Do you realize what they did to Charlie Kirk?

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00:01
Speaker David Pakman
They have destroyed the legacy of Charlie Kirk. They've essentially used him and now they're done with him and they have thrown his legacy in the trash.
00:11
Speaker David Pakman
Let me explain what I mean.
00:13
Speaker David Pakman
This story really starts at Utah Valley University, where Charlie Kirk was under this tent, sort of on stage, not a physical stage, but on stage in the sense of doing an event, uh for Turning Point USA, it's one of these, you know, ask me anything types events, and he is shot in the neck. The shooter is identified as 22-year-old Tyler Robinson. He's arrested. Investigators recover the rifle and text messages later show Robinson saying he was targeting Charlie Kirk because he had enough of his hatred.
00:47
Speaker David Pakman
So those are the facts and sort of the circumstances, and that barely lasts a few hours because almost immediately the people who claimed to love Charlie Kirk the most started to tear his legacy apart.
01:00
Speaker David Pakman
Now you might say, wait, what? What do you mean?
01:02
Speaker David Pakman
I'm going to explain exactly what happened.
01:03
Speaker David Pakman
At first, the response was sort of predictable. Uh grief and anger, um calls that he is a martyr and a hero and a prophet. And then AI images start circulating where Charlie is, you know, glowing and ascending, appearing to followers like a modern Jesus going up into heaven. Trump awards him a posthumous presidential medal of freedom.
02:22
Speaker David Pakman
We had the stadium full of people memorializing his death as the moment that uh has maybe saved Western civilization, or if he had lived, he was going to save Western civilization.
02:23
Speaker David Pakman
So there was this reverence, but underneath it, there was something else that was happening.
02:30
Speaker David Pakman
And it was suspicion.
02:32
Speaker David Pakman
It was paranoia.
02:33
Speaker David Pakman
It was conspiracy.
02:34
Speaker David Pakman
And it wasn't really coming from his critics, it really increasingly has come from Charlie Kirk's own side. And now with a few months of distance, we can go back and look at the hit job that they essentially did on his legacy from the beginning. When the FBI released the shooter's texts, right-wing commentators, some said, these feel kind of fake.
03:26
Speaker David Pakman
It's scripted. It's too clean, it's too convenient. The idea that one lone kid would do this or could do this, it didn't really sit right with them.
03:47
Speaker David Pakman
So they started the rewrites of the story.
03:48
Speaker David Pakman
Candace Owens openly saying, Israel was involved.
04:00
Speaker David Pakman
No caveats, not quietly saying it, just like, Israel was involved.
04:06
Speaker David Pakman
He was about to turn on his support for Israel.
04:12
Speaker David Pakman
And others echoed it.
04:15
Speaker David Pakman
The the Mossad was involved.
04:20
Speaker David Pakman
Or the CIA or the deep state.
04:23
Speaker David Pakman
It kind of doesn't matter, right?
04:26
Speaker David Pakman
It's like a pick your villain, pick your own adventure.
04:30
Speaker David Pakman
Sort of thing.
04:31
Speaker David Pakman
And then the timing was folded in.
04:33
Speaker David Pakman
Right around the 9/11 anniversary, so it must be that something bigger is going on.
04:50
Speaker David Pakman
And this is kind of how the logic or or lack of logic works now.
05:05
Speaker David Pakman
Then came the YouTube videos.
05:07
Speaker David Pakman
Freeze frame breakdowns, like the Zapruder film of the killing of John F. Kennedy with so-called ballistics experts who aren't really experts and people claiming Charlie couldn't have been shot from where the police say he was shot.
05:31
Speaker David Pakman
And videos insisting the bullet came from behind or the other side or not where investigators said the bullet came from.
05:34
Speaker David Pakman
Others said, oh, well, there must have been multiple shooters.
05:39
Speaker David Pakman
If you listen carefully, you hear multiple shots.
05:43
Speaker David Pakman
Or the shooter was just a patsy that they found.
05:44
Speaker David Pakman
Remember, by the way, that anecdotally, we've looked at some of these claims.
05:55
Speaker David Pakman
We did a video ourselves about the he was really shot from behind thing.
05:56
Speaker David Pakman
And I found the claims to be completely without merit.
06:02
Speaker David Pakman
They didn't feel compelling or accurate in any way.
06:04
Speaker David Pakman
And so where we ended up was with a lot of the same people who spent years mocking conspiracy culture.
06:12
Speaker David Pakman
Now producing Zapruder style conspiracy films about Charlie Kirk.
06:20
Speaker David Pakman
So then we've we've got that.
06:21
Speaker David Pakman
Um, but then it got even worse.
06:22
Speaker David Pakman
AI started making things even more confusing.
06:30
Speaker David Pakman
And X's, the former Twitter, X's AI system misidentifies suspects and generates distorted enhanced images that aren't really enhanced.
06:40
Speaker David Pakman
And at one point, even law enforcement shares incorrect visuals before pulling them back.
06:48
Speaker David Pakman
And every one of these mistakes becomes fodder for the conspiracy theorists.
06:55
Speaker David Pakman
Oh, law enforcement shared an image and took it back.
06:58
Speaker David Pakman
Clearly there's a cover-up.
07:00
Speaker David Pakman
So we end up in this situation where nothing is real, which I write about in my book, The Echo Machine.
07:05
Speaker David Pakman
The shooter's not really the shooter.
07:10
Speaker David Pakman
The motive's not really the motive.
07:12
Speaker David Pakman
The evidence isn't really evidence.
07:14
Speaker David Pakman
The death itself, according to some corners of the internet, wasn't real.
07:20
Speaker David Pakman
With videos purporting to uh uh show Charlie Kirk after the shooting showing up in Japan.
