Charlie Kirk Murder, Assassination Culture in America, Jimmy Kimmel Suspended, Ellison Media Empire

Okay, everybody. There's no easy way to start today's show. Eight days ago, Charlie Kirk was savagely murdered while doing what Americans love to do, debate. And when someone is senselessly killed like this, especially at a young age and at the hands of another human, try to make sense of it. That's only natural. And, uh, it's hard to imagine anything worse than a young father of two, just 31 years old and entering the best and most productive years of his life, being killed by a 22-year-old who's barely out of adolescence. Our hearts go out to the Kirk family, his friends, his fans, and every American who understands that no one should be killed for expressing their beliefs. That's the core of the great American experiment. So, let's keep that experiment alive today and the memory of Charlie Kirk by continuing the great debate. Besties, there's a lot to process here as a community, a country, a society, and, uh, I just wanna check everybody's temperature at the top of the program. We're obviously not gonna do a cold open here because that would be inappropriate. But Chamath, how are you processing the last eight days?

I actually wrote down something as well, which I normally don't do. I just like to kind of react, but let me just read that and then maybe we can just talk from there. So, to me, what Tyler Robinson illustrates is the emergence of a lost generation that was shaped by COVID. I see years of isolation, a reliance on screens, and an immersion in online subcultures that have created a vacuum where some young men are drifting in without any grounding. No institutions, no friends, no communities, no family. And out of that void, I think what comes out can, at best, only be called ideological incoherence. Somebody used the word salad bar extremism. These individuals are not clearly aligned with any one ideology completely, but they seem to be assembling fragments of memes, of conspiracies, of cultural signals into an unstable identity and in some cases now, it's exploding into violence. I think the most troubling consequence isn't just the facts themselves, which is abhorrent and I, and I feel incredibly bad for all of Charlie's friends and his family and his children, obviously himself. But beyond the act itself, there's an enormously chilling effect, I think, on public discourse. When you express an idea, it cannot be that then you risk becoming a target. Because the ultimate outcome of that is fewer people will then enter the public debate. And then what happens is the range of acceptable dialogue really narrows, and it only leaves space then for the most benign voices in the public square. And if you have that kind of anodyne discussion, I just think you have very bad outcomes for society. I've watched a lot of his content since he was murdered, and I'm still trying to grapple with why people could not shout the man down if they disagreed with him and instead shot the man down. And I think that that is a completely unacceptable response for what he thought. That's what I think.