Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Michael and Peter on "In Bed With The Right" (Patreon)

Published:
2025-09-22 14:10:16
Imported:
2026-06

Downloads

Content

The boys join the In Bed With The Right podcast to discuss the murder of Charlie Kirk. This episode was originally published as a Patreon episode by In Bed With The Right, but we're sharing it with our listeners as a supplement to our own Charlie Kirk discussion.

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

Michael

A 2 episode drop!

Amanda Martin Sandino

Excited for this! It’s hard not to have complicated thoughts as an NB MENA Latinx person in an immigrant household… along with very uncomplicated grief as a victim of gun violence and a parent. Y’all really help me unpack everything and work on healing <3 thank you for all you do.

Amanda Martin Sandino

Really hoping they don’t deport my husband though… the country his folx are from doesn’t even exist anymore 😭

Chuck Wallace

omg a double header is it christmas

Tiara English

Same, I can’t wait to listen to some sense on this topic

alli moulton

Another one?? Starting Monday on a high!

Rachel B

Two episodes omg. Getting through the week is now possible

Shanda Wells

I genuinely think lots of people in the public sphere are freaking out because whether or not they know it, they identify in some way with Kirk. So seeing him murdered in public makes them fear this exact thing could happen to them. I suspect that capitulation to this idolization of Kirk makes them feel "safer".

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

I can’t wait to listen!!! My favorite smart and snarky podcasters. You all are keeping hope alive.

RedRoseWhite

Has anyone corrected Peter on the “Hey Fascist, catch this” being a Helldivers 2 reference (gamer-groyper joke) and not an indication of alignment with actual antifascism yet? :p

Taylor Kendall

The Brooks thing about "history being moved by humiliation" is a repack of the same idea from David Graeber's 'The Utopia of Rules' Brooks stealing from Graber kills me

Andrew Bryson

Just to piggy back on Michael's point at 2:45 -- I'm not sure that "good at making viral posts" can even be separated from "good at raising money," given what we know (and what we don't know) about the role of payola in algorithmic social media feeds!

LWinner

you should check out the podcast panic world, I think their episode on Charlie Kirk touches on this more

Jenny

IBWtR / IBCK crossover episodes are my favorite. You four have such a great energy together, and every one has something unique and intelligent to say. Thanks for sharing this chat; makes me feel more sane in the midst of the mainstream media's insane reactions.

LWinner

A great episode and I agree with pretty much everything said, although I am put off by Adrian calling people who celebrate the death of one of the most harmful political figures “sociopathic”. I don’t celebrate his death, but is it hard to understand why people who have suffered material harm or witnessed material harm from Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric might be glad that he’s dead? Just a thought.

Ty

On the note of the shooter being a potential right winger: obviously if we saw proof or evidence of right wing fostered motivation I think people really just need to reckon why they would receive this idea so openly. If Tyler Robinson voted and for trump twice and was known to be Republican in his friend group and among his family I'd still be inclined to point out that by a massive and insurmountable margin, the most political and politically impactful thing he ever did was publicly assassinate a right wing political actor. Its obvious he to some degree was coming from the left of Kirk and killing him for political reasons. I'd be more inclined to believe a right winger jumped left then killed Charlie than I would to believe that he was a right winger killing a prolific right winger for political reasons. It was wishful thinking from a crowd of people hoping to immediately politicize this in bad faith.

S

My brother in law worked for a community development ngo in Ecuador and was doing some projects with the husband of a leftist indigenous politicians husband. He died in a car accident along with the politicians husband last year and the first comments on the news article were from people celebrating his death and insulting indigenous people and people who support the leftist political movements. I reported the comments to Facebook and they said it was fine and didn't take it down.

el

the right have been drooling at the chance to label transgender people as violent terrorists and now it’s very funny in a way to watch them scramble for evidence

Irene

👆

el

agree

vevintage

I argued to someone yesterday that, effectively, he sacrificed himself. I haven't listened yet so I don't know what the argument is, but the fact that Kirk believed that (or claimed to) and died in this particular way is more than merely ironic.

Amber Englebert

This is a crossover I am fully delighted in.

amy marie

do you know about nick fuentes and the groypers? robinson's ideology certainly seems to align with them. they hate kirk because they think he's too liberal because he doesn't hate jews enough. fuentes and kirk have a long and well documented feud. the stuff written on the bullets appear to be from right wing groyper memes. this seems to be the most obvious answer to robinson's ideological background IMO.

amy marie

right?? kirk said that gay people (i.e. me) should be stoned to death. THAT is a sociopathic viewpoint. Me celebrating that someone who wants to kill me has died seems pretty chill in comparison.

Natalie

I feel like a cliche leaning on a movie/TV reference, but this is literally the “Splitters!” scene in Life of Brian. It’s not like it’s a new thing.

Mountain Dew Or Crab Juice

It's hard to glean anyone's political affiliations unless they're overtly stated, or they consistently trafficked in well known political parlance. As the information trickled out, combining his obviously conservative upbringing with a vague online footprint and the memes inscribed on the bullets, it wasn't a surprise that people's first assumption was Groyper. Fuentes declared Kirk an enemy multiple times, and Kirk was the target of the first "Groyper war". With so many other shooters (especially recently) being meme-brained nihilists, I think the jump was a logical one, even if it's early adoption was just Leftist wish-casting. A lot of people hold contradictory stances, and change stances easily depending on how questions are presented, or who they last heard speak. There is very little ideological education in America beyond some vague notions of rights and freedoms; so when people see someone who has even less ideology than that, I think it breaks brains. I'm also sure everyone's been corrected and elucidated on the Helldivers 'Hey Fascist, catch.' meme, but the subtext (Helldivers, and Super Earth being a fascist empire that calls itself 'Managed Democracy' while labeling all its enemies Fascist, Communist, etc.) is amusing to me.

Ty

You can come up with all the justifications you want, the fact of the matter is it's pure cope to think anything other than actual evidence of their motivation being right wing, something no reliable source has given us aside from tangential hearsay, is more plausible.

Relkia

Going to devil's advocate for a second: Gretchen Felker-Martin's reaction makes a lot more sense when you consider how much violence Kirk advocated against trans people, everything from public vigilantism to government oppression, incarceration, and even at one point "Nuremberg-style trial(s) for every gender-affirming clinic doctor" (that is a direct quote).

