As of recording, it's been six days since the Charlie Kirk assassination, and I have on the line Emily Jeshinski, who has known Charlie Kirk for the last 10 years. Emily is an American journalist, commentator, and media critic who is currently the Washington, D.C. correspondent for Unheard. She's written for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph. Hello, Emily.
SPEAKER_00Hello, I'm uh very glad to be here. I mentioned this to you before, but I listen to the show all of the time.
SPEAKER_01Oh, thank you so much. And I listen to you on Unheard all the time as well. Um, it's obviously been um such devastating news for so many people um who never met uh Charlie Kirk on the 10th of September. Uh a bullet to the throat at a uh an on uh on-campus free speech event. Um it's been devastating for all kinds of things, but I guess for those who know him, it's been uh a really poignant tragedy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of friends who were very, very close to him. Um, and I I just, you know, can't imagine what it was like to be following the TikTok on that day, not literally the app TikTok, but the TikTok minute by minute news as it was coming out. Um, I was on the air with Megan Kelly, who was very good friends with Charlie Kirk, uh, within minutes of her learning about what had happened. And it was so collectively traumatic for the right because Charlie Kirk knew almost everyone. Uh, the the two of us sort of knew each other very casually, um, going back about 10 years because we were both worked in the conservative youth movement. So putting lectures together on college campuses, helping those students bring speakers, organize all of that. And uh over the last decade, he has just become larger than life and had met so many different people in that process. Um, besides that, also becoming basically a fixture of the Gen Z social media diet. Uh, so it I mean, he just touched so, so many lives. And I think the best way to put it is there's a collective trauma that that's been experienced in the last several days.
SPEAKER_01What do you think Charlie Kirk was trying to do? And and if you'd answered that question a week ago, uh, before this tragedy happened, how how would you answer that question? And and perhaps um, as we look back on his legacy now, tragically in the past tense, uh, that that might have shifted. But if I'd asked you a week ago, what is Charlie Kirk up to, what would you have said?
SPEAKER_00I actually would have said exactly what's being said by many of his friends now. And this is interesting to me because one of the reasons uh we had a lot of disagreement over the years is that when we were both coming up in the conservative youth movement, I was much more interested in social issues. Maybe it's because I'm a woman, maybe it was because of my experiences, but I was just convinced that the right needed to lean into some of these questions. Like as a college student, I was, you know, dealing with my own little micro cancellation because of uh preferred pronoun dust up on campus. And I left college utterly convinced the right needed to lean into the culture war. Charlie um went right into organizing after high school. So at the age of 18, and he immediately started trying to uh bring Turning Point USA to campuses around the country. And he was convinced, as Al Moller recently remembered, that the right needed to lean out of the culture war, that the culture warriors were dragging the right down the way to the hearts and minds of the next generation was through talking about small government, talking about lower taxes, talking about more freedom in that respect. And by last week, he had completely shifted. Not that he didn't still believe in all of those policies, but he had completely shifted to talking in the macro sense about some of these really deep questions of faith and family. Um that was, you know, what he had spent the last couple of years focusing on. And it's an amazing legacy because it speaks to what so many people in America have experienced over the last decade, which is which is realizing that our problems are much bigger than worrying about the Social Security program um going bankrupt. These programs, these problems are about the culture going bankrupt. And that's where he ended his career and what he was a leader in that space, talking to young men about being married, about being good husbands and fathers, and that being what's rewarding to you. So it's it's just utterly poetic. Um, and I think in a way that really speaks to his wisdom.
SPEAKER_01It's kind of a cliche in the last 10 or 15 years to quote that old dictum that politics is downstream of culture. But I I wonder whether we are at a moment where we're finally ready to acknowledge that culture is downstream of the cultists, that Latin word for religion, really. Um and and perhaps that journey that that Charlie's been on is is kind of indicative of that journey that we're all going on. Um to recognize that, yeah, differential tax rates is is not really where um the big disagreements lie. Um but even you know, gender issues are not really where the real issues lie, um, but that there is something far more profound. Um tell me in in Charlie's life, how how did faith and politics kind of combine?
