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The Pundits Mourn Charlie Kirk (Patreon)

Published:
2025-09-22 13:41:12
Imported:
2026-06

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Content

Michael and Peter discuss the bizarre, hagiographic media reactions to the death of Charlie Kirk.

You can play this episode directly through Patreon or use our RSS feed to add it to your podcast app. Here are the instructions from Patreon.

Leave your suggestions for future bonus episodes in the comments!

Comments

desdinova

I hope this is as mean as it needs to be. See you in an hour.

Bella

i’m here 🫡

Elias Rosner

I was tempted to send in a couple of the ones I assume will be covered for "worst takes of the year". Can't wait!

Bella

peter starting beef over ppl just not knowing why he wanted to read the free press is the level of haterism i want to exemplify

Tony Yang

After the hagiography of the last two weeks, this is exactly what I needed

Andrew Bryson

Okay but this one might actually get y'all killed 👀

desdinova

I'll bring fireworks to the memorial

Erin

The way I got this notification while listening to the Diabolical Lies episode: Charlie Kirk & the end of debate in America. Looking forward to listening to this next — I hear our girl Bari disavowed political violence 🙄

Patrick

Quick, download this before the pod gets canceled and all episodes deleted

Heather

This is exactly what I needed this Monday morning

Bella

so sad to know mike is no longer on the podcast, but this is a great sendoff episode. tragic that he became a left wing radical with no empathy /s

Charisma Teeth

Here's my humble request to talk about Ezra Klein. I think he's a more complicated figure than Douthat or Mounk.

Michael

and his chad makeover.

Kevin Hengehold

Well now I have to write the song "how do you mourn a scumbag like a-charlie?". Thanks for that.

Cristina Anderson

just what i needed to start my work week, thanks lads

Nicole

Mike, never change

Emma Barnard

I would totally go to a Maintenance Phase seminor. Mike and Aubrey are missing a trick!

Mary Shurtz

By the way, I grew up in Utah and went to Utah Valley University. I just wanted to add color for why it is ridiculous to connect the shooter to campus culture radicalism, other than he went to one semester and dropped out: he went to one semester at Utah State University, the agricultural school in a tiny town in northern Utah. It just ain't a hotbed for leftist groupthink, it's mostly children of ranchers and farmers from Wyoming and Idaho

Incredibleplum

Thank you guys for articulating as coherent of an argument about the discourse around this tragedy as I think you can get. I've been going insane reading social media for the past week and a half and you guys helped me organize my thoughts and arguments in my head better

el

i nearly fell out with two close friends this past week because they thought it was “shocking” that we were joking around about kirk’s death

MRC

As a Barnard alum who thought I was having a psychotic break when I saw Pres. Rosenbury’s column, I thank you for your service

desdinova

"How to Mourn a Scumbag" sounds like a Ph.D. thesis. I'm all in.

desdinova

Rather low count of 'dipshits', but an acceptable amount of 'scumbag'.

anna schoenfelder

Please never assume we are reading these bs articles - I am avoiding them like the plague and need the recap

Qharps

Please release a 65 minute "teaser" on the main feed. This is literally the only good thing I've heard about Charlie Kirk and the discourse

Gilbert Macnaughton

Peter can’t say he’s not a buffoon when he’s been giving Bari Weiss money

Matthew Morris

Alternative title: The Decline of Klein

Gillian Rosheuvel

Ezra Klein can say the shit he says because he knows the things Charlie Kirk advocated for were never going to affect him. He can talk in terms of both sides because whichever side is in power, he wins.

Missy!

The best words I've heard were 'the way you die does not absolve the way you lived.'

Keith T.

I’ve been thinking along the same lines. I don’t think he’s taken the dirty money yet, but it’s just a matter of time now that he’s getting so much pushback (on this and his recent book). He’ll go full Greenwald-Taibbi before the 2026 midterms is my guess.

KT

the screening of lincoln is sending me

Ben Schwabe

Klien is mourning Kirk's death because he sees Kirk as an equal and the rest of us as rubes to manipulate.

Charisma Teeth

Okay, my apology. The show IS about Klein as well as Kirk. I could vamp and say Klein should get his own episode, but that's not what I meant, so....🙈✌️

Maggie McDonald

I want to make my MIL listen to this 🙃

Alien@System

I can't help but share my utter frustration at my national news (I'm not a US citizen), which of course also covered the Kirk killing much more extensively than any of the other political and state-sponsored violence in the US. There was one article that claimed to be like "Here's the political position that Charlie Kirk actually had", which to its credit did list all his horrifying opinions, even though it was very just matter-of-factly about it. But then it pivots at the end to say that certain things of CK were apparently taken out of context when shared at the internet, and attempts to put context back it. So it picks the example of Kirk says "Gay people should be killed" and offers the following """context""": "Well, he was quoting Leviticus when he did so because somebody asked him how he can claim to be Christian and also so hateful. Kirk then added: 'If you follow the bible, you have to follow all of it'." And I felt like screaming. Because how can a reporter write and not notice that they're just falling for his rethorical tricks? That CK never quoted any other of the very specific prescriptions of Leviticus and does not live any of them? Especially given that earlier in the piece they correctly noted that CK had only recently pivoted from being openly atheist and anti-religious to hard-right Evangelicalism. It's clearly all just smoke and somehow these so-called journalists fall for it.

Charles Rowlands

As a non-citizen who doesn’t want to get rounded up for my radical views, I just want to say that Peter is dead right about fruit flies. You underestimate those little bastards at your peril.

Jess Hrudey

Kirk’s death also lead to this “oh no free speech on campus” article in The Netherlands where I live. https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2582649-nederlandse-universiteiten-schuwen-debat-met-andersdenkenden They quote some real charmers like Thierry Baudet who was leader of one of several Dutch far right parties here who basically runs around spouting conspiracy theories. That plus non-sequitors like mentioning that the Bob Vylan concert cheered on Kirk’s death apparently (which I still don’t understand what that has to do with campus free speech) and included a mention that Dutch rankings in academic freedom are falling and insinuated that that’s a result of not letting controversial people speak on campus (and the only evidence that controversial speakers aren’t allowed on campus are some controversial speakers who say that’s what’s happening). Tl;dr: The Dutch are repeating a lot of the same inraging talking points as the US

Katy M.

I want to make my mother listen to this.

🌈🌧️

Ahh, it’s so much nicer listening when I agree with everything you say. I also think good or bad (it’s bad), political violence is an absolutely unavoidable consequence of this much political instability and decrease in quality of life. We’re creating the perfect conditions for it, and then wringing our hands like we’re in a freshman philosophy class when it happens.