Relkia

And yes I am familiar enough with history to know about the subsequent Nuremberg trials, but I have a bunker to sell you (1 previous owner, slight water damage) if you think that's what Kirk was talking about.

Drew Bernstein

As someone who did laugh when he died,,,, yeah man. I'm trans. He wants me eliminated from public life. Sorry for my lack of sympathy for this guy i guess?? I felt sad for his kids and scared for like. The country as a whole. but God. Let me listen to Haha You're Dead by Green Day and make my stupid little jokes when a fucking nazi dies. Like I'm not a public figure. And it doesn't make me a sociopath to not give a fuck about the death of a nazi I did not know personally. I don't believe anyone deserves to die, but I also don't believe that everyone deserves my respect when they do.

Cassie LaGrange

He would have celebrated my death, and actively called for it, why shouldn't I celebrate his?

el

so true drew

M

Came here to say this.

Evan

Agreed. Kirk gleefully traded in genocidal rhetoric against the groups he didn't like and profited immensely from doing so. I don't think it'd be wildly controversial to say that the world was better off without, for example, Julius Streicher; does the fact that CK didn't live to see the genocides he worked to lay the ground for play out really make him that much better?

Blake

Very weird to hear you all say that we shouldn’t trust info coming out of these agencies, and then take the texts from the FBI at face value.

Blake

It is sociopathic to celebrate violence and death.

LWinner

Eric, you allow me to bring up another gripe I have with the additional misuse of language surrounding mental illness. Sociopathy is a personality disorder and not a term used to describe a lack of empathy or sympathy for someone who is objectively a terrible person or for any person in any scenario and you can’t use the term to refer to people in a generalized manner.

Ben Schwabe

My gosh what a tall horse you're on.

Shalma Movassaghi

Amy Marie, while I agree with you that this was a solid theory, it has been debunked. Peter confirms that in this episode.

Shalma Movassaghi

Peter does address this in the episode. We now know Robinson is not a groyper.

Shalma Movassaghi

Peter is so right about Kirk’s actual motivations for years. There is a reason he focused on educational institutions. Not only because they are considered bastions of leftist thought and progress but also because they are a great source for those ripe for radicalization. Steven Crowder did the same thing with his “Change My Mind” crap. Faux intellectuals radicalizing university students is very intentional.

Shalma Movassaghi

Danielle, so true. I constantly think this about the Kirk mourners. I’ve been highly empathetic (a bleeding heart, Kirk would say!) my whole life and all the sudden I’m sociopathic and people who laugh at others dying are the sensitive souls? Please. Eric here is either gaslit or doing the gaslighting.

Blake

Also to say there’s no evidence he was a groyper… I’m not saying he was for sure, but those bullet engravings were groyper memes. Maybe do some research before spouting off so confidently. Peter actually took the “catch fascist” to be earnest lol

Shalma Movassaghi

(Editing to add that this comment is not directed at Michael or Peter.) Let’s PLEASE shut up about “he didn’t deserve this.” Are we joking????? He didn’t deserve to experience random violence in a gun-loving country by sitting on a platform for YEARS and spouting hateful dangerous fascist rhetoric to impressionable young minds at progressive institutions???? What?! He put a target on himself! Why are we acting surprised there were consequences for what he did for years in relative cis white straight conservative male safety while literally PREYING on young minds like the radical terrorist creep he was? Why is the left held to god-like standards? Meanwhile if I stepped on a lawn when I lived in Texas, I could be justifiably shot and killed over someone’s property. We are so backwards. Black people step out on to the street daily doing NOTHING inflammatory in their lives and are at risk. Eric Garner didn’t deserve to die. George Floyd didn’t deserve to die. I would run out of characters if I kept going. Almost every minority’s life is actively at risk largely because of people like Charlie Kirk feeling safe to be loudly bigoted. He ABSOLUTELY deserved anything that would happen to him due to his insane choices. Just like Trump does. He worked up hatred on a very public platform. That is a RISKY thing to do!!!! Pop stars get death threats, for god’s sake, and this inflammatory smug villain was supposed to be guarded from potentially violent feedback and dangerous actors?? As a staunch leftist, I don’t want ANYONE killed, much less by guns! But to say he “didn’t deserve it” is WILD. And PLEASE, someone contact my boss (me) about this comment so I can get fired!

Shalma Movassaghi

No, no, we must be NICE and KIND and GOOD to the genocidal man. /s

Abby aka Boom Boom

Yes. I think anyone questioning why people are (reasonably) celebrating should read “I’m glad my mom died” by Jeannette mccurdy. (Maybe that’s the next book to read for the pod?)

Colleen Rosky

Can we stop calling it an assassination? It was a murder. One of, sadly, many in this country. He held no political office. CK should have expected that if you rile up young people, at least one will have a gun and wish to make themselves famous.

Abby aka Boom Boom

Also where are the discussions of the plane that disappeared for 20 mins in air right after the shooting, that’s registered to elite Israelis? I feel like mossad-cia isn’t out of the question. Just paying attention to patterns here.

Danielle Ramos

I commented ‘good’ under a post about Charlie Kirk and was doxxed by an internet rando who contacted my job. I’m a glorified secretary at a pharma company. A literal nobody, no followers, not trying to be an influencer or anything. I have a meeting with HR on Wednesday and may get fired for this.

Joy

Big fan of this collab

Cbizkit

I’d like to draw a distinction between being glad someone is dead and endorsing *how* they died. I was glad when my hateful, racist, abusive grandma died because it meant she would stop hurting people I care about, but I’m not going around encouraging people to get emphysema. (Similarly, I don’t think playing the lottery is a wise financial strategy, but I’d be glad if someone gave me a ticket and I won.) I hate the *way* Charlie Kirk died (and I’m terrified of the political consequences it will bring), but I’m glad he’s done talking because the hateful things he said and the violence he encouraged have caused people genuine harm.

Cbizkit

Yeah, I vote for policies and candidates that might have prevented his death (and I’d be DELIGHTED if they had because it would protect so many other people). But *that* is the most he deserves from any of us.

