When Charlie Kirk was shot to death on camera last year by a trans activist with a rifle, his death spurred young men to follow in his footsteps. Protestant, Catholic and evangelical denominations report increased interest among young men to know what Charlie Kirk believed, and many called it a revival.
Despite attempts by some influencers who shall remain unnamed, it rhymes with Schmandace Schmowens, to derail this revival for their own monetary or rhetorical goals, there is evidence that this movement has persisted and not lost momentum. In many places online, Kirk has become the standard to rally to or rail against, and that comes with its own dangers.
Commentary
Thomas: We devoted an entire episode to him. Charlie Kirk dying and being murdered in front of our eyes was a huge turning point for my life.
On the year anniversary of his death, it's important to look back at how culture has changed and how it hasn't as a result of him being assassinated in front of us, and us watching so many people justifying it, cheering it, dismissing it. It wasn't just him getting killed, it was how people reacted that was so galvanizing.
Jonathan: Looking at the strata of human society, his death probably affected the lower echelons the most, because suddenly there were a lot of young men who saw themselves potentially doing what he was doing. It spawned a lot of copycats. I know two or three guys I went to school with who are trying to do what he did on college campuses right now.
Thomas: It's hard.
Jonathan: A lot of them are flaming out.
Thomas: I watched a video of him debating a lady, and he's so patient, and he's so gentle. He's way more gentle and patient than the crowd is with this young lady.
Jonathan: People took a deep look at what he was doing and decided that's what they wanted. Protestant, Catholic, and evangelical denominations reported increased interest in the Bible and in the faith, because they want to know what Charlie Kirk was about. He never hid his faith, never shrank from it one time. This was called a revival, a term used especially in evangelical circles. It shows a revived interest in the word of God, in faith, in forming a relationship with God.
Then it was hijacked, because everybody wanted to claim Charlie Kirk. Everybody wanted to put their arm around him and say, "Me and Charlie talked about this," "When I was texting Charlie." He became a vehicle to shoehorn ideas in. You could see this in podcastistan when all the influencers started fighting each other.
A lot of this revival was believed to have been lost or sabotaged by these influencers for monetary or rhetorical goals, just trying to grow their audiences, a very cynical way to do this. But there's evidence that the momentum gained from those who wanted to be like Charlie Kirk at those lower echelons has persisted and not diminished.
In many places online, Charlie Kirk has become the standard to rally to, and in other places the standard to rally against. I
don't know if you've seen the videos of people pretending to be shot in the neck, a celebration of his death as a blow against MAGA or conservatism or fascism, whatever word they're trying to use.
Thomas: There was a Turning Point USA women's conference in San Antonio, and there were protesters outside with pictures of Charlie Kirk getting shot and drawings of it, celebrating it and threatening the women going into the convention center. Imagine being an 18-year-old girl, a freshman in college, really fired up for Turning Point USA and the cause Charlie Kirk advocated for, and his Christian faith. To get into the event center, you have to walk past protesters celebrating the murder of the founder of your organization, and they're threatening and advocating and celebrating violence, and you have to walk through this gauntlet to get into the building.
The people on the left say, "Oh, it's not that bad, it's not that widespread." For that young girl who had to walk into that building through that, it's a terrifying experience. For people on the right, that's not unusual, that's normal.
It's not that everyone on the left is advocating for violence, but they're not shutting down the people who are. They're not policing their own, saying, "No, you can't do that, you can't represent us, you can't use our name." I'd love to see evidence that the left is policing its own violent rhetoric, but as far as I'm seeing, even at the top, they're still calling us Nazis so they can kill us and feel good about it.
Jonathan: I've seen a couple places where an activist tried to get in a kid's face and another activist, holding a sign, said, "No, no, no, that's a baby. Back off." She was there to protest, sure, but she wasn't there to scream at babies, and she said, "You need to back up. This is terrible behavior."
Thomas: Props to her. What we need more of are the kind of Democrats who are fired up enough to be protesting types, but also have a clear understanding of where the lines are. Many people who sit at home and privately think, "Yeah, that's wrong." But it's very different to publicly say, "Leave this kid alone. This kid is three years old and does not have political views. Leave the kid alone."
Jonathan: If you're going after a little girl in a hijab, I don't think she should be wearing a hijab, I'm not a huge fan of the Islamic religion, but I'm not going to let you go after a little girl in a hijab. There are universal things, like protect the innocent, who in many cases are just doing what they're told. This kid's in a stroller. He didn't come here on his own.
Thomas: The kid didn't choose this, so you can't hold the kid accountable. We saw the same thing when JD Vance was at Disney World with his kids, and people were shouting at his kids that their dad was a murderer.
Jonathan: Grow up. What are you doing? This is like "my dad can beat up your dad" stuff.
