Here are the six lies that you are being told right now, and it's ruining our lives and ruining our culture. They're not lies that are articulated very much, but the social media environment that we are all inhabiting are reinforcing these untruths in every minute of our lives. Here are the six, and we'll go through them. This is him. This is you. This is that. This is them. This is nothing. This is everything. First of all, this is him. It's so interesting that in the videos that we have done about the Charlie Kirk assassination, so many people have said to us, I can't believe you're raising up Charlie Kirk as an example of X, Y, or Z. He is the guy who, and then they will give a portrait of Charlie Kirk that I'm entirely unfamiliar with. I was speaking with my colleague Nate Morgan Locke, whose Reform Mythologist channel you should definitely check out. He said he had no idea that Charlie Kirk was in fact a Christian until after he had died. His social media feeds sometimes gave him images of Charlie Kirk doing a political thing, but never preaching the gospel. For some people, all they see is Charlie Kirk preaching the gospel. For some people, all they see Charlie Kirk doing is defending free speech. For some people, all they see Charlie Kirk saying is things about race and immigration that he ought not to have said. And if that is your social media diet, how can you conclude anything but Charlie Kirk is a hater? But we live in these social media silos in which you have a curated newsfeed. You don't just have an alternative worldview, you don't have alternative tastes, there are alternative facts out there for you to discern. And you're constantly being told this is him. But your friend is being told, no, this is him. And that sense of fracture is being algorithmically hypercharged in this moment. Lie number one, this is him. We're living in a siloed world. Lie number two, this is you. Social media brings very near any kind of event. As long as it happens within sight of a smartphone, that video footage is now inside your world and it gets inside your head at the speed of a click, and you weren't even looking for it. I scrolled through Twitter looking for all sorts of information about what might have happened to Charlie Kirk. And all of a sudden, I see his murder, and everybody is saying the same thing. They were not prepared to see his murder. The algorithm served it up anyway. And how can that not give you a sense of the nearness of the horror? In a print media age, we would have read the story about something that happened in Utah, and that event is still just as awful. But to see it in real time from multiple angles is to make millions of people think this is me, and to feel the nearness of the threat and the potential for violence. Perhaps a nearness that is not borne out by reality. There's the apocryphal story of April 16th, 1912, the Aberdeen Journal runs a headline the day after the Titanic sinks, and it just says, Aberdeen Man drowns at sea. It turns out that's not true. The Aberdeen Journal did indeed lead with the sinking of the Titanic, but it gets at this truth that what is local to us is obviously of most interest to us. But if the Titanic had sunk in a social media age, we would actually completely forget about the Aberdeen man who had drowned at sea. The spectacle of the tragedy that had happened on the other side of the world would have been brought incredibly near and would have made everybody think that they could never again go on a cruise ship. This is you is a distortion. And it's a distortion that when it happens in the midst of incidents of political violence, it makes everybody feel that violence is right near to us, as close as my smartphone is to me. That's not true. But that's the second lie. This is him, this is you. Then social media makes us think this is that. And we are always proclaiming that on our social media feeds. We are invited to make press releases on a daily basis on our social media platform of choice. We are all our own spin doctors, and we all ride our favored hobby horses. And then an image comes to us from the other side of the world, and we are very tempted to say, this is that. Do you remember the Covington High Kid from 2017, The March for Life? And he happened to be wearing a MAGA hat, and there was a Native American who was beating a drum in his face. And there was a snapshot of this kid not knowing what to do, frozen in the middle of a smile. And the image went round the world at the speed of a click, and millions of people are suddenly of the opinion that this kid is smirking at a First Nations tribal leader because it fit the narrative. This is that. And we're constantly being invited by social media to see little snapshots from around the world that have contexts we know nothing of, but it fits into our own little narrative. And we want to use these as jumping off points for sermons that we were going to preach anyway. We're riding a hobby horse, and we'll be riding that hobby horse long after that image has faded away. On social media, beware the this is that fallacy. And then the fourth one, and I think this is huge right now, this is them. This has always been them. This is the platonic ideal of what they are always like. And right now it is very straightforward to troll through TikTok, and you can find any number of people celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk and thinking he had it coming to him. That is appalling, it is imbecilic, it is morally imbecilic. It speaks of psychological and spiritual dysfunction on a level that, yes, does enrage. But then social media is constantly inviting you to be enraged at them, to quote tweet them, and to say, this is them. This deluded TikToker is them, the other side. And you get Elon Musk tweeting out things like, the left is the party of murder, as though the left is celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk. And yet it's incredibly straightforward to find some very well-balanced and profoundly helpful comments by those on the left. Whether it's Bernie Sanders or AOC or Barack Obama or you can find all sorts of left-leaning people who are having all sorts of appropriate reactions to this moment. But social media gives a megaphone, a bullhorn, to anyone with the most fringe views, and the most fringe views get amplified. Because if it enrages, it engages. That used to be the old saying, didn't it, about print media. If it bleeds, it leads. The sensational thing is the thing that is going to be forwarded in print media. Oh my goodness, have we hypercharged that? If it enrages, it engages. And the man who owns Twitter is the worst offender when it comes to this. Here he is addressing a march. Tommy Robinson is asking him to comment on the events of today, and instead of being the grown-up in the room, he falls instantly for the this is them fallacy, and he invites over a hundred thousand people who are there demonstrating in London to do the very same. Have a look. And then you see how much violence there's on the left.