Seán Wootton

I’m so baffled by this insistence I keep hearing from people I usually agree with on the left that we all agree Charlie Kirk’s murder was “shocking” or “upsetting”. It was the predictable outcome of the violent rhetoric he espoused, and no less than what he wished and enacted politically on others. These past two years I have seen babies decapitated, six year olds hanging in pieces off the side of buildings, trans youth killing themselves out of despair, all of which truly is shocking and upsetting, and which Charlie Kirk explicitly endorsed and worked to bring about with the power he had. At a certain point a person loses access to my giving a shit if they die violently, and to call that sociopathy is a catastrophic misunderstanding of what empathy is and is not.

Shalma Movassaghi

Cbizkit, thank you for being a voice of reason. Beautifully said, especially compared to my angry inarticulate deluge.

Ashley Naftule

Yeah, when they were talking about Gretchen’s comments I was disappointed they didn’t bring up that she’s trans. She has good reason not to be civil in her comments. I can’t fault anyone from a background who’s been directly targeted and impacted by the right-wing culture wars that people like CK fomented to not be… charitable in their comments about the incident.

Shalma Movassaghi

Jesus Christ. This is insane. I am so sorry. I’ve dealt with this level of suppression for years for being loudly and openly pro-Palestine (before 2023, only saying that because it was different back then). But this is a whole new level of McCarthyism’s comeback.

Seán Wootton

This just did so much to alleviate my cognitive dissonance, thank you for articulating this

Rocky

I'm listening to this and I am gay

Theo

yes, I'm finding the finger wagging at her pretty hypocritical after they spent the whole last episode talking about the double standards discourse is held to on the left vs the right.

Cbizkit

Thanks for saying this. I’m not sure if it’s just a reflex for folks to condemn all violence generically, but I too have been disappointed with people’s unwillingness to engage with how this single murder fits into the sheer magnitude (and asymmetry) of violence over the past few years. I have felt utterly paralyzed and sickened by all of the devastation you mentioned on a pretty much daily basis—I have not lost my ability to empathize. But I’m not going to pretend to access something that I can’t to convince a bunch of moral relativists that I’m a good person.

Seán Wootton

Exactly!! My empathy is alive and well and it’s running me into the ground frankly. Solidarity, pal.

Mary Y.

Yes thank you. Was it really that shocking? Three weeks before someone shot up kids in a church and said it’s because he wanted to watch them die and Kirk said this is the society he wanted. He died manifesting the world he wanted

Cassie LaGrange

This!! I was like oh okay 👍 I guess were just believing cops now

Joshua Reubens

It's just legit funny to think how all four of these people would apparently boo hoo over Joseph Goebbels getting killed.... What a world...

conrad

With IBWTR's focus on gender-based issues, it was incredibly remiss of them to not highlight that Gretchen Felker-Martin is a trans woman who celebrated the demise of a person who spent much of his career inciting violence against people like her. Kirk advocated for trans people and their allies to be institutionalized, removed from employment and general society, and worse. GLAAD is reporting surges in violence against trans/GNC people, and anecdotally, from my own life and my friends', we feel so much less safe in 2025 than we did 10 years ago. Melissa McCoul's firing from Texas A&M for teaching about gender diversity is frightening. For people to be comforted that someone who hated them and incited violence against them is no longer around seems completely logical to me, not sociopathic in the slightest. When Hitler was killed, many people celebrated. Even centrist media immediately parroting a hostile transgender connection shows how influential Kirk has been. While I know all the participants of this pod are pro-trans rights people, not acknowledging the context of Felker Martin's words just bummed me out. Trans people hear the worst takes on a daily basis about how insane, disgusting, and crazy they are. Leaving out that context made it just seem like Felker-Martin was silly and stupid for not navigating a tricky professional landscape, but from my perspective as a fellow trans person, it seemed like a professional bully was deplatformed and like someone was finally willing to stand up against his well-funded hate campaign. Kirk's stances were vile. I'm not sad he's gone.

Joshua Reubens

Do we? Because the fascists say so? I have legit no idea but it seems we can never KNOW anything about this.

Joshua Reubens

Huh? The actual "left" has been wanting to take up arms for awhile now and doesn't care about your memes.

Relkia

Trans people being fired or forced out of their jobs by local versions of Charlie Kirk (Charlie's Kirk's?) have been happening even before this. Michael probably even remembers one from last year where a trans teacher in Gig Harbor, WA had to quit after being featured on the show of one of our local Puget Sound pieces of living flotsam, Brandi Kruse, simply because they did drag performances in their personal free time.

Patrick Young

Cool I need new podcasts and had not heard of this one.

conancat

"Leftist meathead lift bro" is literally describing Hasanabi guys

Alexis Schade

Just started listening, were there two intentional puns in the first 2 minutes??? "Bring in the big guns " and "Ill give it a shot"??? Hilarious if so....

Jessica Domladovac

I just don't understand why so many people are champing at the bit to empathize with a man who incited, funded, and supported horrendous violence. How I see it, he was a victim of his own propaganda. Sick of all the care in the world, all the "oh, the humanity" about one incredibly bigoted, violent, radicalizing white man, but no one seems to give a shit about people he has directly harmed. I'm SICK of respectability politics. We get fucking nowhere because so many people, leftists included, are convinced that asking nicely is the way to get anything done. Guess what, the right isn't asking nicely. The government doesn't ask nicely when it uses tax dollars to blow children to bits in other countries.

Maxi Mailloux

Especially to hear Mike make the call-back to the earlier joke about CSAM /right after/ mentioning her really bummed me out. I don't think the joke was intentionally transphobic but damn, I did expect better

el

given the sheer vitriol kirk spouted about trans people while he was alive i do think gretchen is valid and is just not censoring herself like everyone else is. i also thought the child p*rn joke directly after was pretty tasteless…

gabbyness

Yeah this really disappointed me :/

Mary Y.

Also like— one person getting shot one time in public and dying very swiftly is very much low on the list of the horrifying tragedies we’re asked to witness over and over and over. This is an incredibly violent country that does incredibly violent things all over country and the world. True horrors. This was really so shocking? Why? Because he was a public figure?

Jen AR

I screwed up my sentence! I was typing as I was reeling from being fired and totally mis-wrote the comment. I meant the right had manufactured this outrage and have edited my comment now.