SPEAKER_00Everything was the same for him. You know, everything was um one. He he his his personal life, uh his his friends were TP USA people, they were uh Vice President Vance, they were uh first son, Donald Trump Jr. These were the people who were closest to him, the people on his staff, uh, the people on his podcast staff, um, because he lived to change the country and he did everything um for the sake of his movement, which is a rare, uh very rare character type. And when you look back on it, I say this, you know, in a really kind of dark way. When you look back on it, it's almost uh so obvious that something like this was going to happen because he poured everything he had into these conversations and into organizing on the ground. And um, you know, I personally, uh having known him really from a distance compared to what some of the other people um know of his life, it seemed to me like around the time he got married, uh, several years back, I think it was maybe 2021, um, around the time he got married, his focus shifted even more noticeably. So the Trump moment was a really big deal for him. He started, like many conservatives, as a kind of anti-Trump guy, and then got on the bandwagon, became really good friends with Donald Trump Jr. Um, and and spearheaded youth outreach efforts, became uh very much almost a part of the the Trump family. Um, and you know, after that was on an intellectual journey, like a lot of people. But then it seemed, especially when he met his wife and became a husband and a father, uh, he made it his mission to prevent young men, young women from going the route of Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes or some of those other dark characters.
SPEAKER_01That is a lot of what people are are kind of saying, and I I'm picking up a lot of sentiment from the right in America that if he had taken such pains to position himself uh in between such figures as those um on the very hard right, like Nick Fuentes and and and Andrew Tate, he's kind of positioning himself, according to many on the right as as a normie. He's a normy conservative. And if a normie conservative is framed as a Nazi bigot, um that that is pretty um disturbing in in terms of you know how we can talk to one another uh across the aisle. Is is it becoming impossible in America to talk in this polarized situation?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's one of the really sad takeaways is that he was not anything like Andrew Tate, was not anything like Nick Fuentes. I mean, those words shouldn't even be uh spoken in the same breath, but they inevitably are because he was, you know, kind of quietly, subtly doing work against them by trying to model a positive behavior. Um, you know, it wasn't like he was out there raging against those guys by name every single day. He was just really trying to uh very obviously model what a happy life looks like and convince other people that this was the better path. And one of his last, uh in one of his last interviews, he talked about, this is with Deseret News, seeing his life's work as preventing a revolution. That's what he was uh looking at by the time he was killed. I mean, it's just there's so much um tragic irony to everything being being shot in the throat on a college campus in the middle of a question about trans like the trans violence, uh whether or not that's statistically significant, all of this. It just the layers here are incredibly poignant. And one of the there's there's micro blame, and we're gonna you know see the legal process play out and and who you know pulled the trigger literally. Um, but then there's macro blame. And I think anyone who's contributed to the overbroadening of of definitions of things like hate and racism and and violence um needs to take a hard look in the mirror because some of what we know, thusly, is that the suspect in this case, a suspected shooter, like many other Americans, saw Charlie Kirk as a hateful person. And and that's absolutely fine. People are allowed to believe that and they're allowed to talk about that and debate it. Um, but it's it's it's at scale, it's such a bad takeaway. It's such an incorrect description that it's very dangerous. We live in a country where so many people believe something that is so flagrantly untrue, rather than seeing him as a decent human being uh who has plenty of testimony about how you know many black Americans he's stood up for and helped, how many times he's had conversations uh with uh LGBT people in the question and answer line at his rallies and been nothing but compassionate. Uh so this this misconception at scale or this lack of grace at scale uh is genuinely very frightening.
SPEAKER_01What would you say then to those who see that same thing? And and President Donald Trump, um, in his statement about Charlie Kirk's death, sort of named that issue uh uh about violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year. Um, but many would point to the fact that within that same speech, he seems to point to um almost exclusively the left as um the proponents of of that kind of demonizing speech. And that doesn't seem to be correct. In fact, the the Cato Institute um put out an article on September the 11th of 2025 saying that uh in the last 50 years, um the preponderance of what they would describe as terrorist violence, terrorist murders, if you take out 9-11, um, it's something like 68% um on the right, as as they would um define things, and only 10% on the left. There seems to be a disagreement over where the preponderance of demonizing speech and and of sort of uh politically motivated murders are coming from. How do how do we navigate that?