SPEAKER_03Uh, with our our friend Charlie Cook getting murdered in cold blood this week, and people on the left celebrating it openly. The left is the party of murder and celebrating murder. I mean, let that sink in for a minute. That's who we're dealing with here. This is a message to the reasonable center, the people who ordinarily wouldn't get involved in politics, uh, who just want to live their lives, they don't want they're quiet, they just go about their business. My message is to them if this continues, that violence is gonna come to you. You will have no choice. This is a this is you're you're in a fundamental situation here where you where whether you choose violence or not, balance is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. You either fight back or you die. That's the truth.
SPEAKER_00Today, Elon, I think we're I think the British public are telling the world that they're ready to fight back.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00Come on! Come on, great brand!
SPEAKER_01Profoundly unhelpful speech and committing all sorts of fallacies, including the this is them fallacy. Let's not fall for it ourselves. The fifth lie we're being told is this is nothing. And here we need to talk about Tyler Robinson, the shooter, who engraved onto his bullet casings any number of conflicting internet memes. And many people are calling this sh posting as a political assassination. I found this article by Ryan Broderick and Adam Boomas to be very helpful at points. Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme. The use of memes in political mass violence started in earnest in 2019 when a man filmed himself attacking a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. Just before he started, he told viewers, subscribe to PewDiePie, the biggest YouTuber at the time. Months later, in Hal, Germany, an attacker livestreamed the shooting of a synagogue on Twitch. In 2022, an 18-year-old white nationalist live-streamed a shooting in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Investigators later discovered that he was planning it openly on 4chan and Discord, calling it a real-life effort sh post. And in the last year, Luigi Mangioni, allegedly gunned downed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson with bullets that read, deny, defend, depose. Days later, a 15-year-old posed for a photo flashing the right-wing okay hand symbol before allegedly carrying out a school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin. And just last month, Robin Westman allegedly carried out a shooting in Minneapolis with bullets that had a range of messages from all around the political spectrum, including, I am the woker baby, wise Aquarius, Skibbity, and the simplified line version of the lost JPEG meme. According to law enforcement, the messages on the bullet casings believed to have belonged to Robinson were equally politically confusing. The bullet that struck and killed Kirk had notices bulge, capital O, little W, capital O, what's this? Written on its casing, a reference to a longtime internet joke that originally comes from a text-based furry roleplay. It is not proof, however, that Robinson was a furry. The meme has long since become a part of the extremely online canon. This does not explain all the motives of Robinson. He had told family members that he thought that Charlie Kirk was full of hate, and he couldn't be reasoned out of it, and it appears that Tyler Robinson had identified hate in Charlie Kirk and wanted to stop him with a bullet. The variety of confusing memes does not mean that this was not politically motivated, but it does mean that Tyler Robinson was lost in more ways than one. He was lost to an ideology that believes that violence can end speech, but it also seems to me that he was lost to utter nihilism, to brain rot, to sh posting. The article finishes by drawing attention to these links between shootings and meme culture, and they say of the violence, all of it is now just another meme you can participate in to go viral. Made even more confusing by a new nihilistic accelerationist movement that delights in muddying the waters for older people who still adhere to a traditional political spectrum. Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary, order and chaos. And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this, then you are, by definition, their enemy. That's the fifth lie. This is nothing. It's a lie that Tyler Robinson has bought into, it's a lie that many others are lost to, and it's killing us. We shrug our shoulders at brain rot, but in a nihilistic frame, in a godless frame, what else is brain rot except soul rot? And we are giving ourselves and our children over to a world of brain rot. A world that says this is nothing. There is definitely danger in ideologies that glorify violence and that permit violence in the name of that ideology. That is dangerous. But it's also extremely dangerous. A nihilism that permits violence because this is nothing. That's the fifth lie, and it is all over our online world. But finally, the sixth lie. This is everything. If you are online as much as I am online, you are receiving a diet of this stuff on a daily basis. Algorithmically tweaked and refined and supercharged to push your buttons in a way that is bespoke for you. And all the algorithm wants is for you to stay at the computer, to stay glued to your screen, to keep on scrolling. That's all it wants. It's just that it's found that the way to keep you glued is to enrage you. It turns out that will tether you to your device more than seeing attractive naked people.