07:28
Speaker David Pakman
Or I don't even remember where the hell it was.
07:30
Speaker David Pakman
And and this is the part that really is the crux of what I'm talking about.
07:35
Speaker David Pakman
If you actually believed that Charlie Kirk mattered, if you believed that his ideas mattered,
07:45
Speaker David Pakman
you wouldn't need to erase the reality of what happened to honor him.
07:50
Speaker David Pakman
You wouldn't need to say it was the Mossad or Netanyahu and Bill Ackman were worried he would turn on Israel.
07:59
Speaker David Pakman
So they had him killed or any of that stuff.
08:01
Speaker David Pakman
You wouldn't need to do it.
08:05
Speaker David Pakman
You wouldn't need to say that there are fake texts or secret shooters or any of it.
08:09
Speaker David Pakman
But the thing is that the modern right-wing doesn't know how to process anything without turning it into a cinematic narrative.
08:16
Speaker David Pakman
It can't just be what it was.
08:19
Speaker David Pakman
They don't want a political assassination carried out by a disturbed individual.
08:28
Speaker David Pakman
They want a story where their side is so important and so threatening that it had to have been shadowy global forces that intervened.
08:35
Speaker David Pakman
And in this process, what they do is they hollow out Charlie Kirk.
08:42
Speaker David Pakman
He's no longer a real person when this is what they do to him.
08:46
Speaker David Pakman
Who had a real political project, which by the way, I opposed.
08:50
Speaker David Pakman
You might say, wow, David, it sounds like you're defending Charlie Kirk.
08:52
Speaker David Pakman
No, no, no.
08:53
Speaker David Pakman
This is a critique of how the right handles these situations.
08:57
Speaker David Pakman
He had a real political project that I strongly disagreed with.
09:03
Speaker David Pakman
But instead, that was erased, and Charlie Kirk's death was turned through the conspiracies and the fearmongering and all of this other stuff into a kind of canvas for grievance content.
09:15
Speaker David Pakman
And that destruction of reality turns out to be really useful.
09:20
Speaker David Pakman
Because while there were people spiraling into conspiracies, the Trump administration moved with total clarity.
09:27
Speaker David Pakman
Trump and JD Vance immediately call it an assassination by the radical left.
09:33
Speaker David Pakman
In the vacuum of conspiracy that was opened up by the followers of Kirk,
09:40
Speaker David Pakman
Trump was able to come out and say, this is domestic terrorism.
09:45
Speaker David Pakman
We've got to go after Antifa at its headquarters.
09:50
Speaker David Pakman
Which of course, there is no such thing.
09:51
Speaker David Pakman
They use it to justify crackdowns on speech and on liberal groups.
09:56
Speaker David Pakman
And so Trump sees the opportunity, no ambiguity at all.
10:00
Speaker David Pakman
Now compare that to what happens a few months later, meaning nowish.
10:05
Speaker David Pakman
Renee Good, 37-year-old, killed by an ice agent in Minneapolis.
10:10
Speaker David Pakman
There's video.
10:11
Speaker David Pakman
She's unarmed.
10:12
Speaker David Pakman
She's calm.
10:13
Speaker David Pakman
She says, I'm not mad at you, bro.
10:16
Speaker David Pakman
Seconds before she gets shot.
10:18
Speaker David Pakman
And suddenly, the administration is allergic to caution.
10:22
Speaker David Pakman
Before any investigation, Trump and Vance say, she is a domestic terrorist.
10:27
Speaker David Pakman
They defend the agent.
10:29
Speaker David Pakman
They say there's complete and total immunity.
10:32
Speaker David Pakman
No stadium memorial.
10:34
Speaker David Pakman
Certainly no medal.
10:35
Speaker David Pakman
No conspiracy about secret forces conspired to target innocent people.
10:40
Speaker David Pakman
It's totally normal behavior by the officer.
10:42
Speaker David Pakman
Made sense.
10:43
Speaker David Pakman
Clean.
10:44
Speaker David Pakman
So we've got two deaths here, Charlie Kirk and Renee Good.
10:48
Speaker David Pakman
Two different narratives.
10:50
Speaker David Pakman
Charlie Kirk is turned into a saint by the state and an object of conspiracy by his own supporters.
10:56
Speaker David Pakman
Renee Good just gets erased.
10:59
Speaker David Pakman
And that's it, that's like the final sick irony here.
11:03
Speaker David Pakman
Which is that Charlie Kirk built a media ecosystem that thrived on suspicion and confrontation and humiliation.
11:13
Speaker David Pakman
Politics as a game.
11:16
Speaker David Pakman
Truth is optional.
11:18
Speaker David Pakman
And outrage was Charlie Kirk's currency.
11:20
Speaker David Pakman
And when he died, that that very same ecosystem that he helped build completely consumed him and his legacy.
11:26
Speaker David Pakman
It wasn't the left.
11:28
Speaker David Pakman
It wasn't critics.
11:30
Speaker David Pakman
It was his own side, including people like Candace Owens.
11:33
Speaker David Pakman
His legacy has been fragmented and monetized to death.
11:37
Speaker David Pakman
And that maybe is like the most revealing part of this entire story.
11:43
Speaker David Pakman
Which is that in this political culture that MAGA has completely perverted, even the martyrs don't get peace when they are declared martyrs.
11:54
Speaker David Pakman
They end up being content generation machines.
11:59
Speaker David Pakman
And now they have really come full circle with the destruction of Charlie Kirk's legacy.
12:05
Speaker David Pakman
A legacy, which includes being the victim of completely inappropriate violence that I have denounced to someone who disagreed with everything that he stood for politically.
12:14
Speaker David Pakman
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Speaker David Pakman
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