelly, Matt Continetti, Catherine Boyle, Constantine Kissin, and our own Eli Lake and Maya Sulkin to reflect on Charlie's life, on his assassination, on this awful moment in American history, and to talk about how we can, if we can, come back from the brink. Stay with us.

3:26I want to bring in now two incredible people who I always learn from, and I'm sure you do too. You're going to know their names. One is Constantine Kissin and the other is Catherine Boyle. Constantine is the host of the Trigonometry podcast and his book is called An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West. His sub stack is his name, Constantine Kissin. He is joined by the wonderful Catherine Boyle. Catherine is a venture capitalist, a partner at A16Z. She oversees the incredible American Dynamism project there. And she's also, and I'm very proud of this, a member of the board of the Free Press, Catherine and Constantine.

4:03Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having us, Barry. The two of you wrote things on the internet over the past 24 hours that I felt touched me in a deep way beyond just my head, but touched my heart. And so one idea is that the downstream effects of this are going to be the obvious ones, the chilling effect. What you have been writing about over the past 24 hours on Twitter is a very different sort of downstream effect of it. And I want you to explain it. You wrote on Twitter, one of the things you've written is that a lot of us woke up today with a new mission. And I want you to explain what you mean by that.

4:39Yeah, yeah. No, yesterday I said we're entering an era of the martyr. And this is an idea that is not just because of Charlie's assassination. It's something that's been on my mind as a Catholic after the Annunciation shooting of two children who became martyrs that day, unwittingly. And so it's something I've been reflecting on a lot. And I tweeted, you know, courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It comes from Chesterton's great book, Orthodoxy. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a willingness to die. And the reason I've been talking so much about martyrdom is just to be perfectly candid.

5:18I was in a business meeting when I heard the news about Charlie. And I'm not a personal friend of his. I've met him a few times, but I have just the utmost admiration and respect for him and his project. And when I heard the news, I stepped out and I just went outside and started praying. And the prayer that I prayed was, please, God, do not make this man a martyr. And it just kept saying it over and over and over again. And then, of course, hours later, we found out that indeed he was martyred. And so I spent some time last night going back through this quote that just came back to me about what is courage?

5:51What is this courage of really truly being this juxtaposition of a zest and something that is so worth living for? The zest for life. You have it so deeply that you are willing to die. And went back into this book, which I would recommend all of your listeners read if you haven't read it. in some ways I think Charlie would have been a huge fan of it and he probably was a huge fan of it. But the juxtaposition, it sort of hit me like a ton of bricks, was he was talking about that there are two choices. And it was another quote that I posted today. The choices between martyrdom, which is again, living your life to the fullest, to the point of willing to die for something outside yourself, and suicide.

6:30And when I first read it, I said, well, suicide really doesn't have anything to do with this. But of course, you all have been writing for years about the suicide of the West, about what is happening in this country, what is happening in civilization. And there really are two choices now. It is the choice of taking on that martyrdom, taking on, we have to stand up for what we believe. Even normal people like myself, who often use the excuse, I'm not a professional writer or commentator anymore. I don't need to be public in my beliefs about everything because that is not my role. We now have the choice to choose between, are we going to be martyrs for the things that we believe?

7:03Are we going to be like Charlie? Or are we going to be like those children who were killed for their faith and continue going to our churches and our synagogues and our places of worship, even knowing that we will potentially be killed? Our children will be killed in those places. Or are we going to be martyrs for the truth? Are we going to be martyrs for this country? Because the other choice is complacency with suicide. And, you know, I was listening to, you know, Matthew, who came on and spoke about rhetoric. And I understand there's rhetoric now that's happening on the internet that feels very heightened.

7:36But I think that that seriousness and that heightenedness is important, that we are having to make these choices. And it might sound extreme to say we have to be martyrs for the things that we believe. But I do believe that what we saw yesterday was a true martyrdom of someone who exemplified the highest order of what that means, which is using words, which is using debate, which is going out and saying what he believes, knowing that there is incredible danger there because he believed in something greater than his own life. And frankly, his own family, which is the thing that is, I think, tearing on every mother and father who has children that age.

8:09Because I think he exemplifies the best of what we are supposed to be called to be doing, which is to be martyrs for God and for country and for truth. And that's why people like me who don't know him are so touched and moved by what happened to him yesterday. KB, for people that are listening and tuning in, and I know people feel so moved by the words you're sharing, but who think to themselves, I didn't really know who Charlie Kirk was. It's horrible that a father and husband was murdered. He seemed like a good guy. But I don't see myself in what Catherine's saying. I just want things to go back to normal.

8:47This is a thing that we hear a lot right now that, you know, I just want to go about my life. I want things to go back to normal. what's your message to the person that hears the idea of suicidal civilization or martyrdom and thinks, I don't see myself in that. I want you to speak if you can to that person who sees themselves as an, as an, as a normie that has a lot going on in their life. Yeah. I mean, and I sympathize with them, right? Because my, my job is not what you all do. Um, but I think the important thing is that, you know, I, as I said, I woke up with a new mission. I feel called to be much more vocal because I have friends like you and people who are putting themselves out there day in, day out.