Thomas: They don't understand what they're dealing with. It's important to explain how the left and the right see violence differently. For the left, it's a form of communication, and they often refer to violence as a dial. They'll say, "The right needs to dial down their violence." Like, what violence? For the right, violence is not a dial. It's not a form of communication of, "If you're not listening to me shout in your face, I'm going to punch you. If you're not listening to me punching you, I'm going to shoot you."
For the right, historically, for the far right, it's genocide or nothing, and we see this many times in history. Carl Jung wrote about this. He called it the Odin switch, where a peaceful people has the switch flipped. It's like that lightning I was talking about. It finally coalesces and then everyone gets violent, and all the men of Benjamin are dead.
Jonathan: The UK is going through this this past week. In Portsmouth, they showed up at the coast and refused to allow shipments of immigrants to come in. They kept them from coming in. The police couldn't do anything because they'd been told to allow it. You're seeing this kind of switch being thrown in the UK already, where it's just, "Oh no, we're violent now." Guys, you need to turn the switch off until it's actually time. The problem with young men is they don't know when to flip the switch.
Thomas: It's why losing Charlie Kirk was so tragic, because he was the biggest advocate for the "let's talk and not fight" faction.
Jonathan: He was a speed bump. He would stop momentum from becoming violent.
Thomas: For people who thought Charlie Kirk was far right, you don't know what far right is. Charlie Kirk was the moderate one. He was the "let's talk and be friends" one, the "give truth a chance" one, and he was very kind and gentle.
Over his career he lost his temper a few times. I would have lost my temper with probably half the people he talked to. But he almost never lost it. He was incredibly patient and calm with people who were very mean and aggressive and threatening, and he responded very well. Could you put together a supercut of him losing his temper? Sure.
If you spent as much time on camera as he did, could I come up with a supercut of you losing your temper? Probably.
We needed his voice, and we need people who say, "No, we can still talk this out," without compromising. While he was kind and gentle in his affect, he was very direct in his positions. He didn't compromise his positions out of fear of hurting your feelings, but he wouldn't say it in a mean way. That's something I've tried to aspire to. I don't think I've ever pulled it off, but having clear convictions while being nice about it is the path, and it's what we need more of.
Jonathan: Look, I'm on the other side of the switch. Everything I was designed to do, everything I was trained to do, everything I was prepared to do is on the other side of the switch. And it's just, "Hey, don't flip the switch, okay?" Charlie Kirk is on this side of the switch. He wants to talk to you about it.
The problem I've been seeing on social media the last few months is people saying, "Why don't we just talk this out? Why don't we de-escalate?" and guys coming back saying, "No, you shot the guy who wanted to talk." They're treating it as an excuse to jump to violence when it's not called for yet. I'm concerned about that.
Thomas: There's a type of person who's incredibly common in Texas, and I don't know if this type is common where you are, Jonathan. This is a person who fully expects society to collapse and for violence to become an everyday occurrence. They have lots of guns, and they are ready to be very violent. They're waiting, fully expecting the switch to be flipped.
We're getting our house rebuilt because of the flood, so different contractors are in building stuff. I was chatting with one contractor who mentioned he was dove hunting, so I asked what he was shooting, and he started talking guns. He said, "I've got one of the guns over here, I can show you if you want," and he goes out to his truck and brings it in. He's got this $3,000 gun he hasn't even shot yet. He's got night vision, all the weapons to basically be a low-drag, high-speed operator, and he's just a contractor, what would look like a normal guy, may not even be conservative, but he has fully accepted that things are going to pop off, and he's ready to be violent when it happens.
He's not the only guy like that I know. A significant percentage of the men I know in Texas are arming themselves for a societal collapse. They see it as an inevitability, and when it comes, they'll be ready immediately. It's kind of that Minuteman attitude, though the Minuteman was a very northeastern thing. These are a different kind of person, and this may be unique to Texas. My guess is there are some people like that in Arizona.
Jonathan: Not Tucson. Tucson's a very blue city. But going toward Phoenix, I'd say Phoenix is more purple. Get into the outskirts and you'll find your gun hobbyists, your veterans, the guys smelling the storm on the wind. These guys aren't going, "I can't wait for it to happen." You do have those crazies, but a lot of them are just, "If this goes down this way, and I'm fairly concerned about the way things are going, I'm going to have my weapons. I'm going to take care of my family. I'm going to take care of my neighbors."
Thomas: Some of them even have a plan, like, "I'm going to take over this building, these are the people." It's surprisingly detailed. The typical blue-city person does not realize how close these ions are to the lightning suddenly happening. You go from not being struck by lightning to being struck instantly. You get that little tingle, and then it happens.
Jonathan: At the Battle of Lexington and Concord, no one knows who fired the first shot. It didn't matter where it came from. The conditions were set.