SPEAKER_00Right. Uh yeah, I think that's an important question. And I spent the weekend actually trying to look at some of the uh surveys and the research into where political violence is coming from because it's obviously an enormously important question, and it is mixed. Um I am trying to extend some understanding to people like as odd as it is to talk about the president of the United States in this term, people like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller and others who were personally close to Charlie Kirk and saw him get, you know, so like I I understand right now and think it is, just in the the week since it's happened, uh, wholly appropriate to focus on the side in this case uh that that does seem to be at fault, not in a unnecessarily a micro sense. I mean, I always think it's important to blame the person who did it. Um, but the side who has insisted that people like Charlie Kirk are hateful and and bigoted and all of that. You know, I think it's sort of appropriate in the immediate aftermath, but in the the deeper sense, uh I mean, something that Charlie Kirk was worried about is nihilism. Um, something that Charlie Kirk was was clearly worried about um was yeah, that that the influence of nihilists or uh like actual obvious bigots um that give up on the the constitutional republican system um and feel so hopeless hopeless that they either check out or check in in very, very, very dangerous ways. Now, there was a a UGO snap poll after his assassination um that found that as they put it, most Americans across the political spectrum say political violence is never justified, but younger and more liberal Americans are more likely to disagree. Uh, same thing with most Americans say it's unacceptable to be happy about public figures' deaths, but younger and more liberal Americans are more likely to call it acceptable. Uh, on the other hand, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, FIRE, has been measuring this data going back to about 2020. And while the ideological group that has among students that has the strongest belief that student opinions uh that using violence is acceptable to stop a speaker, uh, by ideology, the group that has the highest level of support for that, it's a over 40%, is democratic socialists. Over time, you can also see the right, conservative students, uh increasing in their support for that position too. And I think that's what it comes down to is this this nihilism, this desperation, and and this idea that the system is no longer an efficient means of representation and of change.
SPEAKER_01Right. And and so you've got this issue where left left and right is meaning less and less as our certainly as our primary uh lens through which we see the the political uh issues of the day. But just as violence exists on on both sides of that divide, I guess nihilism exists on both sides of that divide, which I guess goes back to a point that you're saying Charlie Kirk was increasingly aware of as his career developed, um, that these are spiritual matters um that that need to go deeper than than the political questions uh that are there. Do you do you have hope for that in the United States, that somehow even even at this moment and perhaps even through this moment, that there there might be some kind of spiritual awakening?
SPEAKER_00That's the big question. Um you know, it's that was I I think the way that you put it is uh exactly right just now. Because you know the reason I'm more critical of the left in this space is I think there's something about postmodernism um that is more it's it it creates, you know, the my truth versus your truth versus their truth um debates, or actually even just that paradigm through which you see the world, um, it it does I think set people up to justify um really bad behavior in a way that if you're still sort of clinging to um I am the way, the truth, and you like if you're still in that camp, uh whether you know it or not, you know, talking about like the the cultural Christians, as you've had many conversations with. Um, but once you sort of leave that realm, I think that that's a real problem um disproportionately on the left. I think it also will come for the right. Um, as you know, we segregate more. That's my prediction in answer to your question. It's sort of a hopeful one, but not. I I think it's the the Benedict option is going to become more and more manifest, meaning you'll see um people in what we call our blue cities here, Democratic Ren, major cities in the United States. I don't think there will be many conservatives left in those areas. And I don't think there will be many people on the left remaining in rural areas or uh some of the suburbs. I think we are really going to come apart at the seams, not necessarily based on Democrat or Republican, but ultimately it'll be uh more based on these cultural priors. And what gives me hope is the fact that Charlie Kirk was having enormous success making these arguments, um, that we are really seeing uh true evidence of young people, just as it is happening in the UK, like going back to church, uh, taking an interest again in marriage and and family and the way my generation, millennials were not. So I think there's some good news. I just don't know that we're going to live in close proximity, you know, 50 years from now or 100 years from now.
SPEAKER_01So d does this mean that the American experiment uh has a sort of a sell-by date on it? Uh it's it's been going for 249 years, uh, which is that's a pretty good innings. Um what hope is there if if you're saying that basically red and blue are gonna continue to sort themselves and sort themselves? Uh do you think that red and blue America can just live side by side, or or is there gonna be more of a conflict than that?
SPEAKER_00Uh you know, I think there's hope for living side by side. What just makes me sad as an American um right now is it's unnecessary. Um, that, you know, it I to have memories like many living Americans of the 1990s and 2000s and especially after 9-11, um, where there was just in incredible, you know, maybe not in our in our politics, maybe not here in Washington, DC, but neighbor to neighbor, there was such a uh compassion and a warmth, um, you know, that just bridged all divides, almost all divides. And so it's it's sad in that respect. I think it's feasible. Um, and I think to some extent we actually already do that now. Um, it's just not at the same level. Uh the cultural distinctions, Charles Murray wrote a great book about this called Coming Apart in 2012. The cultural distinctions between um socioeconomically affluent areas with high levels of education and income. Uh, the cultural differences, where you eat, what shows you watch, what movies you watch, what music you listen to, what books you read. As of 2012, there was a huge already gulf between Red and Blue America, which was starting to be more on class lines. And so I think it'll just be uh more geographic and physical than it is right now. I don't think it's unfeasible. I just think it's so sad because you we've we've always been able to, I mean, we uh the civil rights movement in America, um, you people shed blood so that we could live in a more perfect union. And um it's hard to watch that uh seemingly fade away.