Ainvar

@Mike are you doing a European meet and greet, in central Europe? Or am I to take to grindr, manually filtering for short-kings? 😉 I’m in Brussels!

Erika Bentley Holland

I think Klein is genuinely afraid this is going to spiral into widespread violence and he’s trying to influence his listeners into not escalating. That’s my most generous interpretation

Mountain Dew Or Crab Juice

First they came for the Campus Debate Grifters and i did not speak up because fuck those guys

Adarsh Nednur

I don't know how to ask this without getting ratioed, but I'm gonna ask anyway. I am a big and long-time fan of Ezra Klein. I have read/listened to his pieces on the Charlie Kirk assassination. I have come to my own conclusions and opinions about them (mostly agreement with some clarification) which it seems most other people on the left—including the people in this comment section—do not share. It's obviously totally within those people's rights to disagree with me, but my patience with hearing the criticism and discourse and dunking around Ezra at the moment (especially the bad faith stuff) has really worn thin, and I feel this slowly extending to the discourse around this topic in general. But I am obviously also a big and long-time fan of Michael and Peter. So my question is, to people who have listened to this and/or the other episode they just put out: should I just skip these? Is the way Ezra and/or this topic gets discussed gonna just make me sad? I guess tl;dr: would a "Trigger warning: Ezra Klein dunking" be appropriate?

Daniel Kevin Eisenhauer

banger. such a relief to load up a pod on kirk, confident that i won't be treated to a throat clearing lecture on how political violence is actually bad

Heidi Vee

It’s not a dunking without nuance, and they both talk about respecting Ezra Klein in the past and being disappointed by his lack of clarity in this case, as well as speculating about the human impulses that might be informing his choices. I encourage you to have a listen!

Adarsh Nednur

Thank you, that's very helpful to know, I really appreciate it!

el

so true robin

Brick Ingle

Unfortunately I think Hobbes is wrong in this one about guns. The hunting rifle and ammonium the gunman used is pretty accessible in countries with stricter gun controls and far fewer gun deaths per year (eg uk and Germany). Mass availability of guns and gun deaths is obvs still an issue regardless.

Charisma Teeth

The profound wealth gap has meant that billionaires can pour money into ideological projects. That's why right-wing pundits seem to be multiplying like rabbits. It's a money making project, and Charlie Kirk knew all about that.

Jordan Sandvig

Please please unlock this sooner than later. I need to share it with my silly lib friends asap!

Dave!

Probably not? The comments on Klein is only about five or six minutes up top and, while I’m not too familiar with him, it all sounded pretty reasonable to me.

Mary Y.

I would consider him to be an architect of this economy, actually

GummiBearGundam

This will come off as jaded(and nihilistic), but I don't see Charlie Kirk's murder as tragic. In this political climate, it was inevitable. I don't think shooting politicians and their flying monkeys is the right thing to do, and shouldn't happen. Charlie was a voice of and to the far right, and encouraged his listeners to distain the existence of others and wish them to disappear, convert to our way or die. The push to canonize him as some sort of good-hearted, God fearing man working for the well being of America or the "He was just some guy with a podcast and a dream" whitewashing has driven me to see all the people doing it as afraid. Afraid of the ambivalence and hostility of the "Soy-cuck-leftist-queers" saying "And nothing of value was lost". I personally think it's time the right wing grifters and hate mongers got a taste of the anger and smirking laissez-faire attitude at murdered people they aim at others to be reflected back. Is this a great attitude to have, no. I know that it will not fix anything. I also have reached the end of my "Let's reach across the aisle, kumbaya, be the bigger person, take the high road" limit, that also has done nothing to change anything. I'm a burnt out, 40 year old millennial. I have see the hate crimes in my Canadian city climb in the last 10 years and bought my trans spouse a knife to carry if they walk the trails in the city alone. I am so done with being generous to people that want us dead.

Stephanie Gustafson

That survey question is so interesting to me (“is political violence ever justified?”) because if I were asked that I would never assume they were asking me “would you ever physically attack some conservative guy because of something he said?” I would think, well yeah, revolutions are political violence (are they not?) and they’re sometimes called for. Like…isn’t a war political violence? So like…WWII? In a country created with the Revolutionary War it seems weird to say no?

Stephanie Stewart

I agree. Gun control does a lot to curb gun violence. It's incredibly necessary. I think this happening at a school has kinda of blurred the lines of murder by gun and school shooting in the rhetoric around it. School and mass shooters by and large would not commit those atrocities of they did not have ready accessibility to large quantities of high ammunition weapons. Very few have gone out of their way to procure weapons. The weapons were either already available to them or easily purchased. Assassinations and murders like this, on the other hand, are the crimes that do fall under the "if they see an opportunity to do it, they'll do it regardless of laws" category. It was planned, targeted, and specific. He did what he wanted to do and left. It's far more important to talk about how violent rhetoric attributed to this murder than it is to talk about gun control.

OuijaFBabysMama

Great job! The Boyzos are killin it today

Stephanie Gustafson

Don’t know the exact moment you’re referring to but I’m guessing he was saying fomented, in context?

amy marie

i do think that's a bit overly generous ;) i dunno how much i worry that liberal NYT reading pearl clutchers are gonna assassinate right wing grifters that they've probably barely heard of. i can see your perspective though.

Hannah

That makes so much more sense! The caption said fermented and I was wracking my brain for similar terms that it could've been bahaha thank you for setting me straight (and apologies to Peter 🙏)

amy marie

that's such a good point--lowkey kind of what happened to naomi wolfe.

Kiki

Build more bike lanes and make them separated.

Stephanie Stewart

I went to BYU. Campuses in Utah are the opposite of radicalizing leftist factories. My dad tried to get a professorship as a power conversion engineering (the people who work on renewable energy sources) professor in Utah and there was one professor at U of U and he had to fight the politicians on pretty much every project he tried to do. I hope it's gotten better in the last decade, but I've been trying to ignore Utah since I left so I don't know.

Ardin

In the same boat here

Elizabeth Wynn

"20% of young Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 think that violence can sometimes be justified" WE HAVE OFF-THE-CHARTS MILITARY AND POLICE SPENDING IN THIS COUNTRY. It is so WILD to me that civilian "political violence" gets so siloed off from the state-sanctioned, individual-enacted violence that keeps getting funded regardless of justification. we live in a culture of violence, and Charlie Kirk was happy to feed into it with the belief that it would never come back to feed on him.

Tyrel Irwin

Fruit flies live in your drains. Pour boiling water down and then plug the drains thoroughly.