Thomas: That's a perfect metaphor. Everybody lined up with their guns, all staring at each other, but nobody willing to take the first shot. That's where we're at, and there's still a chance the shot doesn't have to happen. We had an incident 10 or 15 years ago, a dispute over a ranch in Nevada, where there were about 100 armed ranchers facing off against 20 or 30 armed police and feds. They had the lines drawn, they were talking, and they were one shot away from kicking off the whole thing right then and there, and the shot didn't happen. Most of you probably don't even know the story because it got diffused. They were able to talk it out. But if blood had been spilled there, the police faction and the farmer faction would both have pulled in more people, and it would have spiraled, and the whole civil war would have kicked off right there. We don't realize how close we were.
As authors who tell stories, you help people make sense of suffering, and that's really important, because that's what diffuses and directs this energy. Benjamin Franklin was really good at bringing peace. He also invented the lightning rod. He figured out a way of directing that energy into a safe place. If you build a lightning rod above the building, instead of the lightning striking the building and setting it on fire, the lightning strikes the rod and all the electricity channels into the ground. Stories can do that too. Preaching can do that too.
Part of the reason England never went communist, despite Marx and Engels being in England, was one preacher named Charles Spurgeon, the person Karl Marx hated above all others. His church services were so big, and his sermons were published in the papers, before radio, before TV. He was a hardcore, intense preacher focusing people on God so much, on repenting of their own sins and helping the poor themselves, that there was no ambient energy for communism to take off. Communism utterly failed to take off in England in the 1880s and 1890s, despite Marx being right there. It's like a board game where your main piece is right there on the space, and you keep rolling critical failures. How do I convert this country to communism? He's standing right in front of me. Why can't I hit him?
Meanwhile they roll for Russia, where they had none of their major thinkers. The environment was different. Russia did not have a preacher focusing people on God. Instead they had a wizard focusing people on magic, which is fascinating. They had a wizard who'd snuck his way into the royal court, doing magic and seducing people. His name was Rasputin, probably the most historically documented wizard. I know some of you are materialists and don't believe wizards are real, but explain Rasputin to me.
Jonathan: Guys are supposed to die after you've shot them nine times.
Thomas: I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but it's crazy.
We need to turn back as a nation, toward God. We need to repent of our own sins. It's really easy to see the speck in somebody else's eye. It's really hard to pull the log out of your own. That's what Charles Spurgeon did. That's what Charlie Kirk was doing. He was calling young men to repent of their own sins, to stop looking at porn, to stop blaming other people for the problems in their life, even when other people are causing problems in your life. You can't change other people, but you can change yourself.
That energizing spirit can be present in fiction too, and you can work it into your fiction. Or you can take power, and somebody is going to see all this latent energy and gather the power into themselves.
Jonathan: When you're writing fiction, there are expected ways for energy to flow. Kill a young man's mentor, and what do you expect the young man to do? A vengeance quest. That's what's expected. What's powerful is when what his mentor taught him keeps him from following the energy to vengeance, and he instead turns from that path, which is the easier, more understandable one, and takes the path his mentor wished for him. The conflict and friction from him fighting that urge to submit himself to his mentor's teachings, that's powerful.
Those are powerful stories, and I think those are stories Charlie Kirk was behind. "I know bad things have happened to you." No one's saying slavery didn't happen or wasn't bad. We need to heal. We need to move past this. It can't always be something we're holding over somebody's head.
Thomas: For me personally, Charlie Kirk dying is what kicked off my health journey of embracing suffering through what I eat and what I make my body suffer through.
People look at me like, "Are you taking the pill? Are you doing the injections?" I don't say I'll never do that, but I'm very suspicious of prescriptions, and I haven't done it yet. I don't want to go back to where I was, and I'm willing to do anything to not get back there.
Part of this journey has been about embracing the suffering and learning how to suffer, learning to go do something I don't want to do, and seeing suffering as a redemptive thing, not as trauma. I hate that word trauma. I hate when people grab onto that word, and I feel like therapists really do people a disservice.
Jonathan: Trauma gives the idea that you can't overcome it. It just happened to you, and now you live with it. As someone who's spent a lot of time around people who have endured trauma, losing their legs, you have a choice, and they always talk about this choice: did you get broken, or was it just your leg?
Thomas: It's not just about the suffering, it's also about the courage. This show became more political after he died. We did that big episode, I got more political on my Christian Publishing Show, and I had consequences for that, which I'm okay with. Part of it was structuring my life so I'm not super cancelable, which not everyone can do. A lot of people have a job and have to keep their corporate boss happy. Since I don't have that, I have an obligation to use the freedom to speak that I have.
In the UK something like 60,000 people have been arrested for speech violations. That's way worse than book burning.