Mike Millimetre

i think the ironic thing about gfm's firing is she was writing a book about two characters whose whole deal is they are violent vigilantes who wholeheartedly believe in and commit vigilante murders. truly fork found in sink situation

Mike Millimetre

also bc she has been the target of a slander campaign trying to paint her as a paedophile or akin to one. i think it's probably due to their lack of familiarity with her and the discourses surrounding her but did leave a sour taste

gabbyness

Also she’s always been like this so DC knew who they were hiring

GummiBearGundam

Not liking murder, but not being broken up over a specific person's murder is not sociopathic. I am old enough to have seen the turn of the tides, and have to tread the waters this hate rode in on. I have no empathy, sympathy or grace for those that wish death in me and my loved ones. Kirk actively stoked violence and hate against LGBT+ people. He actively stoked hate and repression of minorities and women. Am I happy he was killed... No. Am I disappointed he's dead? Also no.

Mike Millimetre

fr 😭 from what I've seen it feels like it was both that the book was not doing well regardless AND someone at wb was making calls

Julian Peavy

As someone else said she’s always been like this and part of that is that she’s overly edgy and to be honest, not the best writer, so there were a lot of jokes flying around with a lot of comic book fans about how they were happy she got kicked off the Jason run, but not for this reason. “We won but at what cost?”

Julian Peavy

The joke about CP isn’t anything to do with like the fact that it’s funny but just the ridiculousness of the situation at large

el

it’s just poorly timed and kinda tasteless to talk about a trans person and then make a child p*rn joke while still kind of talking abt them

MEAT CLOWN

Unfortunately I have to be the "Webster's dictionary defines x as..." guy here: "murder by sudden or secret attack often for political reasons : the act or an instance of assassinating someone (such as a prominent political leader)" His killing fits the bill even if he wasn't an elected official.

apers

“And if you’re listening to this, you’re gay” Oh dip, you’re right…

Colleen Rosky

Well, you didn't *have* to be that guy, but I disagree. He may have been prominent to *some* but not all. He was a guy who got what he preached: zero empathy. He cared nothing for others and I am absolutely 💯 certain it's hot where he landed.

Bridget

I recognize Adrian from Sarah’s podcast, and now I need to listen to their podcast, and I bet I’m in for another Patreon subscription :) This ep was great

Matt

I think it was Jack on IDSG who pointed out that Kirk’s whole schtick only worked because he did it to college students and not the professors. He was a lying hatemongering hack doing crowd work on ill-prepared college kids so he could cut up the clips and entertain racist boomers on YouTube, he wasn’t debating anything and wasn’t interested in an exchange of ideas with anyone.

Dorothy Cooper

Hey I want to echo what other people have said that the take on Gretchen Felker-Martin does feel tone-deaf to the specific intensity of the hate that Kirk pumped out towards trans people, and that making a callback to the child porn thing right after felt in extremely bad taste given the context of people tarring trans women as paedophiles for... existing, and Felker-Martin having been specifically a victim of this harassment

Matt

It is indeed important to note that the tolerance for political violence and related excuse-making is extremely dependent on the political affiliation of the involved parties. A Trump terrorist murders a Democratic politician and her family, meh, a fascist YouTuber with deep connections to the Republican Party gets shot by a brainrotted meme kid and now everyone to the right of Che Guevara gets hysterical about anyone possibly saying anything about said fascist YouTuber. Like, say, quoting him and correctly describing what he was. Plus, it’s bad to make CSAM jokes anywhere near to a trans person considering the right wing desire to murder trans people. No argument with that. At the same time, Moira’s point about class solidarity among the pundits is also worth remembering - all the elite lib pundits like Klein are also very not interested in fellow pundits getting shot, even fascist agitators like Charlie Kirk. Edit: I also don’t like the characterization of anything Gretchen said as crazy - Kirk was a murderous agitator trying to incite pogroms and lynch mobs when he wasn’t trying to police college professors and get them fired for saying things his fascist boomer owners didn’t like. Anyone who’s in one of the minorities Kirk wanted to murder would have to go way farther than that for me to describe what they say as crazy.

Relkia

I'm willing to extend the benefit of doubt only on the callback joke since a lot of people didn't know much about Felker-Martin other than she was an author (myself included) until the news about her firing got big. As an example I didn't know she had been being harassed in that specific manner until people brought it up in this comment section, so it was hopefully not intentionally pointed at her and was just an Ill Conceived (iykyk) joke.

Dorothy Cooper

I think it's especially in bad taste given her personal history but tbh I think given the prevalence of treating being trans, especially a trans woman, as a threat to children in itself the joke was still in quite bad taste/would still have been if it was about a trans woman who had not been specifically targeted yk? I do love Ill Concieved too tho!

victoria Wood

Look up the Sophists of Ancient Greece and it will teach you everything you need to know about Turning Point. They called themselves philosophers (like Kirk called himself a debater), but they specialized in rhetoric and focussed on effective persuasion over truth.

Denden

It's pretty rich for Adrian to call anyone who says they are glad this happened to Kirk "sociopaths" after spending almost an hour detailing all of the fascist bigotry Kirk was responsible for. Should the Jews of Europe have not been glad when Hitler shot himself in the head? Or when Heinrich Himmler killed himself with a cyanide capsule? You cannot acknowledge the level of violence and upheaval that fascists normalize and then pretend that there is anything tenable about acting like good, decent liberal and leftist people must abide by the old rules that violence is outside of the social contract of politics; the essence of fascism *is* to escalate conflict to the point that catastrophic violence is inevitable and any such situation must be recognized as one where the state no longer has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. To walk back from this set of circumstances requires massive amounts of de-radicalization and honest reckoning with the consequences of empowering fascist politics; it is not an established norm we can lean on for support. It takes decades of fundamental change and reconstruction work that lies ahead of us, *if* we manage to survive the current authoritarian moment. Peter's comments on Gretchen Felker-Martin are completely inappropriate and he needs to check his cis privilege. He betrays a complete lack of consideration for the level of naked, genocidal dehumanization that the right wing attacks the trans community with every single day, and because he doesn't experience that as a what any trans person experiences it as: a deeply realistic and serious threat to life and limb, that is why he "doesn't get it". Maybe if this podcast invited a single trans guest on or centered any trans voices on these relevant political topics, he'd be able to start to understand outside of his own myopic attitude. Michael's rejoinder joke about child pornography is also completely inappropriate as any association between child sex abuse and trans people (the implication that a trans woman has child porn on her phone) feeds directly into right wing talking points that support their mission to eradicate all trans people from the United States. Michael and Peter, if you do not apologize for these comments next episode, I am cancelling my Patreon subscription.