Tyrel Irwin

And yet- I can't remember the last time a political figure was shot at in Canada. There's something about the gun CULTURE in America that increases these violent acts. When it comes down to it, guns only have one use: killing.

Emily Dean

can someone please explain the boss baby reference Peter makes at 47:10?

Sophie

In my experience of universities as a center for debate: I was in Army ROTC in college and we argued so frequently that we would have intense debates about economics and politics while jogging in formation during our morning PT. Trying to run a 5k and simultaneously tell a libertarian business major that his ideas about the free market are ridiculous is a great way to build aerobic capacity!

Ron Crawford

Has this shown up in anyone else’s podcatcher? Pocket Casts still hasn’t seen either of today’s.

Becky Hawkins

There was a tweet that went something like “Person who has only seen the movie Boss Baby, watching another movie: I’m getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes from this”

Ernest Richardson

The comment about guns from 56:21-52:25 is too broad and incorrect. The firearm and ammunition allegedly used to kill Charlie Kirk is legal in every G-7, G20, and NATO nation barring specific long guns in Japan and South Korea. More misinformation about firearms is not needed.

Kristen North

This got weird for me near the end because not only does my kid constantly play Helldivers II but my husband is playing Silksong.

Soph Emm

This is what I love about this pod. Scathing takes and home maintenance hacks

Erika Bentley Holland

Thanks for the respectful response. I’ve been an Ezra Klein listener and I think he has nuanced, informed perspective on a lot of issues. I think he takes his responsibility as an opinion leader super seriously and he’s trying to turn down the temperature. It’s absolutely capitulation at this point, though

Ben Schwabe

All the talk about how universities don't let conservatives "speak" are about how the conservatives aren't allowed to run things like they do at their religious colleges. Everyone who thinks the American Revolution was good believes in political violence.

G Goldhar

I think a fundamental way to understand Klein and other pundits center and right on this issue is that they didn't see a political actor but a fellow content creator or even entertainer get killed for doing of his job of making a New Episode of The News, and they're all afraid they're next so theyre attempting to placate a potentially violent audience

Marek

It's really weird to see the conservatives panic that 20 percent of young people said political violence is sometimes justified, when the whole conservative argument for guns is "we might have to rise up against tyrannical government"

Melissa Reiff

100%. I graduated from USU. It not only isn’t a hotbed of leftist groupthink, many attempts were made to make me more religious, more conservative, and more close-minded. So there’s that.

Meghan 🫶

Why do they only come out when I buy melons or bananas?

Cat Mara

It is difficult to argue otherwise if you live in a country that fought a war of independence

Amanda Erickson

This is the real driver here. There's soooooo much money leveraged on the side that is against us (Billionaires who would like to harvest the rest of us for our organs) that we hardly stand a chance. Even our voting mechanisms are under constant attack and our very suffrage and enfranchisement. There's no stemming that tide of money so what do we have left...it's grim.

Amanda Erickson

Is it bad faith to say that his take was/is bad?

Jack Wolfe

nodding my head furiously at michael's 46:10 comment as i sit at work in total silence. conservative ideas are simply allowed to be expressed at most workplaces-- their dumb shit is not understood as "politics" the way say "lets not fund a genocide" is

Adarsh Nednur

No, which is why I specified "especially the bad faith stuff," implying that it is possible to disagree with his take in good faith as well. That being said, I am now at a point of finding even the good faith disagreement a little tiring, but hopefully it's clear that I understand that that's a me problem.

el

unfortunately terry he would definitely joke about yours if you’re not a white cis man.

Marek

Oh yeah you're right. European here, didn't realize this connection

Free DC

It seems like the difference in polling between younger and older generations could be pretty easily explained by education and awareness. A young person today could list a number of successful terrorist/politically violent acts because until recently we had begun to have a more honest assessment of historical events through multiple perspectives. Older generations would have been less exposed to these perspectives and hence the backlash…

Soph Emm

I went to the Maintenance Phase seminar and all I got was a lousy podcast

Adarsh Nednur

I haven't listened to this podcast yet but to me the generous interpretation is fairly obvious? "Charlie Kirk practiced politics the right way, RELATIVE to the guy who killed him. I disagree with Kirk on basically every political position and find his views and methods abhorrent, and I probably agree with his killer on basically every political position and find his views righteous. And yet, on his worst day, Kirk—who is best known for going into an environment where most people disagreed with him and arguing with them—didn't pull out a gun and shoot the people he disagreed with. And maybe that seems like the bare minimum and not something to be praising people for, but as evidenced by the long list of political violence incidents catalogued at the beginning of this piece, it's a bare minimum that many people are not reaching, so it is worth saying explicitly by people who have platforms: Kirk was practicing politics, and the guy who killed him was doing the opposite, and the whole point of democracy is understanding ourselves as having more in common with the 'bad guy' who tries to convince you of his views than with the 'good guy' who uses a gun to make society's decisions for it—and yes, that is doubly bad for people like Trump, who are the worst of both worlds: bad guys who use guns to make society's decisions for it—which is why I have been sounding the alarm about Trump's authoritarian takeover for literal years."

Jill McCourt

Yeah most people will say yes to that question but drilling down to political assassination means almost nobody approves. Those surveys are really strict about the way questions are asked too. I got a call from Gallup and when I asked for clarification the woman said she could only repeat the question, how I interpreted it was up to me.

DD

More of that "sympathy > empathy" that Kirk espoused. Ezra Klein seems to agree with it too. Not surprising since Klein's also fine with trading away others rights while he's secure in his own.

Lisa Kapsner-Swift

The conservative pundit take of "this feels different somehow" seems easily answered by "yes because one of you was the target this time instead of apparently-expendable elementary school children." I bet that feels pretty damned different.

Natalie

They *can* live in drains, but they are also easily confused with drain flies and fungus gnats, which can also live in drains.

Jennifer Dawn

Klein built a brand that depicts him as a Malcolm Gladwell type persona - the thoughtful insightful commentator with his finger on the pulse. I can't remember what it was, but I saw him in something about 6 months ago that made me realize it was mostly branding and that I shouldn't take him as seriously as he clearly wants to be taken.

Mars Ikeda

Also, if you do this but flies persist around sink, check if a forgotten bag of potatoes is liquidating in the cabinet under the sink. Just. That's been known to happen to Good People. I hear.

TE

It's also remarkable that a 22 year old without sniper training could make a clean shot like that from that distance. That's not luck. That's probably months or years of practice with his grandfather's rifle. His family's social media was apparently full of pictures of him with a gun. That's all gun culture on top of access through a family member.