9:24And there is not only safety in numbers, but the way that we achieve normalcy in this country and the way that we go back to the era that we all look at and say, wow, we could raise our kids without fearing for their lives or we could go to church without seeing an armed police officer or go to our synagogue without having to worry about having private security. The way that we get back to that is speaking up. It's doing exactly what Charlie did. And of course, he practiced martyrdom in the most extreme way, which hopefully none of us will ever have to experience, but we can practice it in small ways every day in our university classrooms where we say what we're thinking or we can do it with our business associates.

9:59We can say the thing that we're actually thinking. And I think that's what we are called to do, to do it in a way of practicing martyrdom every day where yes, we will possibly lose some things, possibly lose some friends, but that's how we get back to that normalcy that everyone is craving and the America that people all wanna get back to. So I'm committing myself to do that in small ways. not in the way that Charlie did, but in the small ways. And I hope I never am in a circumstance where that happens to me, right? But in the small ways where I know that I'm going to be sacrificing, but it's for this greater good of getting back to exactly what you just said.

10:32Constantine, do you want to jump in? Yeah. I wish I felt that there was some sort of way of going back to, there's no going back to anything. You can't move back. You can only move forward. And we do not get to choose the times that we live in. And the times we live in are what they are. I wouldn't even put a label on it at this point. They just are what they are. We do not live in the age of normalcy. We live in the age of extremism. That's just a fact. And so we are going to have to reckon with that and act accordingly. Now, one of the things that I think is clearly, I don't know if you talked about this with Matthew when you were talking about rhetoric, because I jumped on fairly late.

11:14But we have to recognize that quite a lot of us, even though we've been willing to say something, we've nonetheless been very careful to not challenge some very, very important and very false claims about reality that have been being made for a long time. And one of them is this idea about words being violence, which we heard initially. Then we heard that silence was violence during the summer of BLM. And all of these things are being called violence, which are not violence. And the reason this really matters, Barry, is that once you say words are violence, or once you say that silence is violence, well, historically speaking, our understanding of violence is that if you are violent towards me, I'm entitled to be violent back towards you.

12:00So if we allow these realities to be rewritten in this linguistic way, we end up in a place where, let's be honest, if you look at the polling of Gen Z in particular, there's quite a lot of people. I mean, we've lost a good chunk of a generation to a mind virus that tells them that actually it's okay if you are upset about big pharma or insurance companies, CEOs. It's actually, if someone goes and murders one of them, that's actually a good thing. Let's celebrate that person. And on and on it goes. So there's a re -education project that needs to happen in America and across the West. And it starts with our own children.

12:35It starts with us taking responsibility as parents for reminding and very powerfully reinstating the key messages and distinctions of Western civilization. And one of them is that there is a big difference between words and violence. And just because your feelings are hurt or just because someone has a different political opinion to you, you're not entitled to punch people you wrongly label as Nazis. We lived through that era. And if there's one hope I have for this tragedy is that the result of it is we simultaneously stop taking this nonsense seriously and also take it so seriously that we actually begin to address these lies in a very powerful and profound way.

13:16And this has to be the moment when we all say enough of your bullshit. Words are not violence. Silence is not violence. Violence is violence, and it's completely unacceptable, and it has to end. But that, I think, is a generational project because, as I say, we have been miseducating our young people for a long time, and the circumstances of their life are more challenging with the rise of social media, with the rise of atomization, with the rise of powerful economic currents that affect people's lives. And that is a fight we're going to have to win. But to win it, we're going to have to fight it properly first.

13:53One thing I want to pick up on here, and I'm curious, both of your answers to this is what Konstantin is saying about us living in the era of extremes. I don't think the extremes are the majority, but I think the extremes feel like the most generative and sort of alive place right now. I think that is certainly true culturally and politically. And I think one of the things Matt mentioned earlier in this conversation is this idea of sort of like bringing back the center. And I think most people hear the center and they think like an absence of passion. They think about like a negative identity that is the opposite of what the extremes are offering right now, which is profound charisma and power.

14:36And I wonder, you know, Catherine, I hear a little bit of what you're saying, I know you would never phrase it as bringing back the center, but speaking up for what used to be called common sense and normalcy, decency, civility, the things that we used to think of as water, we didn't even notice it until it went away. How can we, you know, and whatever language you want, bring, like, how can we make that charismatic? Because that is the thing that I think is essential if the extremes are going to be, if the extremes are not going to become the mainstream. Yeah. Well, the irony of, I think, the, you know, the murder of Charlie is that he was not the extreme.

15:17He was representative of exactly what you were talking about. And he was the right -wing version of that. He went on college campuses and he debated in a way that in some ways looks very tweet. Like you don't see photos of Charlie Kirk around the internet holding machine guns and threatening violence. He was the man who went to campus and would talk to anyone. So he is an example. And, you know, it's the thing about what's so horrific about martyrs is, you know, a lot of the tweets that are going around about, you know, his view is someone asked him, what do you want to be remembered for? And he said, I want to be remembered for my faith.