SPEAKER_01To what degree uh has social media played a role in any of this? Um as we think about the the Charlie Kirk murder. Um without social media, that's a different event, or at least it's it's differently experienced by the world. Um when I'm scrolling on Twitter and cannot help but come across the actual footage of the actual murder, and like it or not, I see this um this act of tremendous violence, and millions of people see this tremendous act of violence, and um we are our own press secretaries now, and we can make our own little announcements, um, millions of us all at once, and out the ripple effects go. Um we're we're living in a very different world. How should we think about the the influence of social media? I just read um Sam Harris uh at the free press just saying, I logged off three years ago. Guys, you need to get off this thing called social media. Um he he used some very strong language uh about what social media was doing to us. He calls it a digital sewer and um absolutely uh urges people, um Benedict Option style, to come away from Babylon, come out from her and be separate. Um is is that the answer? Um I'm thinking as a journalist, um you you might you might be a user of uh said website. Um how should how should we think about the media and social media in this moment?
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean, I'm probably a top like one percent of Twitter users, unfortunately. And I think a lot of journalists are, which is a problem in in media and uh creates its own biases. But yeah, I think the casino-ification of the discourse uh Has been poisonous in ways that we will look back on like the frog in the boiling pot. It will basically be too late. And I think it it may actually already be too late. I don't think it actually is too late, but whether or not uh the people who are in charge of these platforms can be convinced um that they should operate them differently. I mean, one I think really obvious fix uh is is going back to the vintage timeline model, meaning you strip some of these social media platforms of the algorithm because what the algorithm does, and Marshall McLuhan before the algorithm was brilliant about how the algorithm would change our discourse. Um that prizes strong emotion because and it prizes posting, by the way, as well. Like even just to post or not to post is something that the algorithm is very seductive when it comes to that, because you don't necessarily need to say things, but you will get you know that that dopamine reward if you do. Uh, and so that part of transferring our personal and political lives onto Twitter, Instagram, uh, Facebook, TikTok, what we're doing is communicating in ways that are designed to uh that are designed, that are worded, written, crafted, filmed uh in in ways, whether we know it or not, to maximize engagement. And that's for the profit of literally for the profit of these these companies, um, but not for the profit of our souls. So uh I think you need to have a total paradigm shift when it comes to how kids use these apps or allowed to use these apps. Some of that has to be cultural and on parents and and in uh stigmatizing that kind of use. Some of it probably should be uh a public policy, some of it should be decisions made at the business level. But part of the problem here is that we can no longer have any sense of consensus when it comes to where we draw the lines. And and this is cancel culture's uh big, probably this is a big piece of evidence that we should take from cancel cultures that we can no longer have coherent discussions towards that consensus when so much of these conversations are happening on social media, you can't say, here's where the line should be, here's where the line shouldn't be. You can't come to any common place of agreement on that because the discourse is poisoned from the get-go by these bad incentives.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And when the owner of Twitter, with 220 odd million followers, says the left is the party of murder, um, and when he addresses uh, you know, a rally in London, a Tommy Tommy Robinson free speech rally, and and tells them violence is coming for you, fight or die. Um, you know, here here are people using speech um in in ways that are absolutely being ramped up by the algorithm and and sent out. And it's it's just extraordinary to me that when you s when you talk about a narcissistic billionaire me social media owner, um you could be talking about two different people. One of whom is the is the leader of the free world, um, neither of whom are temperate in their speech at all. Um and it it really seems to me, and and uh I've been saying this for the last couple of weeks because free speech has been in the in the media quite a lot, is that we've got a particularly negative libertarian view of free speech. Um we want freedom from restriction in order to say the edgy thing. And at that point, you know, the avatar of free speech is the person who is able to make a Nazi salute and it's okay, or the the the person who is just able to absolutely push at the fringe, and I guess he's able to, because yay, freedom. As opposed to a positive vision of freedom, in which responsibility is included, in which you're aiming your speech at creating dialogue. Um and at that point, you know, Elon Musk is not creating free speech, right, in in in that positive sense, in any sense of you know how is his speech actually allowing for the kind of the free exchange of ideas that it that I thought free speech was was meant to generate. Um so is is he a is he a hero for buying Twitter and and turning it into X, or or is he going to be looked back on as the villain of the piece?