Siobhan Green

THANK YOU for mentioning the incredible harm that killing USAID has already had and will continue to have across the world.

Tiffany

Cringing that I used to like Ezra Klein 💀

Amy Davidson

Insightful analysis as always but... are we conceding it was a lefty violence act?

Chaston Kome

I think Michael and Peter’s take beginning around 8 minutes that Klein fired off too fast a take and then when the backlash came wasn’t sure how to walk it back make the most sense. In his interview with Gov Spencer Cox he relays the critique of him that Kirk was not practicing politics the right way and plays Kirk’s quote in full about Michelle Obama and KBJ. I do think the idea that Klein’s a Republican is prob some form of wishcasting. Doesn’t mean its not a bad take, just that there’s prob not actually some real change there

Tiffany

Can we please get the titles of some of these books on Hitler and the Third Reich, Michael? Nazi history book roundup bonus episode?

Fenstar

I use pocket casts and both have shown up for me. Recently however I had an issue where all my patreon ones stopped loading, so I had to re-add them to my list.

Lucy

Makes you wonder how sincere they thought he was, like it was all just an act.

Tiffany

The U.S. has 120 guns per capita. That's twice as many as the country with the next-highest rate. The comment was about access, not legality.

Horseloverfat

Good point Ezra. Whenever I find myself in a massive crisis, I also immediately go back to all the strategies that got me there in the first place. As the old adage goes, “doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of sanity”.

ES

Ok. All right. Look. I understand that you two are public figures who do not wish to be sued, or to have terrorists show up at your homes and murder you, and that you need to factor all that in when you decide what to say in public. I was pretty disappointed that Peter wasn’t openly gloating though.

ES

This is obviously a better take than Ezra Klein’s, but tbh, I don’t think what you’re saying is as different from what he said as you think it is. You posed the question, “How do you mourn someone who objectively sucked?” The answer is, “You don’t.” If it’s someone you knew personally, that’s one thing. Human relationships are very complex, and it’s perfectly normal to grieve someone who had a role in your life, even if that role was profoundly negative. But on a societal level? As a normative expectation of people who didn’t even know the deceased? You don’t. You don’t mourn them. I think a lot of people, you two included, this time, are engaging in a bit of a logical fallacy. We don’t WANT to believe that we are in extraordinarily precarious and dangerous times, we don’t WANT to believe that this is an emergency and we need to activate Emergency Mode, we don’t WANT to believe that we are teetering on the edge of mass state violence and Actual For-Real Fascism… so we just, don’t. We START from the premise that we are not living in 1930s Germany, and understand events in accordance with that belief, rather than starting with the evidence and drawing conclusions from there. To put it more bluntly, as you two asked so many times about Ezra Klein’s analysis, where is the line? Charlie Kirk was an influential, organizing force of right-wing radicalization, open fascism, and consequent violence. *He literally BUSSED people to an INSURRECTION that BREACHED THE CAPITOL BUILDING.* That didn’t even happen in the Civil War! Where is the line!? Are we supposed to think it would have been terrible if someone assassinated Robert E. Lee? Jefferson Davis? Andrew Jackson? Christopher Columbus? If someone had taken a look at the beliefs and policy preferences of the US confederacy, and then assessed how important Robert E. Lee was to defending and advancing those beliefs and policy preferences, and then that person decided to take him out of the game, are we really prepared to say that would have been a bad thing? If you’ve ever pondered the question, “would a time traveler be morally obligated to kill baby Hitler?”, and you’ve either said, “yes,” or been stuck on issues like, “but that’s a baby,” or, “but the butterfly effect,” or, “nature vs. nurture, maybe we could fix him!,”… but NOT, “no, that’s murder,” then I need to know what the difference is. Where is the line? How destructive does someone need to be, how much of a clear and present danger do they need to be to an entire society, before we’re willing to admit that maybe this isn’t such a terrible outcome? (Not to say that Charlie Kirk, himself, is analogous to Hitler, but tbh, some of that is a function of how much political power they each had. Charlie Kirk’s beliefs and policy preferences were extremely odious, and I am not convinced that he would have done such different things with political power.)

Colleen Rosky

Said like a young person who hasn't checked history. 🫩

Abby aka Boom Boom

I wonder if they’d consider reading “I’m glad my mom died” by Jeannette mccurdy. I feel like maybe they can understand the relief? And therefore comic relief? Idk

Jacob

I feel like you’re straying from generous to completely rewriting the article to say something less controversial but also completely meaningless. I think a more legitimate generous interpretation is the one which Michael and Peter say which is that Klein probably just didn’t do a lot of research into the kind of politics Kirk actually practiced before writing the article and is too scared of getting fired to fully retract it.

Julian Peavy

I dont know why people seem to be doing this when it isnt strongly evidenced. It certainly requires you to believe some very biased secondhand statements

d'egg

The only take on this I care to consume tbh

Brian

Will anyone teach these hacks to write?? “Work laboriously” Brooks??? They should WORK WORKINGLY?? You’d think someone whose output was such drivel analytically would at least be forced to express it well, but no. Lifetime appointment to “public intellectual”

Tyrel Irwin

Gawd, now I need to worry about my fruit AND drains separately?!?

DD

That clip of a Klein show where he talks about areas of compromise from Clinton and Obama that he likes. Huh. No surprise that it's about race (Obama) and abortion (Clinton). You know, things that won't affect Klein directly.

TessaJ

The only way ❄️💓u I Bb Will pop e1. )1

Astraea

I can't remember the exact phrasing, but there's a saying that goes something like, "Part of growing up is realizing the adults in your childhood were winging it the whole time." This reminds me of that, but more in the "oh most people don't know what it means to *actually* be smart, they just know how to fake it real well" sense. The more prominent the paper you work for, the worse the affliction, methinks.

Astraea

Not to do with Kirk specifically, but with The Discourse in General: That Ezra Klein clip about how we've stopped engaging with our political opponents really crystallized something for me. Has anyone considered that maybe the reason people, especially young people, are drawing hard lines around what is considered a valid opinion is because the vilest, most regressive opinions in our country's history are being revived at an astonishing rate? Ten years ago it was a mainstream opinion that fascism and slavery were bad and women's equality was good. Now I have to say "no slavery was actually bad and wrong and not a valid way to construct a society" like ten times a fucking day. We're not "illiberaly refusing to engage in civic discourse," we are quite reasonably refusing to lend legitimacy to ideas that we all agreed decades ago are invalid, immoral, and incompatible with small-L liberal society. And now the mainstream media is spending the entire 24-hour news cycle trying to gaslight me into thinking that maybe we all just judged fascism too harshly and too soon. (It's like Mike's theory that women are drawing harder lines in dating not because they're getting pickier, but because the worst men are both worse and more common than they were ten years ago. *Of fucking course* I'm not gonna take a chance on a self-identified MAGA man, are you kidding me?)

