Do you realize what they did to Charlie Kirk? — Transcript

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.

Let me explain what I mean.

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.

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.

Now you might say, wait, what? What do you mean?

I'm going to explain exactly what happened.

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.

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.

So there was this reverence, but underneath it, there was something else that was happening.

And it was suspicion.

It was paranoia.

It was conspiracy.

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.

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.

So they started the rewrites of the story.

Candace Owens openly saying, Israel was involved.

No caveats, not quietly saying it, just like, Israel was involved.

He was about to turn on his support for Israel.

And others echoed it.

The the Mossad was involved.

Or the CIA or the deep state.

It kind of doesn't matter, right?

It's like a pick your villain, pick your own adventure.

Sort of thing.

And then the timing was folded in.

Right around the 9/11 anniversary, so it must be that something bigger is going on.

And this is kind of how the logic or or lack of logic works now.

Then came the YouTube videos.

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.

And videos insisting the bullet came from behind or the other side or not where investigators said the bullet came from.

Others said, oh, well, there must have been multiple shooters.

If you listen carefully, you hear multiple shots.

Or the shooter was just a patsy that they found.

Remember, by the way, that anecdotally, we've looked at some of these claims.

We did a video ourselves about the he was really shot from behind thing.

And I found the claims to be completely without merit.

They didn't feel compelling or accurate in any way.

And so where we ended up was with a lot of the same people who spent years mocking conspiracy culture.

Now producing Zapruder style conspiracy films about Charlie Kirk.

So then we've we've got that.

Um, but then it got even worse.

AI started making things even more confusing.

And X's, the former Twitter, X's AI system misidentifies suspects and generates distorted enhanced images that aren't really enhanced.

And at one point, even law enforcement shares incorrect visuals before pulling them back.

And every one of these mistakes becomes fodder for the conspiracy theorists.

Oh, law enforcement shared an image and took it back.

Clearly there's a cover-up.

So we end up in this situation where nothing is real, which I write about in my book, The Echo Machine.

The shooter's not really the shooter.

The motive's not really the motive.

The evidence isn't really evidence.

The death itself, according to some corners of the internet, wasn't real.

With videos purporting to uh uh show Charlie Kirk after the shooting showing up in Japan.

Or I don't even remember where the hell it was.

And and this is the part that really is the crux of what I'm talking about.

If you actually believed that Charlie Kirk mattered, if you believed that his ideas mattered,

you wouldn't need to erase the reality of what happened to honor him.

You wouldn't need to say it was the Mossad or Netanyahu and Bill Ackman were worried he would turn on Israel.

So they had him killed or any of that stuff.

You wouldn't need to do it.

You wouldn't need to say that there are fake texts or secret shooters or any of it.

But the thing is that the modern right-wing doesn't know how to process anything without turning it into a cinematic narrative.

It can't just be what it was.

They don't want a political assassination carried out by a disturbed individual.

They want a story where their side is so important and so threatening that it had to have been shadowy global forces that intervened.

And in this process, what they do is they hollow out Charlie Kirk.

He's no longer a real person when this is what they do to him.

Who had a real political project, which by the way, I opposed.

You might say, wow, David, it sounds like you're defending Charlie Kirk.

No, no, no.

This is a critique of how the right handles these situations.

He had a real political project that I strongly disagreed with.

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.

And that destruction of reality turns out to be really useful.

Because while there were people spiraling into conspiracies, the Trump administration moved with total clarity.

Trump and JD Vance immediately call it an assassination by the radical left.

In the vacuum of conspiracy that was opened up by the followers of Kirk,

Trump was able to come out and say, this is domestic terrorism.

We've got to go after Antifa at its headquarters.

Which of course, there is no such thing.

They use it to justify crackdowns on speech and on liberal groups.

And so Trump sees the opportunity, no ambiguity at all.

Now compare that to what happens a few months later, meaning nowish.

Renee Good, 37-year-old, killed by an ice agent in Minneapolis.

There's video.

She's unarmed.

She's calm.

She says, I'm not mad at you, bro.

Seconds before she gets shot.

And suddenly, the administration is allergic to caution.

Before any investigation, Trump and Vance say, she is a domestic terrorist.

They defend the agent.

They say there's complete and total immunity.

No stadium memorial.

Certainly no medal.

No conspiracy about secret forces conspired to target innocent people.

It's totally normal behavior by the officer.

Made sense.

Clean.

So we've got two deaths here, Charlie Kirk and Renee Good.

Two different narratives.

Charlie Kirk is turned into a saint by the state and an object of conspiracy by his own supporters.

Renee Good just gets erased.

And that's it, that's like the final sick irony here.

Which is that Charlie Kirk built a media ecosystem that thrived on suspicion and confrontation and humiliation.

Politics as a game.

Truth is optional.

And outrage was Charlie Kirk's currency.

And when he died, that that very same ecosystem that he helped build completely consumed him and his legacy.

It wasn't the left.

It wasn't critics.

It was his own side, including people like Candace Owens.

His legacy has been fragmented and monetized to death.

And that maybe is like the most revealing part of this entire story.

Which is that in this political culture that MAGA has completely perverted, even the martyrs don't get peace when they are declared martyrs.

They end up being content generation machines.

And now they have really come full circle with the destruction of Charlie Kirk's legacy.

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.

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