SPEAKER_02We used to think sex sales, what we found is something better, and that is rage. And these algorithms have figured out that the best way to get engagement and more Nissan ads is to figure out your political leanings and then take you as far as they can, tweet by tweet, or reel by reel, or TikTok by TikTok, to an extreme. And now that Americans get two or two-thirds of Americans get their news from social media, the temperature has just gone up. And I would ask all of us to do what Darth Vader Vader suggested and search your feelings. You know this to be true.
SPEAKER_01More than lust, which is a problem all of its own, anger will keep you addicted to the machine. And you're tempted, and I'm tempted, to believe this sixth lie. This is everything. But it's really not. Last night I was in a church helping Christians to get better at how to share their faith. And one thing I train Christians to do is to just use the line, that's what I love about my church. And we got people to workshop that. And of course, there's so many things that people love about their church. There is this embodied community where I get to meet people from all kinds of different walks of life. Some of them have a social media diet that paints Charlie Kirk in one way, some of them have a social media diet that paints Charlie Kirk in a totally different light. And we get to come together. And when we come together on a Sunday morning, we get to hit reset. And we get to say, the problem is me. We get to confess our sins. And out loud, together, we can talk about how I've been a spiritual moron this week. And you've been a spiritual moron this week. We've all been wrong this week. Doesn't that recalibrate your heart? Instead of being right online, you can show up in church and be wrong. Instead of an online world in which I'm trying to look good in the presence of judgment, I can come to church and I can look bad in the presence of love. Never have we needed embodied community across racial lines, across ideological lines. Never have we needed the Church of Jesus Christ more than right now. And listen, we're glad if Charlie Kirk and the social media that is coming to you from Charlie Kirk has meant that you end up in church on a Sunday. If the name of Charlie Kirk got you to church on a Sunday, praise God. But if you leave that church because it didn't mention the name of Charlie Kirk, I don't think that's even what Charlie Kirk would have wanted. Church is the place where we refocus on the name above every name, where we challenge the lies that we've been telling ourselves all week, where we come clean in front of one another, we drop the act, we stop trying to look good in the presence of judgment, we start looking bad in the presence of love. And we worship a Jesus who descended into the mess to be with us, to be with us all, to be for us, to be for us all, and to lead us in a truth that comes from beyond. Have you investigated the truth of Jesus yet? We've got a great way of doing that. It's called 321. You can go to 321course.com and see life according to Jesus. Plenty of people have done it since the Charlie Kirk event, and some people are finding faith right now because the Charlie Kirk events have awoken them to their spiritual need. They've done 321 and they've come to Christ and now they want to go to church. Could that be you? Could that be your friends? Perhaps you should do it as a Christian and then pass it on to your friends. Go to 321course.com and discover life according to Jesus. That'll do for this video. If you've got this far, you must be a fan of the channel. Have you subscribed? Um, there's plenty more stuff for you that is coming. Our new studio is coming, and that's why I'm here in this makeshift studio in a few weeks. I cannot wait to show you what the new studio looks like. Subscribe, and we'll see you very soon.