Cassie LaGrange

Yall were pretty happy when kissinger died. I'm not sure how they're different. Kirks death was expedited and not natural, but why should I feel bad for him?

anna schoenfelder

Yes! This. I can’t believe how quickly we’ve collectively moved on from this.

Erin

i’ve always found klein a bit irksome and condescending and this put my feelings into words really well

TheSoilWillSaveUs

The line was “access to this kind of gun” so I think the original comment is fair. I’d guess hunting rifles are going to be one of the more common types of guns anywhere, even places with strict gun laws.

Myerk Lamb

Featuring two cis men? Groundbreaking

Jessa

Suggestion for bypassing paywalls to read articles for peter & all! I always use archive.ph when I hit a paywall- you just paste in the article link & get an archived version of what's at that link (you can still interact with it, use reader, etc). It's always worked for me!

Cara Leopold

There was a good article about this by Emily Atkin in the Heated substack about his funding from the fossil fuel industry because surprise, surprise, he was also a climate denier.

Aleah Nelson

I’ve been seeing a lot about the 22 year old being a phenomenal shot and it rather confuses me, because growing up in a rural area I happen to know a great number of people who could have made this shot since they grew up deer hunting. This is a man who was raised in Utah where hunting is a pretty common pass time. Many of my peers were raised the same way, and a great number of them could have made that shot at 22 without any formal training. I absolutely agree that it’s a massive issue in our culture that this ability is so commonplace. I think the fact that it’s not remarkable is actually what’s more alarming. It doesn’t do the left any good to hold this man’s ability to aim up on a pedestal, because it’s not honest to what a lot of Americans are actually capable of doing with a simple hunting rifle due to our fucked up gun culture.

Johnny 5

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & right wingers.

The Fat Culture Critic

Sorry Peter, you have to forgive those of us who take your questions to literally and give obvious advice. See Tylenol fairies snuck in our mum’s wombs to cast ‘tism spells on us.

Gil the Gilded Dragon

At what point do the Ezrakleinses' names become synonymous with Benedict A or Vidkun Q, or with Nev Ch?

Carson Schneider

The paid subscription was worth it for this episode alone

M

As a NYer who has watched Barnard go hard in the persecution of their students who organize against the genocide in Palestine, this column from the Barnard President is just, astounding.

Miriam Reid

Justice for em dashes. That is all.

Charisma Teeth

Always follow the money. It's a reliable way to get at a lot of this larger problem.

Mj

I'm Arab and I just clocked that she was saying Madrasa as in "schools" in Arabic bro American racism is crazyyy. That's not even the word for univeristy!! She should have said Jamia'at. She's not fear mongering correctly!

Avocado Mistress

The whole "left wing people are in charge of managing right wingers' feelings so that right wingers won't do bad things" discourse reminds me so much of the narrative around how hetero women are responsible for managing men's feelings so that their men won't beat or kill them. Hey, everybody knows men are rapists, so....why did you wear that short skirt, anyway?

GummiBearGundam

I think Klein is right about Social Media, because this "hard line and no discourse" political stance in young people is that they have seen what people are posting about, like general population people along with Republican/right wing influencers. Then when Democrats start the "we should reach across the aisle and work together for America", people are like "NO WAY, I SEE WHAT THESE NUT BALLS ARE TALKING ABOUT! " And centrist talking heads are like "Wow, the left are sooo aggressive and wont listen to other points of views". I can see why a lot of the Black pill nihilistic meme culture is coming out of the wood work. Young people don't have hope for change or hope at all. I also think centrist media people are going to have to wrap their heads around people not having a direct political affiliation or drive. Just people that see the world falling apart around them and see no way out. (Sorry for the ramble, brain hairball had to come out it seems).

Ashley Shew

I don’t have social media so don’t know if someone already shared this, but check out Brave browser for paywalls. There are some good critiques that Brave has gone downhill with it’s like credit system now, and there’s some alternative browsers out there too, but it’s been the most user friendly for me and has helped me get past paywalls for articles on different outlets a number of times.

Astraea

So I live in southern AZ. We get dust storms every so often, but not so often that there's a long-standing local word for them. So, our local media just calls them haboob. One summer a particularly bad dust storm over in Phoenix made the national media. The right-wing freakout machine had, I kid you not, a full 24-hour news cycle on how using a word with Arabic roots was disrespectful to our troops and could potentially even trigger their PTSD. I cannot stress enough how much I wish I was joking. Truly, American racism is bad, but I'd say its defining characteristic is actually how proudly, mind-bogglingly *stupid* it is. There are no depths of stupidity that American racism cannot plumb.

Alex Rachel

HONESTLY. I sit right next to a Zionist and in the era of the Gaza Solidarity encampments she got to work from home for weeks [not our policy] because our workplace is near the encampment and she "felt unsafe," in spite of the fact that it was a small, well-organized, totally peaceful protest. Do I get to say "Hey, I think you're a piece of shit for supporting a genocide?" No. Can I tell my Trump-supporting coworkers and boss that they're idiots who are actively destroying democracy? No. Most workplaces trend conservative so we have become adept at finding people who share our views and generally keeping our mouths shut otherwise.

Alexandra Curd

Gotta push back on the idea that you can't be "working class" while being in academia and non-profit sector. Very much relies on a kinda conservative and flat definition of working class. The leftist definition of working class is selling your labor and not owning the means of production, so it's weird for a leftist podcast to refer to the more conservative definition imo

Alex Rachel

Even so, its genuinely a bad argument. Even if we distributed an AR-15 to every man, woman, and child in the country, these "I've got to defend my freedom" types are relying on a myth of themselves as Rambo-esque heroes and our government as willing to use restraint. Ours is the only country to drop a nuclear bomb on a civilian population....twice. The U.S. government is more than capable of forgetting that "restraint."

Alex Rachel

Charlie Kirk died as he lived: promoting violence.

a

would love to see you guys cover "algospeak" by adam aleksic in a future mainfeed or bonus episode!!

ES

Thank you! I love compliments on my spiciest of spicy takes, lol. I mean every word though (and quite a few more words that I didn’t want to write down), and I appreciate knowing I’m not the only one.

brennabean

Charlie Kirk did say in 2023, “It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment”. So I don’t really see why any of us would have to feel bad for his death🤷🏽‍♀️ he literally said it’s worth it.

