Ben Shapiro and I Talk Political De-escalation
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What happened with Charlie Kirk’s murder and how did it shape the episode’s opening?
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Last week, Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking at Utah Valley University. His murder has shaken me pretty deeply. In the days after his assassination, when I would close my eyes, I just kept imagining a bullet going through a neck. But it disturbed me in a different way when I would open my eyes and look online. To see some of Kirk's allies declaring war, insisting that normal politics had failed, that the time to cleanse this country of the radical left, whatever that means, had come. When I'd see some of Kirk's critics mocking or reveling in his murder, sharing clips of his worst moments, suggesting in one way or another that he deserved this, that we were better off. This was not everybody.
It was not most of us. It never is. but the nature of online algorithms means that it makes for a lot of what the most politically engaged see of each other. I could just feel the temperature rising. I don't think we have ever felt in my lifetime as close to some kind of violent national rupture. Because it's not just Kirk. In the last few years, a bullet nearly ended Donald Trump's life. A man tried to burn Josh Shapiro and his family alive in their home. A man broke into Nancy Pelosi's home to kidnap her. And when he didn't find her, he fractured her 82-year-old husband's skull with a hammer. The former speaker of the Minnesota House and her husband were assassinated. The CEO of UnitedHealthcare was gunned down in midtown Manhattan, and many lionized his killer.
Violence is viral. It infects. It spreads. Violence is combustible. It blazes into civil wars, into world wars, into totalitarian turns. Who knows which spark will light the wildfire? In the hours after Kirk's murder, trying to process my own shock, my own fear, I wrote a piece about him. In that piece, I said, you can disagree with virtually everything Kirk believed about politics. You can detest some of what he believed about politics and still believe that he was there on that stage practicing politics the right way, showing up to college campuses and trying to persuade people who disagreed with him. I said that I had often wished my own side exhibited more of that spirit, that we went more often to the places where we knew people would disagree with us and talk to them, treated that disagreement as the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one.
I've published a lot of pieces over the years. I'm not sure I've published any with as polarizing a reaction as that one. A lot of people appreciated it, particularly on the right. They felt it saw their friend and their ally more the way they saw him. And there were many, many people closer to my own politics who were truly infuriated by it. Privately and publicly, they offered the worst things Kirk has said and done, starting a watch list of leftist professors, busing people to the protest that led to the January 6th insurrection. telling his political foes that they should be deported, saying the Democratic Party hates this country, saying the Civil Rights Act was a mistake. I had friends say to me, look, we can oppose political violence without whitewashing this guy.
I spent some time thinking about that over the weekend. I also just spent some time thinking, trying to work through how I'm feeling. And my reaction, honestly, is that it is too little to just say we oppose political violence. In ways that surprise me, given what I thought of Kirk's project, I was and am grieving for Kirk himself.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What happened with Charlie Kirk’s murder and how did it shape the episode’s opening?
0:00–16:11
2
How does Ezra describe his personal reaction and the idea of grieving across political lines?
16:11–58:39
3
What is Ben Shapiro’s “Lions and Scavengers” theory and why was it chosen for this conversation?
58:39–1:03:59
4
How does the book define “lions” versus “scavengers” and what role do they play in today’s politics?
1:03:59–1:17:57
5
Why does Ezra see Donald Trump as a pivotal figure in the right’s recent evolution?
1:17:57–1:38:10
6
How do grievance‑based and counter‑revolutionary mindsets fuel current political polarization?
1:38:10–1:56:56