15:51I want to be remembered for my faith in Jesus Christ. And I always point out that Jesus Christ never picked up the sword. And a lot of people will feel called to anger and violence in Charlie's name, just as some people feel that way in Jesus's name. But the point of martyrdom and the point of I think what his project stood for is it did not stand for violence. It stood for debate. It stood for dialogue. And so I think in some ways, the extremes, if they are looking for a cause, it is the opposite of what his cause was, which was to engage with one another, to have proper dialogue, to have dissent, to meet your enemies, right?

16:31And to not even think of them as enemies, to think of them as people you can convert to your cause. And I think that's a very important part of this is that we cannot call people who are on the left or the right extremists when they are part of what the center is, which is speaking, which is debating. As Constantine said, it's putting your voice out there, but it is not taking up arms. It is not violence. It is not silencing the other side's view because that would mean that Charlie died in vain and we cannot have that. I think one of the things that's just so disorienting is that for those familiar with the kinds of things Charlie Kirk did.

17:09He's just about the most mainstream conservative, magnanimous conservative that you would ever hope to encounter. And yet there is just a chasm between the reality of who he was and the way that he's being talked about on certain cable networks who I don't even need to name. And that is enraging to many people because it sort of creates what Ben opened this conversation with talking about, which is a sort of permission structure in which violence is acceptable against people who sort of fall so well outside the Overton window of what's normal in American cultural and political life, when he was so deeply inside what has always been considered the 40 -yard lines.

17:58Constantine, I want to just bring in a little bit of news, which is that as we're having a discussion, the Wall Street Journal put out a photo of the person of interest in the shooting. It was already going around online, but it's now official. And the FBI is offering a reward of up to $100 ,000 for any information. As you both know, but as people just tuning in will want to know, a high -powered rifle, including ammunition engraved with transgender and anti -fascist ideology. CNN, I believe, described it as cultural slogans, which was incredible, was recovered in a wooded area where the shooter fled.

18:38I wonder if there's anything that either of you want to say about, I mean, there's a way of seeing this, which is, you know, there's political extremists and violence on both sides. That is always true. Many people are mentally ill. Many people in a country awash in guns can pick up guns and kill other people. But there is a specificity to this ideology, which, if true, also drove the shooter at the Annunciation Church, at the mass that Catherine was talking about. And if I think back even to five or six years ago, there was this trope that Antifa wasn't really a thing. It was some kind of imagined construct that Antifa was actually the same thing as our great -grandparents who went and fought the Nazis.

19:28They're simply anti -fascists. And who has trouble with anti -fascists? Konstantin, I wonder if you want to comment on that. Well, it comes back to what I said, which is we have to stop pretending that when people say ridiculous things, those things are acceptable to discuss. The things that have happened to the words Nazi, fascist, over the last decade, disgust me more than almost anything else that this woke progressive extremism has done. Because I've been saying this for many, many years, Barry, as you know, if you truly believed you're a person of passion and principle, if I truly believed, if Catherine truly believed that Hitler was here and about to take over the United States government or the British government, would it not be our duty to pick up a rifle and go to the front line?

20:23So when we allowed these people to use words like Nazi and fascist, and whenever I say we, I don't just mean me, you, and the three of us. I mean our culture. When we didn't say in shock and horror, how dare you? How dare you call somebody a Nazi? I mean, we have this in Britain, David Lammy, who was until recently our foreign secretary, and is now the deputy prime minister of this country. He's repeatedly called people in British conservative movements Nazis. We just had a former Labour politician just accuse Nigel Farage of being like Adolf Hitler, right? When you have this type of rhetoric, there will be people who are, of course, tempted to take that literally.

21:08Some people will be mentally ill, and that will be their cover. But my point is, we have allowed these terms and these labels to be used with such careless abandon that I think we've become completely desensitized to just how inaccurate, horrific, and unacceptable these claims are. And so when you have CNN or MSNBC or left -wing publications in Britain allowing this type of thing and not challenging people who say these sorts of things, I think that inevitably contributes to a climate when people who are labeled as such will be killed. I so agree with what you just said, Constantine. And the thing that I think you said earlier about we can't go back to normalcy is that the reason why things got so bad is because normal people who just wanted to keep their head down ignored it.

22:00They said, okay, I'm not going to question it. I just want things to be normal. I'm just going to sit there and take it. I'll do whatever is asked of me at work. I'll change my LinkedIn. I'll put my pronouns up. I'll do whatever, even if we didn't believe in it. And I think we have now seen the consequences of not taking a stand as normal people. And so that I think is the call is that now all of us have to call that out to say that, yes, rhetoric and words have power. And if we hear someone using words incorrectly, we have to debate them. We have to tell them that they are wrong and we can no longer be silent.

22:37Catherine Boyle, Constantine Kisson, thank you so much for joining me on a really emotional day. It's really wonderful to see two friends. Thank you.

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23:38Thank you.