Archer Mallon.

The part about Laura Rosenbury is hilarious because she was a professor when I was in law school and her approach to free speech was...different. When our dean sent out a kind of racist and extremely poorly worded letter about Mike Brown just before the cop wasn't indicted, she gave some students her password that let faculty send emails to the entire law school so we could send an email inviting everyone to walk out of class at a time when 80%+ of the students were in classes. She also lent us use her key card so we could hang political materials (and just mean things about the dean) in the library in the middle of the night. I'm glad she understand that a 22 year old law student is much more responsible than a 21 year old undergraduate and can be trusted with dialogue lol. She also helped some students sue the university before she moved to Florida and helped make it illegal for professors to help sue the state.

James Hultgren

“and that they will turn away from sticking their neck out” Did an editor check the editorial from TFP cause… ummmmm……..

Katie

Wow

Lindsey Tee

Have to say every take is a 10/10 please continue being this unapologetically your selves

Henré Botha

Mike used "lab out" as a verb. I'm only getting more convinced that he's secretly an fgc dork.

Tracy & her cats

For a paywall bypass i use is Article Reader (for Android, there seem to be similar ones for Apple). It strips the page down to text. It's good for ad-heavy blog recipe sites too.

Jill

I know that the fringes have always existed, but there used to be a point where the majority of people used to agree that yes, there are some views that are either just plain objectively wrong or too repugnant to entertain, and now debatebro culture has such a chokehold on discussions and the overton window moved so far to the right that it feels like that's just been lost? Like, if somebody said "we should kill every single puppy on Earth" or "today is Februvember 37th," it feels like the main reaction now would be "oh well let's hear them out and have a spirited debate" instead of the correct reaction, which is to go "what the fuck are you talking about?"

jcopper

if you don't have fruits or veg out - do you have plants? They might to fungus gnats instead. In which case you want beneficial nematodes.

Astraea

This was delightful. Thank you so much for sharing.

Harumy Concepción

I've been avoiding the news about Charlie Kirk like the plague, because it makes me want to scream. I'm so glad to have caught this episode and your conversation with In Bed With the Right, it makes me feel more sane.

Tiaragram

Thank you, thank you, thank you

Elizabeth Gunn, sickly but cruel

I'm thinking about all this. I was horrified when Melissa Hortman and her husband and her dog were murdered. But I wasn't exactly surprised? I was not grieved but I was surprised by the murder of Kirk. And i think it comes back to the state having a monopoly on violence. Even when they are not state actors, right wing murderers, especially of left wing figures, are implicitly and sometimes explicitly supported by the state. To have that reversed, to have a right wing figure be murdered is pushing back against that state monopoly on violence, and I think that is a big reason for all this shock and brouhaha.

Emma G

He mentions a few in the Bret Stephens episode! Sounds like he read the Volker Ullrich books and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Rachael P

For people interested in learning more about parallels of our bizarre reality with Germany in the 1930s, In Bed with the Right is doing a series on Germany 1933. It is deeply researched and manages to be serious without being a huge bummer. And I love Adrian’s wordplay.

Finn Macartney

IBCK comes down hard on the intentionalist functionalist debate!

Siffrin No Middle Names No Last Name

as a trans person whose advocacy used to include a lot of gender 101 education, people who say they're "just a little confused" or w/e about gender these days are more often than not speaking in bad faith. we really don't need to coddle them for the sake of appearing reasonable. trans issues are in the news like daily now, if people are ignorant that's a choice they've made. the correct response to "it's valid to believe there are only two genders" isn't "it's okay to think that as long as you're not being outright bigoted," it's "no, it is not valid to believe that." and as a trans person it does scare me that two of the cis public figures i have viewed as consistent trans allies defaulted to the former and not the latter.

Boolckin

The question that keeps popping up in my mind while I listen to almost any episode of If books could kill: does Michael cut out all the parts where one of them is angrily and hysterically yelling about the subject matter, or do they really have such unbelievable self-control? If it's the latter, please share your wisdom senpais

Blake

I get really annoyed when I hear Michael spreading misinformation. I don’t think it’s true that the gun Robinson used wouldn’t be accessible in other countries. It’s actually a fairly standard hunting rifle, not something people would even describe as an “assault weapon”

Amanda Daquila

Dark Passion Doom Loop band name, called it!

Amanda Martin Sandino

Oh! I think I get access to the Free Press through my job (in any case, I have access?). I saved the Lukianoff on Kirk and Phillips piece on Hortman as PDFs. Can I email to the podcast address?

ES

Michael, don’t tease me with a Maintenance Phase seminar and then not actually deliver one.

ES

Is the Free Press piece *actually* called Je Suis Charlie? Like… the Charlie Hebdo coverage 😬

ES

I am begging you to also post them on sci-hub, if they’ll let you. And/or archive.org, and/or a Google drive folder, and/or printing them out and mailing them to my address.

ES

If any of these schmucks actually had, as Mike likes to call them, content-neutral beliefs that violence is bad, they wouldn’t need to lie about Charlie Kirk’s politics, because his politics would be completely irrelevant to their point. I’ll give Ezra Klein credit on this one: his take was stupid, but it was internally, logically consistent and seems to be honest.

@megawheeze

I had great success with the DIY traps I set up using some rando's online instructions: large empty soda bottle; slice off top below the curve; put a few inches of red wine & sugary beverage (soda!); invert the bottle top so the fruit flies dive in the narrow opening & die in the sugary wine mixture. Put out about 3 of these in the kitchen simultaneously & declared triumph within a few days. Not classy interior decor, but effective.

Jenna Jerman

This episode is especially good. Given the timeliness, I wonder if you would consider putting it on your main feed so it can be shared?

Ryan Mishap

Re: Ezra Klein moving rightward. You can tell this is true by his beard. Ugh.

gretchen anderson

Can’t believe we didn’t wheel out the “he was no angel” for this guy

Cree Merr

Michael, if you want a more systemic analysis of how Hitler was installed (not elected) in power, check out The Anatomy of Fascim by Robert O. Paxton. Very unique read

Stacy Shabalin

For the first time since the Charlie Kirk assassination/murder, I felt my emotions reflected back at me. So much of the liberal media (e.g. Pod Save America), seemed to trip over itself to rewrite Kirk's life mission and mourn the death of a human who never existed, who was a good-faith actor pushing our democracy forward through open debate. That Kirk is a fantasy - a fantasy he spat on the entire time he was alive. No mainstream article accepts the discomfort of acknowledging that being killed doesn't make Charlie Kirk a saint. He is just another victim of the gun violence he spent his life justifying.