Elizabeth Gunn, sickly but cruel

I'm there with you, friend. My heart has been stomped on by witnessing the devastation of Palestine for the last two years, I have no pain left for the death of a man contributing to its erasure.

Denden

Not even the "good" people on the left live in actual reality anymore.

Denden

There's something uniquely insulting about the way fascist authoritarians have done so much to make the world colder, harsher, more brutal, less tolerant of difference, and less open to compassion and care on every possible issue, and then expect their enemies to summon up an infinite emotional wellspring of tender loving softness for a man who, in life, would never have done anything of the sort for his own chosen foes.

Denden

Lawyer up if you can afford to! If not, please start a crowdfunding campaign! Fight for your right to free speech!

Amanda

Yikes. Fell asleep on the first listen and went to dive back in and opened these comments first. No longer excited to listen for the message that I should be 'civil' about Charlie Kirks death. Or a joke at the expense of a trans woman who they didn't feel was civil enough. Gross.

Elizabeth Gunn, sickly but cruel

There's still good stuff, but it was a breath of fresh air to come into the comments and go, "Hey, we all like these guys and pay to listen to them and also we mostly agree that they are wrong in this context!"

Gema Alig (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-06 20:00 It was so hard to concentrate with the lady's voice and her laugh. No thank you.
2025-09-24 09:48 It was so hard to concentrate with the lady's voice and her laugh. No thank you. Michael & Peter no more guests please. I can't believe she has a podcast. Even if I stand alone in this, I don't care. It was insufferable

It was so hard to concentrate with the lady's voice and her laugh. No thank you. Michael & Peter no more guests please. I can't believe she has a podcast. Even if I stand alone in this, I don't care. It was insufferable

Mary Y.

We don’t even need the conditional tense there. He *did not* do any sort of performative compassion, be it for his political foes or for slaughtered children.

Eva

Thank you for using the term CSAM. I know it's still not widely used, but man do I hate the term "child porn" and the consent it implies.

Seán Wootton

It was honestly weird how much they got right and then still managed to walk around to describing making jokes about Kirk’s death as “saying something awful”! I’ve also heard Peter be cavalier about cop deaths on 5-4 many times, so especially weird to hear this kind of thing coming from him. Hopefully they will address and clarify some of their comments in future!

Redcrysto

Uncommon L for this podcast, jesus yall. Yall talk about the mainstream dems not meeting the moment? Yall aint meetin this moment! We’re glad that ghoul is dead, rest in piss, even!

Erik

Matt

Yeah, it gives one of the grossest things imaginable a patina of legitimacy and smears an industry that doesn’t deserve that kind of bad shit.

Zack

His name is Michael, show some respect

E C

I think Michael and Peter jumped right past a really good point from Moira about how Ezra Klein was just seeing himself in Kirk rather than seeing the real Kirk. Also think there's some interesting stuff about gender and the solidarity of the influencer pundit class you could have gone after

Cassie LaGrange

I really hope Michael and Peter take the feedback here seriously. I really do like these guys and value what yall have to say, I just think you guys missed the mark because you have the privilege to have these positions. Working class, 2SLGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and especially multuply marginalized people don't have the luxury of mourning an oppresor and shouldn't be told we're bad for not feeling bad when a literal fascist dies

Ugino

oh drat I got through almost this whole episode without you realizing I'm gay

Holly W

I really think some of the opinions being expressed in this episode (and by other people on the left elsewhere) are heavily influenced by the way in which Kirk died. If he had simply passed away in his sleep with no one to see it, would this many people even care that some people are happy about it? It feels like a lot of the backlash against anyone who is happy about his death stems from the fact that he was shot in broad daylight, likely for his political opinions, and video of it was widely circulated online. I think most reasonable people can say it’s still okay to be relieved or even happy that he’s gone now, while also not agreeing with the manner in which he died. I’m not sure why this is such a difficult concept for some people to understand or engage with.

Carlita

😂 best

Gayhole

I generally like this podcast, but holy shit y'alls missed the mark by a mile on this one.

Aaron Blackmon

What the hell is Peter talking about????????

Joshua Potter

Not the best episode lol, and It really feels like they weren’t as critical because they were worried about Moira’s and Adrian’s employment

Amy Writes

There’s been a lot of political books and episodes lately (I know there’s a lot of politics going on!) Next bonus can we go silly for some comic relief? I actually seriously wanna see a playthrough of Date Everything with Mike & Peter.

A

“transgender ideology” is so ill defined that it’s completely insane that (1) the ATF wrote that in the initial report and (2) the WSJ reported it verbatim. could they even define transgender ideology? it’s so clearly an online right-coded term that has pretty much exclusively been used to describe fake situations. so why would they even say that

Douglas Woodhouse

So they have intro and outro music that you just cut to get get right to the chase, or do they really just start and stop their podcast out of nowhere?

Alexandra Curd

Yeah idk when we started trusting cops, but I didn't trust them in the quote un-quote "good ol days" of pre-Trump 2.0, so I'm for SURE not starting now and idk why they would either

Jake Smith

I was trying to get my thoughts together on this one, and then came to find that all the comments (at least the ones I've seen) are saying the things I was feeling. But I also want to specifically point to the line about "only a sociopath could be happy about this" (it's something like that, not the exact quote). The most joy I've ever seen Peter display was when Trump had COVID. Am I to believe he didn't want trump to die, he was simply hoping trump wasn't able to taste or smell for a while?

Jake Smith

5-4 sells a shirt that says Antonin Scallia is dead lol. I don't know what the fuck they're talking about here

Gayhole

I dunno, I've come to expect a pretty high degree of Liberalism from from Michael and Peter, but this episode is beyond the pale. This felt like a panel of socially insular right-leaning Centrists competing to be "the most reasonable people in the room." Political violence is blatantly the status quo for every marginalized population in the U.S. and this trend will not be stopped without a proportional response from those communities. "Polictical violence is bad" is a statement devoid of context that is both boring and meaningless in a world where political violence is a daily reality for large swaths of the population. The Justice system in the U.S. is enshrined Political Violence, and yet they aren't calling for the immediate abolition of police and courts. Just that we should not openly celebrate Kirk getting what he thought most of us all deserved? Utterly trash analysis. People who celebrate when white supremacists die are the best of us. Whether Kirk's assassination was good and whether it was effective are separate conversations... and the efficacy conversation depends on knowing who did this and why. Accepting the FBI narrative after such a clearly politically motivated rush to blame every convenient scapegoat for this Administration? C'mon now. I'll give this a couple episodes to recover and course correct, but this stuff is absolutely not the kind of content I will pay to access. I have noticed a distinct pivot toward Liberal apologia as of late. This episode was just a particularly odious example.