SPEAKER_00Well, I love this question because on the American right over the last decade, there was some discomfort, but very quiet discomfort, with Republicans talking ad nauseam uh about free speech, about the free exchange of ideas, about uh, you know, the just basically a lot of Republicans, and myself included, would come out and say free speech absolutists. Um, and there was some quiet discomfort among conservative intellectuals who said, well, no, free speech um exists for the pursuit of truth. The founders envisioned free speech not as a good in and of itself, but as a good um that facilitates the pursuit of truth, particularly, not as a good that just allows people to say whatever they want to say, which is why we already have limits on it, but um, that facilitates the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of the good, uh, whatever it may be, free speech is there to facilitate that. So free speech can be curtailed um by a lowercase de democratic society or a republican society, um, to the extent that it doesn't facilitate that approach or that it doesn't actually help get to the good, the capital G good. And I mean, I'm a obviously like died in the wool, red-blooded American, and I think that's historically accurate, um, but get really uncomfortable with what that could look like uh in practice. And I think, you know, we're seeing a little bit of that now just over the last several days, um, as conservatives refocus on uh quote free speech looking more like uh that argument says it should. Uh, and it just it definitely does make me uncomfortable as an American in some ways. But on the other hand, Elon Musk being a champion of free speech, I mean, I think he's Twitter was so bad that even this version of Twitter is better than it was before, but that doesn't um excuse him, certainly, of any of the negative effects that it has on the discourse, which is many. I mean, I remember when Parler, uh, this is a deep poll, but there was an app called Parler that tried to compete with the old version of Twitter uh probably five plus years ago. And I was a, you know, hosting a conservative podcast at the time. And I asked the CEO, like, well, what do you want to do about like, do you have any plans to make this app less addictive, to make it less um, you know, something that rots people's brains to the point where, you know, as when people have their smartphones near them, we've seen study after study at this point show that it disrupts brain function, that it makes your brain function at a lesser level. Uh, and Elon Musk doesn't talk about that. And nobody holds him to account for that. Nobody holds him to account for what his vision of free speech actually is. Uh, it's just we everyone moves on. And I don't know, I think it's a really depressing state of affairs. That was sort of a long rambling answer, but it's it I as you were talking, I was thinking about the Scottish girl um with the knife who very quickly became uh a symbol and lionized um over in the UK. And we found out it reminds me of so many of these stories that have induced riots in the United States of alleged police violence against unarmed black men. Um, again, like actual riots have ensued more than like three, four times the last 15 years uh because of social media clips. And that's what I saw in that as well. And it turned out that there was literally, if you broadened the aperture, more going on. But that's not what the algorithm teaches us uh to think about.
SPEAKER_01Right. Uh I'm thinking back to when was that? There was a March for Life in which there was a kid with a MAGA hat on.
SPEAKER_00Covington Catholic.
SPEAKER_01There was the yeah, the Covington Catholic school. And there was the the Native American who was like like kind of doing the drumming thing in his face. And there was just one image, wasn't it? And he was sort of he didn't know what to do, so he's frozen in this kind of smile, but it looked like he was smirking at a minority. And that and that was the frame that then just gets boosted and sends all around the world. I think that that that was a real moment for me of seeing how framing is absolutely everything. And you know, a a lie can get around the world before the truth can get its pants on, you know. It's uh Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Nick Sandman, yeah. He CNN settled with him for uh I think we don't have the full amount, but like reportedly a gargantuan amount of money because their coverage totally jumped the gun.
SPEAKER_01That's interesting. And that's an interesting example of what it is that holds free speech in check in the States as opposed to in uh in the UK. I think the state kind of tries to hold free speech in check, and there are something like 33 arrests per day um for social media postings uh in the UK. And and so um, yeah, very very much it's a socialized sense of holding free speech to account, and it's a very much democratized sense of holding free speech to account in the States. Say whatever you like, but a lawsuit is probably on its way. Is is that kind of the way it works in the US?
SPEAKER_00It is, and I think there's also just a um there's a a level of toleration that's that's different that we sort of live in. It's it's like um one of the just expected um parts of American life is is you can kind of say whatever you want to say. And that's part of where the backlash started on the left to free speech is uh, you know, people were making the argument that certain words literally are violence, which is of course different than saying certain words can incite violence. But um, I think because there's so much toleration for free speech in the US, the left was able to start convincing a lot of young people that those those boundaries were way too broad. Um, and you know, some on the right, as I was saying before, were quietly agreeing and saying, yeah, um, uncomfortable with the free speech absolutionism that the right was mounting in response to the left getting uncomfortable with it. But I do think one of the big differences is just here, it's almost like with guns in a weird way. You just expect that it's part of daily life. You just expect that um people are saying crazy things as a part of of daily life here. And it's it's very uh, you know, I'm one of the few Americans that unheard. So I I cover and and uh read a lot about uh free speech in the UK. And to me, it's it's very bizarre. Um it's just a different world. And I think some of it is just it's totally cultural.