Meredith Collins

i think there’s a difference between misinformation and just being…accidentally wrong

Susannah Maher

It hasn't been loading for me I was afraid it had been taken down!

Astraea

I haven't heard the PSA take so technically shouldn't comment . . . but I will say, your comment makes me feel pretty dang good about my decision to cancel my subscription to them last year.

Cree Merr

There's even a free pdf copy on libcomm if you search Google

Cree Merr

IIRC he might also be reading Richard J Evans' trilogy on Nazi Germany. Coming of the Third Reich, Third Reich in Power, Third Reich at War. If you're only interested in how Hitler came to be Chancellor, you only need to read the first. It's also the shortest. Great series, highly recommend

Blake

If a journalist is wrong, they’re spreading misinformation, intentionally or not. You’re willing to extend benefit of the doubt because he shares your political views. We all do it, but we’d call out a right winger for doing the same thing, even if it was accidental. Michael should issue a correction.

ES

The fact that it was one (1) grown-ass adult, rather than 20 1st graders, feels different to me too. Feels better. Signed, Someone from Connecticut

ES

How did you get tickets for the seminar!? I’ve been waitlisted for months 😭 I too want to eat stale snacks in a poorly lit conference room and listen to speakers whose mics don’t work!

ES

And, do you get to work from home because your MAGA coworkers and boss are part of the demographic that is *actually* committing most of the mass violence in our society and it makes YOU feel unsafe?

ES

Or the civil war. I kept screaming during the episode, “should we have just let slavery continue!?!??????!????”

ES

I thank them for their service 🫡

ES

Lmao that’s fantastic; thank you!

India

This has nothing to do with this episode (which is very good!) but I don’t use twitter so Patreon comments are all I’ve got. To the hosts, to anyone reading this, PLEASE read Isaac Chotiner’s recent interview with Cass Sunstein in the New Yorker. It’s beyond the fuckin pale

ES

Yeah, I think this is a net good. I do feel bad for his kids, but like you alluded to, I felt bad for them while he was alive too!! I think I can get on board with their argument that political violence, on the whole, is a bad thing. I too would like to live in a world where we don’t settle our problems with murder! But we haven’t lived in that world in long time - if ever. Far right terrorism is the most common form of political violence in this country, it has been for years, and it’s getting worse. *IF* this assassin was motivated by political reasons (which he may not have been - e.g., Harvey Milk’s killer seems to have been motivated much more by a labor dispute than by homophobia), then that politically-motivated assassination does not exist in a vacuum. We have BEEN in a violent, deadly fascism vs. democracy clash for YEARS now, it’s just that one side wasn’t shooting back. I’m not saying that leftists should march out into the streets and do mass scale violence (gosh wouldn’t that be terrible… a bunch of terrorists just marching down the street, chanting threats, killing people… good thing nothing like that has happened WELL AWHILE AGO…). We do have better values than them, and we should act accordingly. But sometimes “acting accordingly” means having the courage to take one for the team and do what needs to be done to protect the vulnerable people we claim to care about.

schwa431

in many ways, gun violence is similar to writing an opinion collumn. is what tylor robinson did really much different than what political pundits do every day? new york times get at me for more hot takes

ES

AND ANOTHER THING… I’ve now listened to your appearance on “in bed with the right,” and I think I’ve uncovered another facet of my disagreement with you. Peter mentioned being opposed to the death penalty; that he doesn’t think actual murderers should be killed, much less people who, it’s true, were just talking. I am also opposed to the death penalty, and this made me think: why do I feel differently about Charlie Kirk getting iced at a speaking engagement than I do about the state executing someone who (let’s just stipulate this is true) has committed heinous crimes? Eventually the answer came to me: the death penalty is, as the name implies, a PENALTY. It’s a punishment - punitive, retributive. It does not serve any purpose other than to punish someone for something they’ve done. By definition, someone sentenced to death has already been captured, tried, convicted, and incarcerated. Even if we were to ignore actual facts and just assume that everyone on death row would continue causing harm in society if they were released, the fact is that that’s not what we’re addressing when the state executes someone. They’re incarcerated; they are no threat to the public. (They may be a threat to their fellow inmates, but none of these pro-death penalty people seem to care about that.) There is no utility in the death penalty; it is purely vengeance. As a matter of faith, I do not think humans should be dealing out vengeance, and as a matter of civics, I definitely do not think the government should be dealing out vengeance. The assassination of Charlie Kirk, however, has utility. We don’t know the assassin’s actual motives in his own head, but if this actually was the act of political violence that it’s being described as, *that’s not vengeance.* Like in the example I gave of Robert E. Lee, the motivation is not “I hate this guy so much; it will give me pleasure to see him die,” but rather, “I recognize a huge threat to a lot of people, and I have the opportunity to do something *strategic* to mitigate that danger.” We all understand this in wars (which I am also opposed to, btw! I too would prefer to live in a world without violence, but we DON’T, and refusing to fight back against fascism isn’t a winning strategy.). The idea of murdering some random 18 year old kid is (and should be) abhorrent, and yet we all revere veterans (rightly). As my boy Faramir once said, looking down at a slain enemy soldier, “His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he comes from, and if he really was evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home, or would he not rather have stayed there, in peace?” We all understand that when “open war is upon you, whether you would have it or not,” sometimes, horrifically and grievously, taking human life becomes an issue of strategy, not malevolence. I’m hesitant to call our situation open war, at least for now, but I think the distinction applies. (And in this case, we actually know the answer to some of Faramir’s questions! And it turns out that Charlie Kirk was actually a piece of shit!)

Carin

Thank you for this episode. Living in Germany (28 years), I had never heard of this guy and you filled in a lot of the gaps for me. A guy like CK would have been an AfD member over here.

Bea

All the left wing podcasts need to pool their resources and get ONE subscription to TFP that you all share. That way you're giving Bari as little money as possible.

ryo

I have a genuine question that I hope Peter & Michael will address. In more discussions and podcasts than I can count, the issue of immigration and mass deportation and disappearing of people in concentration camps is entirely ignored. The offensive ideas of the right is summed up as trans rghts and abortion over and over. It makes me think that most podcasters and their fans are unaware and/or unconcerned that Steven Miller is running the country and trying to exterminate Latinos. We can all agree that genocide is bad in other countries but we don’t talk about the genocide happening here. What the heck is going on?