Gayhole

Whether it was good and whether it was effective are different conversations.

Gayhole

Like, it's fine if they don't want to Wade into overtime conspiracy theories, but can we at least acknowledge all the weird shit that took place (and continues to take place) around this event which predictably feeds into conspiracy theories? Really poor analysis in this episode, to put it lightly.

Joshua Reubens

I keep coming back here, hoping maybe they've deemed their fans "good" enough to respond but... Nope. Sad.

Jack Wolfe

you have not sufficiently celebrated the sudden murder of a public figure on a popular podcast in a time of widespread persecution of leftist voices and for this reason, michael and peter, you owe me an apology

amloth

i will say that on tumblr people were celebrating even before we knew he was dead so like... idk about twitter and bluesky but tumblr was being its usual self

Jake Smith

This was another thing that stood out to me. They just repeated that phrase like it means anything

Perri

"Hey fascist, catch" is a reference to the videogame Helldivers. The joke is that fascists are the ones saying that. It is not anti-fascist in nature

MEAT CLOWN

Man your life sounds really tough

MEAT CLOWN

I too am a leftist who can squat 435 and was very disappointed in the POL erasure

Emily Schmalz

I haven’t heard enough people saying this but I thought this as well.

AP

My grandmother's family were partisans who pursued the Nazi occupation across the Apennines and all the way up the then only recently unified peninsula. My US-born Romani grandfather was deployed to Europe while his own grandfather was in a concentration camp. The good news is, one doesn't have to have such close, personal models of antifascist discipline to stay fully alienated from this bizarre civility discourse around the murder of one of the right's most prolific and dangerous mouthpieces. I realize we're still in the "liberal media paving the way" stage of fascism, but I expected better from both sets of hosts.

Gayhole

I expect they will respond and I personally prefer they take time to give a well thought out one.

Em

some victim/survivors have expressed a personal preference for "CP" bc it conveys the purpose that CSAM serves to/the manner in which abusers hold that material in their minds in a way some feel "CSAM" does not. I don't intend to advocate for its use, here; js there are people who use the term that evokes feelings of repulsion *for that very reason*. more to the point, though... the porn industry writ large is ABSOLUTELY deserving of "bad shit" lol wtf

Joshua Reubens

That's fair. I've probably been a bit "on tilt" over this situation.

Soph Emm

An interesting and clearly contentious episode, but you guys were clearly on your best behaviour and aware that it’s not just your unhinged patrons hearing it 😅

Cree Merr

The discourse policing after Kirk's death reminded me of the backlash against statements put out by Palestine solidarity groups in the wake of Oct 7th. Then as now, you had bad faith actors with an obvious motive to paint explanations as excuses. Worse yet, they were assisted by a pundit class unwilling to examine their own ignorance of the subject, the conventional wisdom of their peers, or (most cowardly of all) their employers. Then as now, entirely reasonable points were warped into fireable offenses. The most common I would summarize with the warning given to Shakespeare's Romeo: "These violent delights have violent ends." In the case of Israel/Palestine, that the ultimate moral and legal onus for the conflict falls on the side that launched and maintains occupation, apartheid, and genocide. In the case of Kirk, that he was not merely a conservative pundit, but one that promoted the *exact* kind of society that saw him killed.

Cree Merr

Best of luck to you, as others said, look for a lawyer if you can.

Cbizkit

Tbh, even as someone who felt some joy/relief at his death, I wouldn’t argue that it was “good” or “effective.” Aside from basically Hitler himself, it would be hard for me to say the shooting death of any person was “good,” and I certainly doubt that it was “effective,” whatever that means. I will respond to the ensuing consequences accordingly, and who knows (I live in a blue state), maybe I’ll be collateral damage myself. Maybe it’s more like—as other people have suggested here—given the murder/starvation of so many thousands of people over the past few years, I felt a great sense of relief—both that this was one death I didn’t feel morally obligated to trouble myself with and that I’d never have to hear him speak again. I can hate myself for that feeling with a bunch of navel gazing, or I can accept it and move on, knowing that my politics are less deadly than his any day.

winter

I know it's already been mentioned but I refuse to not say it again. Your complete dismissal of Gretchen, a trans woman who has addressed this exact criticism from media figures such as yourselves about her firing, is not just tone deaf but blatantly trans misogyny. Telling a woman who is a direct victim of this violence, that she should keep it to the group chat is so deeply unempathetic. Especially when you admit in this same episode that the right truly wants trans people dead. How are trans people supposed to respond as we are actively being killed in backlash to crimes we did not commit. When we were already being fired for existing as ourselves. When every single statement that comes out of our mouths has to be a perfect political performance or we lose our rights to be human. And I can't accept the answer "nothing at all" because I refuse to die in silence. In the same way you can recognize that you don't need to white wash his death to talk about him, you don't need to call his victims sociopaths to talk about your relationship to his killing.

carms

as a long time listener of IBCK and patron for months now, i am incredibly disappointed in how thoughtlessly all four of these hosts—but peter and michael specifically—bent the knee to fascist rhetoric and lukewarm liberalism. so much of this episode was done in poor taste and with little consideration for the groups who were victimized by the political violence charlie kirk endorsed. i thought that IBCK actually had a back bone, but clearly they are just as eager to contribute to the censorship and belittling of the ACTUAL left. hope michael and peter learn something from this and apologize to their audience

winter

I think there's a difference between demanding they celebrate murder and fans pointing out that calling people who have nuanced emotions around this, especially trans people, aren't in fact sociopaths

Mary Y.