Everyone's talking about book burning, whether a library chooses not to give a book away for free, a children's library choosing not to give a pornographic book for free, and everyone's like, "Oh, it's book burning." Meanwhile, they're throwing 60,000 people in jail for what they write online. "Oh, well, it's online, it's not the same." Putting people in jail for stuff they write seems way closer to book burning to me, and it's 60,000 people.
Those people eventually get out of jail and go back into the population. Are they going to be rehabilitated?
Or are they going to be mad and ready to burn it all down? Is that a good long-term strategy? Putting communists in jail in Russia in the late 1800s for a few years hoping they'd cool off didn't work. It just made them more angry to overthrow everything. Now we're seeing the communists who run the UK not learning how they took power. I know they don't see themselves as communists, they see themselves as the Labour Party, but potato, potato.
I'm overall still optimistic, and my optimism comes from my belief in a sovereign God who presides over the destinies of nations. I'm hopeful we'll turn back to God as a people again, because we've done it before. We've been super evil in the past, and we've repented in the past. We had Great Awakenings because things were really bad spiritually in America, and then they got better. American history isn't "everything was fine and then everything was terrible and now it's terrible ever since." It's a wave, a cycle.
We see the same thing in the Old Testament. There's a meme, archaeologists say there's no evidence of monotheism in Israel, and the next picture is the Prophet Jeremiah weeping, "I know." The lack of monotheism in Israel is well documented in the Bible. There were monotheists, but there were a lot of gods.
Jonathan: For people who are excited for the switch to be thrown, I want you to check out the writings from the Civil War and read what the men who did have to throw the switch wrote about firing on their own people. That's still the war with the most casualties of any war America has ever been in, the most American casualties. It was all Americans.
Thomas: All Americans on both sides.
Jonathan: And it was more.
Thomas: It was more than all wars combined until just a few years ago. It took 200 years of non-Civil War wars to equal just the Civil War.
Jonathan: So for people excited for the switch to be thrown, I have that temptation too. Everything I'm good at is on the other end of the switch. But I'm reading from the men who went before me, and they did not have a good time. They hated it. It was the darkest years of their lives, and all they wanted afterward was to put it behind them.
Thomas: It can be avoided. It may not be, but we should look for every escape we can take. It's important, because I know we have listeners across the political spectrum. F
or a lot of our audience, this is the only conservative news outlet they have any exposure to. For those folks, I want you to understand how close things are to the switch flipping. It's a switch for the right. It's not a slow build-up warning. It's nothing and then everything.
When you taunt the right for their heroes being killed, or interfere with them being able to mourn, because the Democrats are trying to block the memorial ceremonies at the college, you can only poke the dog so many times before the dog attacks you.
For the people on the right, hold off. There's still a chance we can fix this. For the people on the left, stop poking the dog, especially over petty things. Let people mourn their heroes and let them do it in peace. That's the easiest thing to do.
Jonathan: Today is the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. America changed. Jeremy Boreing did a great post earlier today. It's been 25 years since 9/11, and America's only been around for 250. So 10% of America has been drastically affected by the global war on terror, by what was initiated on that day.
Be thinking about it today. Remember when America unified on that day, because we were all attacked. They weren't trying to hit one side or the other. All of us were together on the same day. It was a bad day, but it was a good day as to how Americans reacted.
Thomas: Islam is uniquely incompatible with America. America created the Navy specifically for dealing with Muslim terrorists. We have had a long history of conflict with the House of Islam, capital H, capital I.
There's a belief that we can all just get along, and that belief is unsupported by any historical evidence. It wasn't just 9/11. It was the blood tax, where five-year-olds were stolen from their mothers and indoctrinated and turned into janissaries and forced to fight against Christians as adults, which they did century after century. It's the stealing of Christians and forcing them into slavery, stealing millions of Christians from Europe and forcing them into slavery and sex slavery, and piracy, and all the rest of it.
I encourage you to study the history of Islam. Many of you are religious, and you've made the mistake of studying the theology of Islam. That's not nearly as interesting or as informative as the history of Islam.
Jonathan: They don't agree on Islamic theology. There's a whole thing called jurisprudence where they argue about it.
Thomas: It's like Governor Festus when Paul comes up debating theology with the Pharisees, and he's just, "I don't want to dispute." Or Governor Pilate. Don't get into the theology. Just look at their actions over time. They've been surprisingly consistent. If you understand how someone has been, you can understand how they will be, and that's true with individuals, nations, and religions. It's very important not to be bamboozled by liars who are lying about what they're doing while they're doing it. Look at their actions.
That's what we remember on 9/11. We were attacked by the House of Islam, and they attacked us as a country because in their eyes we're a Christian country. There's a debate here as to whether that's true, but there's no debate over there as to whether it's true.
What y'all are doing as authors is important. You have a lot of power. Use it responsibly.