SPEAKER_01Well, let's talk about that because I I think the way the ways in which Americans view the Brits is um one interesting kind of uh characterization. And then the way that Americans see uh the way that the Brits see Americans is another interesting characterization. And myself as a as an Australian, I'd just say apox on both your houses. But I think I think essentially if uh if a Brit was to direct America the movie, it would it would be this Michael Bay directed special effects monstrosity in which everybody has AR-15s and they're all going down in a hail of bullets shouting America Whereas I think if America directed Britain the movie, it would be this dystopian, this this kind of 1984 style there you know, men in gray suits from the government who are calmly requisitioning your children from you while you know some some cockney parents say, This is bang out of order. Um I think I think that's probably how how Americans see the the UK and and in particular on on this issue, as as Brits look across the the Atlantic to America, we see your first two amendments of the Constitution. And it's like you can shoot your mouth off and you can shoot your guns off. And we're like, this is a recipe for disaster, isn't it? And and didn't John Adams say in 1798 or whatever that that actually this constitution is only made for a moral and religious people, and it is not suitable for any other. And and I think we we look at that and we kind of think, yeah, this this is a dangerous freedom to allow yourself. Um and are we not seeing the the dangers of that kind of freedoms that you've allowed yourselves?
SPEAKER_00Well, that quote I've thought a lot about, maybe more than any other quote in recent years, because it um gets to this question of whether that moral and religious people is self-sustaining in the climate created by the American system. And this is where a lot of conservatives have come down on the side of saying not necessarily. This is where you get sort of post-liberal uh conservatives, of which Vice President Bance has counted himself among uh in the past, which is that the the liberal order is not self-sustaining. It will not ultimately sustain a moral and religious people needed to ensure those freedoms uh are actually feasible and for the common good at the end of the day. I on the other hand, um, I think it most Americans still, I think the kind of online right or the intellectual right absolutely sees Britain that way. Um, I think the average American is still like a pop cultural anglophile and absolutely in love with their like dream vacation, is uh going to London and taking pictures with the guards at Buckingham Palace. Um, but the the right certainly culturally sees uh the UK that way. And the the question of whether our freedoms are are too broad is it's so, so tough because those freedoms are baked into our sense of patriotism, um, are baked into that's what makes us different. The meme about the European mind cannot comprehend this with pictures of people just in hot dog eating contests or riding, you know, massive trucks with racks full of uh guns. Um, those are just baked into the way that we we see ourselves and not all for the worse. I think the left sees that in a really shameful way. And this gets to what we were talking about earlier. I'm not sure that Americans even agree on this being good. Um, you know, as someone on the right, uh it's for me, I grew up, you know, in in the woods hunting and and fishing and listening to the country music and having guns and going to church every Sunday and have a very different cultural experience than than most people who live here in in Washington, DC. And even our ability to talk about this, um, I I think that is if you can't talk about it, uh, that's where you you start to see cracks in the foundation. And that's where, again, like I don't I haven't come down on one side or this or the other, to be honest, because it's just it's so it's it's so personally difficult um to reckon with where the country has gone in the last 10 plus years.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Help help us though, because uh because because you've you've got a lot of you've got a lot of friends on this side of the Atlantic looking across at America and me explaining to my children what had happened um on that university campus. And of course, you know, my my 10-year-old daughter's like, well, Daddy, you go to university campuses, are you gonna get shot? And I was like, um, I go to UK university campuses, and um it's very, very different. And and in fact, as we as the conversation sort of went on, we sort of we involved Chat GPT in the conversation. Um and and discovered that you know something like close to 50,000 gun deaths, you know, in in America, many many of which uh uh uh people taking their own lives, um but but around 50,000 you know gun deaths in in America every year and around 50 every year in the UK. And that that seems that seems from our side of things like a problem. And I absolutely recognize that you know only six days after Charlie Kirk's death, maybe now's not the time to talk about, but maybe now, or sometime soon is the time to talk about that. Uh is there is there any chance of uh a sober-minded questioning of the Second Amendment in American culture?