Yeah there was a line in a recent episode about how mainstream media isn’t prepared to deal with the other side being bad guys. They want to treat them like good faith actors and can’t accept that they’re not. It was sort of ironic because I felt like the hosts here were similarly failing to understand exactly how wicked Charlie Kirk was and how he was an extremely politically powerful person who used his power and influence to bring harm on large swathes of people. I can’t imagine the sort of “of course it’s sociopathic to celebrate” if this happened to someone like Alex Jones. I think it would be widely understood that he got what he deserved if it had happened to Jones. But Kirk is worse than Alex Jones in every material way and it’s interesting to see people typically so critical of pundits fall for his aesthetics.

CortanaOrgana

Hi Peter and Michael, I really love this show, but on the Felker-Martin part of this show y'all really let trans people down. I'm a random trans woman living in a better part of one of the less hateful southern states and I've had a couple situations where someone has stared at me with a "I'd kill you if I was allowed to" stare (if you've had this happen to you then you know what I'm talking about), I've had slurs said against me around 3 dozen times in the last decade. The number of times I've been harrased in public is in the hundreds, and the number of times I've been stared at is in the thousands (walking into restaurants early in my transition was miserable). I've had a couple of children laugh at me 5 feet from the door to my own home. I've had people surround me to force me to take a picture with them. I've had people run at me and pretend they were going to kick me (I actually called their bluff on this one and didn't physically react). I've had some Christian dude mad that I told him to fuck off banging on my car door and try to force his way in. I say all of this because I want y'all to know that this is what it's like for me to live life. I'm not a soldier, I didn't sign up for this life. It's just what America gives. Having this shit happen to you remolds you as a person and I'd encourage y'all to *entirely rethink* how you discuss people that are legit traumatized by violence who might occasionally indulge their catharsis with an online post. Like, when people were having the whole "Was Killmonger kinda right?" discussions (which I think Peter name-dropped in a past episode, but I could be wrong) in 2018, was that all just BS? Like, did we not learn a thing about how you shouldn't hold marginalized people responsible for not responding "appropriately" to the people/powers actively ruining their lives day after day after day after day after day?

Jilly Panilly

I don’t think it’s sociopathic to be glad someone (whothefuckever) killed Charlie Kirk. I also don’t think GFM should have “kept it in the group chat” because it was especially mean. Maybe she could’ve figured she’d be fired for it if she took a few extra minutes of consideration. But it’s not like DC Comics has like, rigorous conduct standards & she has talked similar shit before online. I still contribute to her Patreon (like I do this one). Gretchen can talk her shit because she already knows these ghouls want her dead.

Leorio

The bullet engravings were literally Groyper memes? What do you mean there's proof he was on the left? This episode was very disappointing. You guys talk all the time about how the administration doesn't provide reliable information, yet you're taking everything yhe FBI says at face value? Its something I've noticed with Michael and Peter where they're so obsessed with being intellectually superior that they write off a lot of valuable information as "conspiracy," if it doesn't come from predominantly white elite institutions, the same way they write off a lot of valuable spiritual beliefs as "grifter make believe fantasies."

Leorio

They're more concerned with being viewed as intellectually superior. They don't want to be associated with any "conspiracy" or anything they view as intellectually inferior. At the end of the day they really are reply guys. I can't help but feel like Aubrey and Sarah balanced out Michael a lot more.

Leorio

Wow. Riveting. Tell me more.

Raz

Justice for us leftist personal trainers :/

Darren Cohen

This was rough to read. Please don't end statements with question marks.

Leorio

It's called a question Darren.

Michelle FW

“CBS News to name Bari Weiss, a frequent critic of mainstream media, as its top editor.” You ever wish you could just text Michael and Peter??

Fernando Rosales

Some of the comments about how bad their takes were are pretty unhinged. They were wrong about the engravings, idc. The CK post mortem discourse is pretty based.

Dylan Rothganger

Jfc Michael. Well said over and over. I need to make my family listen to this with me for sure.

carms

YES very well said. lately i’ve been feeling very “meh” about IBCK and preferring reruns of MP and YWA over new episodes from IBCK. they feel a lot more well researched and based in critical thought. compared to YWA’s “homelessness” episode and MP’s “10000 steps myth” (for example), michael’s work with IBCK seems more like surface level commentary

Lilith Anderson

God It's wild to hear that people weren't celebrating on other social media sites, tumblr was fucking lit. It was like when the queen died, crab raves as far as you could scroll.

Kevin Bice

I'd love to hear a discussion about how the Right has become a coalition of factions that seem united by the throughline of institutional distrust. They don't trust science and large institutions. As someone who grew up in the 90s in Santa Cruz, CA, these were my people. We didn't trust the government & corporations. But now those people have shifted over to the Right, and I cant quite put my finger on why. Did that start with disbelieving the science of climate change and expand from there to the point where now theres a widespread disbelief of germ theory? Does it come from a religious mistrust of modernity? Is it the advances in sociology that irked their latent racism? I know it's been there for a while, at least since Buckley's era when they started attacking higher Ed. But how has this line of thought come to subsume the political Right, and created this coalition of climate deniers, MAHA, small gov libertarians, and anti-sociology sociology club members?

Kevin Bice

Actually, just after I posted this, I heard 2 scientists on NPR talking about how they first noticed this Right-wing anti-science rhetoric around climate science, but that's just anecdotal. I'd love to hear a full Hobbesian deep-dive on this (with input from Peter, his Political Scientist sidekick, of course)

max

i’m actually so confused on the backlash for this episode. did they get things 100% right? i don’t know. but what i DO know is that ANYONE dying of gun violence is sad! charlie kirk was a terrible person, and he was also murdered on a college campus. the second one doesn’t make their first invalid and the first doesn’t make the second one any less of a tragedy. it’s not good that he’s dead, not only because the people who witnessed will be traumatized by it and his kids will grown up without their parent, but also because it will never allow for him to face the consequences of his hateful rhetoric. murder (by vigilantes or by the state) is NOT something we should be excited about. if we allow people to become unworthy of living, whether because of a crime they committed or hateful speech they spread, we are one step closer to stripping rights away from the vulnerable. if we allow the death penalty mindset to become how we live our lives, we are sacrificing human compassion. and the moment we start sacrificing that, the fascists can take over our minds and our laws

Morgan

I just want to interject very quickly that leftist lift bros are wayyyy more common than you think. Die-hard, jacked, veteran gym rat here and lifelong HARD leftist! Love you guys. Thanks for all you do :)

vevintage

Haha, I SCREAMED when I heard it

vevintage

"this was one death I didn't feel morally obligated to trouble myself with" - EXCELLENT point!