David Blakeley

It seems like you guys are accepting the right-wing framing that Charlie Kirk was an example of "left-wing violence"? I still haven't seen anything that supports that. The guy was a right-wing guy from a right-wing family doing right-wing violence. It just so happens that, just like the attempts on Trump, the target was also right-wing.

Cordelia Reagan

Has been taken down - there was news about it I believe but I do love www.removepaywall.com

ES

They’re going after Chris Murphy????? Have most people even heard of Chris Murphy??? And they’re going after him on abortion, rather than guns????

ES

MICHAEL - how did you get rid of the fruit flies? I have plants, and I have been at war with these little bastards for YEARS.

EmSmi

When is the full takedown of EK coming? I am continuously flawed by how out of touch he is.

Laura R

After that Ezra Klein interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates, we really need a new episode on EK... Please! It's the most rage-inducing thing I've seen in a long time.

Nomi Storm

Ok, random place for plant advice, but those are not fruit flies but fungus gnats and are caused by the soil being too wet. Letting the top inch of soil dry out completely in between watering should clear up the problem.

Jonathan Honor

When Ezra said that he doesnt see statistics on how voter suppression tactics change voter turn out and elections i was done with the idea he was a serious person

Elliott G

We need a Kleinisode

Raz

Silksong reference?! Just when I thought this episode couldn’t get any better.

Rose Nylund

Once I used a jar of cider vinegar and dish soap to catch them

Jessica Lysne

As you described the F150 driver with the punisher sticker on the back, I was right behind a gigantic ford truck with a We the People decal over their entire back window. Universe aligning

Claire

I just became aware that Candace Owen’s has a book called “Make Him a Sandwich” and I can’t read it for my own mental sanity but would LOVE to hear you both dissect it hahah

ES

I don’t think @ replies do anything on Patreon, so I’m just going to reply here to both of you: Yes, Nomi is correct, some of these bugs are fungus gnats. Fungus gnats are spindly, whereas fruit flies are chunky. I have both though, and I just call them all fruit flies. As for letting the soil dry out, I have tried that. I actually killed quite a few of my plants because I let them dry out so much in my desperation to get rid of the bugs. Similarly, @Ophelia, I have been using traps like that for years now, to very little effect. Like I said, I have been at war with these little bastards for years, and I have exhausted all of the normal options. Dry soil, vinegar traps, sticky traps, neem tea, repotting, etc. I even just stopped buying fresh fruit at all for a while, sacrificing my own most healthy choices in pursuit of victory, to no end. When I started buying fruit again, I also bought mesh covers like they use at picnics. I take the garbage out way more often than it really needs. I periodically pour bleach and/or hot water down my drains. Nothing is working!!!

Lilith Anderson

I'm just gonna say it: charlie kirk getting popped like a meat balloon rules and it made my day when I heard about it, tumblr really felt like the last day of school before summer when we all learned charlie kirk swallowed that bullet. Rest in piss idiot.

Tracey Hanna

Are we going to get an episode on Bari Weiss getting installed as head of CBS news?? WTF...

Lisa Bari

Came here to say this - feels like EMERGENCY POD time....

Evan

38:12 say that again 👀

Cassie Riel

RED ALERT: sprinkling diatomaceous earth on my plans and their soil finally kicked my months-long fungus gnat war. Cheap, not sticky/messy, not toxic to anything but bugs.

V P

Let Michael and Peter lose their collective braincells while reading it, while we protect our mental health :D

V P

I've been meaning to listen to his podcast for a long time and then discovered that he's a complete AI bro who believes that AGI is coming tomorrow. After learning this I don't think I'll be able to take any of his talking points seriously.

ES

This is a new one!! THANK YOU! I’ll try it! 😃😃😃

Ben Murphy

Please please please do SAPIENS (please)

Chelsea S

Quick point about "exclusion" and this assassination happening on a college campus - that college literally has a 100% ACCEPTANCE RATE, per the USNews college ranking profile 🥴

Cristina

Oh my gosh I never fucking expected a Silksong reference in my politics podcast 🤣

Hollie L A Zaborowsky

@ES, just curious - did the diatomaceous earth work?? I actually moved and started over with new plants to get rid of mine.

Zero Gravitas

Tbf y'all Hilary Clinton IS a conservative. Not a joke lol

Athena V Hollins

From MN House Rep, thank you for recognizing the hypocrisy of response between the killing of Melissa Hortman and Charlie Kirk. Not only was the Kirk situation re-traumatizing, but the response of the country made Melissa's death feel completely forgotten.

Bea Kelly-Russo

Great episode, but I don’t get the “Boss Baby” reference?

Erica

I believe "disinformation" is the term for when it's intentionally wrong

Erica

I am pro-em dash!

Blake

Fine, misinformation. But the effect is the same

PlushieMoss

The silksong mention prompted me to realize that I would pay good money to watch Michael play literally any video game on stream. PLEASE 🙏

Bea

It's a reference to a famous tweet: "Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this..."

A. List

I grew up with narcissistic parents, and so much of the Klein/centrist response reminds me of the magical thinking children trapped with negligent parents do. It's comforting in the short term, but doesn't change the situation at all. And while children might not have limited options outside of internalized fantasies, adults are able to be more active in how they respond to frightening situations.

Arien

Omg not Silksong slander! Also yes, seconding OdinCat - I want to watch Mike play video games!

Cate Kneale

It was interesting listening to this again when we now know the real way to mourn Charlie Kirk is with lots of fireworks and an unsettling interview between the widow and pod fave Bari Weiss. I've been trying to make a joke about the ghosts of past, present and future Charlie appearing but in reality the saint-making process has only been pushed further along.

AngryDog GoodBoy

Hot take perhaps. But the only good nazi is a dead nazi. Charlie Kirk was a nazi.

Edie Nugent

Fully three months late but thought I know you tried archive sites, I just got on to Free Press with archive.is

Molly's Best Life

Thoughts on democrats thinking violence ‘might be necessary’ or whatever. Many of us have learned something of history, wrestled with the personal/political/moral implications, and actually learned something. Additionally, I took “nazi punks fuck off” into my soul as a teenager and that ethos never left me. Apparently neither did the nazis.

camilk

only 27 but also exhausted by this shit. why should I care about this person who gladly celebrated the suffering of marginalized groups? I don't see his death as tragic and I'm not going to apologize for it.

Olivia R Burton

Anti-vegans use this “be nice and people will listen” argument with vegans too. People don’t often change because you’re nice OR mean to them. There is no one way to change minds, especially when people are indoctrinated into a belief. To me, complaining that someone with differing beliefs is “mean” is just a way to avoid the actual discussion.

ES

Hero