SPEAKER_00No, uh there's not. I mean, we had the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School more than 10 years ago now, and I wonder if this was Barack Obama at the time. It was some prominent Democrat who uh said, you know, if if we can't do gun control after 20-something kids were uh slaughtered at an elementary school, uh, then it will never happen. And I think that's true. Uh we've had other tragedies since, and nothing's happened. In fact, there was uh an awful shooting in Las Vegas that people probably remember at the Harvest Country Music Festival. And uh that was, you know, mostly like you could you could imagine Second Amendment supporting conservative Americans who are in Las Vegas at a country music festival, and certainly nothing happened after that. It was like the largest mass shooting uh in American history. Um, and and nothing happened after that. And I I don't actually, I think the sort of media's instinct is to blame the right for that, but I don't actually just blame the right for that. As somebody who's pro-Second Amendment in ways that would definitely make most people in uh the UK or actually just outside of America uncomfortable. Uh, even I think, you know, we can do better when it comes to background checks. We can have laws that just are are better and make more sense when it comes to background checks and and that type of thing. Uh, but we don't have a path to reconciliation on this because the culture war uh has made it virtually impossible uh to have, you know, I'll use your word, like a sober-minded uh policy debate, because everyone is on uh part in the pun, like a hair trigger. Like you are coming to disarm my family and um make us less safe. I mean, one of the interesting things uh just culturally about the states is that we're a frontier society and people still have guns from their grandfather's uh grandfather and people who live in really rural areas where the police would be, in some cases, literally an hour away, um, are very, very paranoid about what would happen if they had to give up their weapons, because people really do see their property as kind of little, little fiefdoms. And that's what's people see as beautiful about living in the rural United States, uh, that you can be your own security, that you can be your own um, you know, police force. So these are the like some of the cultural differences, even between them and people in cities. I remember uh I have two of my best friends in the world went to a shooting range um when you're I don't know, they're probably like 20 years old and came back from it and told me they cried when they fired guns. And and they grew up in the northeast and very dense suburbs in the northeast. And I laughed and I felt really badly for laughing at them because then I had to go back and think, yeah, you know, I guess it is really you if you're if you're not used to guns, the the sound of a gun going off, the feeling of a gun in your hand is associated with um, in your mind, you know, all of these horrific scenes that you've seen throughout our history. It is loud and powerful. Um, and so you even just little things like that, I mean, so much of it is just your personal experience. And it's been it's a it is mystifying. Um it makes more sense if you're you've sort of grown up in it. But I I understand why people look at us and are like, what on earth?
SPEAKER_01Because from a from an Australian point of view, I mean, Australia is a kind of a frontier kind of a place as well. There's plenty of things that will kill you in Australia, and it might be better to be armed. Um But after the Port Arthur massacre um in Australia, you know, the police basically said hand in your guns, and Australians basically did. I I think, you know, there's a there's a sort of mythology about Australians that that we are well, you know, we're descended from convicts, so of of course we've got that rebellious streak. Actually, we're we're descended from um the police officers as well. So we don't mind prison guards. And and we we don't mind the state taking control of uh of things in ways that I think the more political and spiritual history of America is is A spiritual history of independence from the state. First spiritual independence from the Church of England, and then political independence from King George. I think that has had even more of an effect than than the rural-urban thing, than the frontiers thing. That much deeper ingrained sense of what it is that makes us a free society. And you know, it in in America, the the great dechurching has kind of happened. It was a book written by uh Michael Graham and Ryan Burge and about 40 million Americans have stopped going to church in in the States this century. Um interestingly, half of them say they will they will return at some point. Most of them haven't left because they've slammed the door on the church and they've had they've had um terrible experiences of church abuse. Some of them have, and a significant number have, but the majority haven't, and they do intend to go back. And in that book they said something like eight million Americans could be counted on to if you invited them to church, they they might well come. They say in polls and in surveys that they would go back to church on Sunday if they were but asked. Is there some evidence that the Charlie Kirk event has been a little bit like that tap on the shoulder in in terms of people reawakening to spiritual reality?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Uh I've heard anecdotally reports of uh people being able to bring their friends with them to church or people's friends asking to come with them to church uh just over the last weekend. And your point about the spiritual mind of the American is so smart and interesting because there is, and you saw this a lot in the Tea Party movement that Charlie Kirk came out of, um, this memory. I mean, even the fact that it was called the Tea Party movement speaks to uh how deeply ingrained this uh sense of pride of being against a government that controls your religion, against a government uh that is overreaching on taxation, as was the case in the Tea Party. Uh, it's not just about policy, it's about seeing the individual as the more trustworthy entity than the collection of individuals. And that's the same case. I mean, it's it's it's in some sense, it's about concentrated power. It's this deep paranoia about concentrated power. And