Amy

I just finished a re-listen of the whole podcast as a way of escaping the bleak and exhausting news for few weeks. It turned out to be a great idea. I learned so much. Love you both & love this show! Michael, you are doing the lord’s work with Peter’s voice, thank you

Beth T

Can you guys do a joke episode on FBI director, Kash Patel’s self insert children’s book where he saves the king? It’s got pictures so it can be a Peter Book

Gene Daniels

Just finished the 'Who Moved My Cheese' ep -- would LOVE for you all to do a pod on Patrick Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a team. I absolutely detest the book and see it peddled all over the place. It's just dumbed down social work for MBAs.

Rose Nylund

Omg that sounds like a bonkers book

Vanya Wright

I have a book for you: The Fourth Turning. It’s like “The Secret” for men, except they’re manifesting destroying America instead of manifesting a husband. There is a good NYT review that explains the background well enough that it becomes obvious that the whole idea is cribbed from Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” book series. It’s not even a good book series. This is relevant today because, according to the NYT review, it is Steve Bannon’s favorite book. It allows him to claim that destroying the country is just part of an impersonal historic cycle and not a cabal of ghouls destroying everything on purpose.

audioboy

MIKE IM DYING FOR THE EUROVISION EP PLEASE!!

Joshua Reubens

So you're online but have never heard of the Paradox of Tolerance? Wild. People are unworthy of living when their entire ideology wishes others dead.

Joshua Reubens

I feel like the libs in this comment section would look out their window on The Day of the Rope and think "well, at least WE didn't do anything violent."

anarchopixie

Unrelated, but I am begging - BEGGING - for an episode on Peter Thiel's antichrist lectures.

anarchopixie

Interestingly a lot of lifting culture actually came from German immigrants to America, who believed it was important to be strong so that bosses would be physically afraid of the workers 😂

max

im not saying there should be no consequences, im saying the consequences should never include death. when someone is killed, they have no chance to redeem themselves or change their minds. they have no chance to come back from the edge and reconnect with humanity. and if you believe people are irredeemable, that is a whole separate thing! the phrase “their entire ideology wishes others dead” should theoretically only apply to people spreading hateful rhetoric. however if that’s the line, that can be twisted to mean people talking about socialist ideas (“they want to kill people and take their land”) or promoting gender identity (“they want men in dresses to get into our bathrooms to kill women”). do you see what i mean? any goalpost can be moved, which is why there shouldn’t be one at all

bee

PRETTY PRETTY PRETTY PRETTY PLEEEEEEEEEEASE

Melissa Hall

This is an unsolicited recommendation but my sister just got "The Energy Bus" from work and it seems like a fun opportunity to combine airport books and urbanism. I wanna know if it was written by someone who has actually ever been on a bus.

Corrine Schaible

I think this episode was recorded a week after the shooting, so they, too were reporting on bad info. The kid was clearly a groyper

Ali Colomer

can you do a pundit portrait on katie roiphe?? pls

Greej

Who are some vendetta journalists? Who're the Shermans to your Crabtrees?

Nicole Bonneau

My only comfort in these times is IBCK episodes

Mary Y.

How many people have to be harmed and murdered while we wait for someone’s redemption? Redemption is God’s business. Ours is survival and building a just and beautiful society.

max

i’m not advocating for people who commit heinous crimes to be walking out on the street instead of facing consequences. i’m advocating for those people to LIVE, even if that is in prison for their lives. redemption might be God’s business, but in order to create a just society it has to be our business too

JCCTigris

we *really* need to bring back that energy! Lift and making gains, so as to better support your brothers in unionizing against the bosses!

Karyn Semple

Yeah this is a lot of my Instagram, but its leftist lifting ladies.

Shannon Ryan

Okay I guess this is an unpopular opinion, but I definitely saw lots of content that alluded to celebrating Kirk’s death, and I wasn’t mad about it at all. I think we should be allowed to be happy about someone evil dying. He spewed violent rhetoric that was extremely harmful, the world is literally much better without people like him.

janananana

Interesting that CK went to UVU to own the libs. That is a feeder community college for BYU. Their libs are not terribly liberal and the audience would be VERY friendly. When I hear CK described as owning the libs.... Really? I also think it's perhaps ironic, perhaps hypocritical, that while the Right was loudly defending CK's right to say awful things, they also disallowed anyone else's right to also say awful things. Great episode, I wish there were more.

Betti Tristan

I think I’ll only feel celebratory when there happens to be a death that makes things better and safer for everyone. I feel like this just did a better job at what Charlie was already doing with his life.

The Sovereign Duchy of Bellandria

Re: GFM, it's worth noting she is a trans woman, i.e. one of the people Kirk targeted. Really strange that wasn't mentioned, given how much time was (rightly!) spent discussing Kirk's anti-trans bullshit. Not for nothing, but she was hired to write Red Hood, the only Batfamily vigilante who rather famously kills bad guys. The book was marketed as being a darker and edgier adults only comic. And nothing GFM said was out of line with the rest of her online presence. DC willingly hired someone known for havijg no filter, and then fired her for...being snarky about the death of a man who not only wanted her and people like her dead but actively campaigned for it? And DC didn't just fire her--they scrapped the ongoing series entirely, recalled the one issue that had gone out to stores, and scrubbed all mention of it from their sites and app. They completely buried it. Meanwhile, the work of sex pests and various other awful writers/artists is still widely available. There's a lot of context missing here, is what I'm saying. "Take it to the group chat" is both surface level and frankly hypocritical.

Spritez0Lemonade

This is an inaccurate description of UVU. Several students who attend UVU precisely do so because BYU is too conservative and Mormon for their liking. I also disagree that Mormon liberals aren’t very liberal! The number of anticapitalist and further left Mormons continues to grow.

Nezzie42

UVU isn't a "feeder community college". It's it's own college and the attendees go there to avoid BYU. They have a rivalry.

Matelda

I know this is mean but it's my data point from your audience: Moira Donegan is someone who's opinion i don't respect and so i didn't listen to this. I don't know if she's turned over a leaf since her braindead left-punching years, or if "in bed with the right" is supposed to be ironic now, nor do i care, nor am I finding out.

KikiL

Did they ever acknowledge this?? I have just started subscribing but after reading these comments, I am thinking twice...