it does kind of still, as the as I see it, I think it does kind of play out in the rural urban divide because on the left, there's actually deep shame um about the American constitution. There's this idea that the constitution should be a living, breathing document. And the idea that um you know the the Second Amendment should be read in 2025 as it was read in 1800 is uh something that the left finds to be a source of shame that speaks to Americans being backwards and reactionary and and stuck in the past and unable to adapt. Um, and that is where, again, this becomes does the assassination of of Charlie Kirk have people rethinking um whether or not this is fundamentally spiritual? That I think the answer is is going to be clearly yes. There are going to be some people who have uh uh been deeply confused. And Kirk himself was a leader in bringing some of those people over to the Trump movement. If you look at the Make America Healthy Again movement, uh Robert F. Kennedy Jr. referred to uh Charlie Kirk as a quick soulmate of his as soon as they met and started talking at a vigil at the Kennedy Center just a couple of days ago. Um, Kirk was trying to bring a lot of people inside this tent and not just trying to get them to vote Republican. He was trying to get them to uh rediscover uh the beauty of some of these uh sort of hallmarks of a good Christian life and Christ, uh, like actually trying to get people to rediscover Christ. Nicole Shanahan is a really interesting example. She ran uh as RFK Jr.'s vice president ticket, Silicon Valley person who has had an enormous spiritual awakening and not in any small part, I would say, due to uh meeting Charlie Kirk, seeing the work of people like Charlie Kirk and COVID, um, I think is a good example of what we could see after this assassination is it just sort of starts to clarify things in people's minds as to whether they want to be with the concentrated powers or if they want to be with the kind of little guy, which the right now sees as uh the family and the community. I, you know, it's it's sad because I don't think we're going to see it from a lot of people on the on the left. Um at the same time, the reenchantment discourse. I mean, I I don't know if you saw this story, but there's a feminist blog called Jezebel that was in the days before Charlie Kirk was shot in the head, wrote a story about paying Etsy witches to put a curse on Charlie Kirk. One of them said that they had cursed Kirk so that his head would pop off. And the poignance of stories like those, which are are now being focused on more on the right, as the right talks in in spiritual terms more than political terms, that that could be incredibly powerful. So I'm I'm really curious about where things go from here, but I do think this will be a clarifying moment for many people.
SPEAKER_01I see a lot of people um seeing evil with a capital E and sort of pulling at that thread and discovering that on on the far end of that thread there might be goodness with a capital G. And it's kind of the C. S. Lewis journey, isn't it? From from atheism to belief in some kind of God. It was actually the the existence of evil, the existence of, oh, okay, um, we're not gonna psychologize this, we're not gonna um uh sim simply see this as biological or cultural, but there there is evil with a capital E, and I need to get serious about spiritual reality. Uh I'm I'm seeing that happen a a lot. Um Emily, as as we finish, um, you are uh a a journalist and a and a person of faith. Um how do you see your your Christian faith informing your journalism? Like why is there is there a kind of a a spiritual Christian why behind being a Washington, DC correspondent?
SPEAKER_00Um of course. I mean, because for me it's just like many journalists, this obsessive pursuit of truth. It's it's almost like political apologetics, right? As a as a political journalist, you're uh constantly trying to um you know put together an accurate picture. And uh for me that's important um because you know, truth, the the truths that we need to make our decisions as as human beings, as Americans, as parents, as uh just members of a community, as Christians, frankly. Um, if you're if you're not operating from the same set of facts, if you're not operating from the same foundational truth, then those decisions uh become, you know, different opinions is fine, but coming to it with a different set of priors entirely. Um for me, you know, I I grew up in Wisconsin, uh, which is a one of the flyover states, as uh the left would call them in the United States. But um, I I just felt very um very uh patronized and condescended to by American culture when I was growing up. And that's one of the reasons that I was pushed to kind of go into uh go into Washington, D.C. and go into media because it just frustrated me. It drove me kind of crazy to see Christians treated the way that they were um in pop culture and in politics, because I grew up during the Obama-era culture wars or the the late George W. Bush era culture wars, where it was the depiction of a bunch of toothless uh hillbillies and uh treating people of faith that way. And it was President Obama said, you know, people cling to their gods, guns, and religion in a very derisive way when he was running for president initially. And those are the things that uh pushed me to go into the career where you're trying to say, no, this is wrong and this is right. Um and so that's how I see it. It's is it's obviously tough because it's a very secular profession, maybe the most secular profession outside of like entertainment. But um, you know, it's fundamentally for me the most important thing is truth, truth, truth, truth. And I'm very lucky to have a job where I get paid to try to get as close to the truth as possible because I think that's our duty as Christians.
SPEAKER_01Very good. Very good. Shining a light, speaking the truth uh out there into the world. Uh Emily Jeshinski, it's been fantastic uh to have your perspective. And I think there's been a meeting of minds across across the Atlantic. Uh we have figured one another out, or at least we've figured out why uh the other side is just so bizarre. Um and baffling.
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean, that's something in and of itself.
SPEAKER_01There we go. We've we've come to some some level of truth. Yeah. Fantastic. Emily, thanks so much.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.