Transcript - America This Week, September 12, 2025: "The Assassination of Charlie Kirk, and a New Age of Political Violence"

Recalling the rising level of incivility and rage surrounding the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, a symbol of political dialogue. Also, the conventions of Conan Doyle's detective novel

Matt Taibbi: Hi. Welcome to America this week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: And it’s September 11th, and we’re recording on September 11th. You’ll be seeing this on September 12th. These are dark times in the United States. They have been for a while, but September 10th, Wednesday, we had another assassination. This time somebody you and I both know, Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. And a lot of people, semi-ironically, are describing this as a turning point in American history. There’s a marked change in tone in the reactions or radicalization, I would say, on both sides. We’ll get into all of it.

Walter, do you have any initial comments before we start rolling tape and things like this, or... All I can say is that I feel, as somebody... We’re both in the same business as him, and there’s a degree of coldness and viciousness and professionalism to this that is unnerving. But we’ll get into all of it. But I do feel like this is a difference making moment for a variety of reasons.

Walter Kirn: I do too. I just have a few things to say in preface before we get into it. Number one, this is a guy who I’ve met. He asked me to be on his show recently. I declined for various reasons, mostly having to do with my schedule. He is one degree of separation from me in all sorts of ways. I know a lot of people who know him, some people who are very close friends of his there, they’re absolutely shocked as was I. The fact that this occurred on a university campus, I think is underappreciated. It also was an attack on someone who, despite what is a pretty marked dehumanization campaign on the part of his political enemies, was a paragon of a sort of old-fashioned college Republican; let’s sit down and talk, I’ll persuade you, way of doing things.

Beside the fact that he was a podcaster and a journalist, it’s an attack on civil society, on the way we do things, on our expectation that there are spaces in which we can talk and debate and disagree. So the side of me that hopes for a civilized world and world in which there are guardrails around our political and cultural discussions is absolutely shattered and disappointed by this. He’s a father. I relate to that. Two young children, a 31-year-old man.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. I was shocked to see that age. I didn’t realize he was that young.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, and I think that’s another dimension of this that is worthy of note. This was a young person, a young person speaking to young people on a place, a college campus, which is supposed to be for that very purpose. To see his posture on that stage, relaxed, sitting back in his chair, listening, engaged, suddenly disrupted by a shot to the throat is an image that too should stun and dishearten us all.

But finally, aside from all of these considerations, I think what bothers me the most is that almost instantly, and I guess we’re going to see this, this incident, was fed into a machine whose workings we’re quite familiar with now, whose operations have been used in all sorts of ways over the years, and especially the last few years. And the dehumanization of this person before he had even left the earth, truly, literally, was for me,, the most terrifying aspect of the whole thing.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. So the first thing that came to my mind when I heard that it was Charlie who had been shot, is that his particular genre of being an influencer, being a reporter, being a commentator, is different from almost everybody else on the internet. He does a thing where he goes on campuses and he engages people, and he tries to prove you wrong or tries to pick a part your point of view. And what I thought was really interesting about it, now he comes from a background that I just couldn’t be more different from mine. He is a Christian. He’s sort of steadfastly a diehard Republican, always has been. A lot of his views are things that I probably politically wouldn’t have agreed with, especially years ago. Some of the things more recently, however I have agreed with.

But his whole shtick is to go and talk to people. And he’s not rude. He’s not abrasive or profane. Some of those conversations don’t go so well, but this is what we would hope for when we talk about free speech. We hope that people would talk to each other, confront one another, and that something would emerge out of those discussions. And so for him to be the person who is shot and killed is a message directed, not just at somebody who has a lot of political significance because Walter, as you point out, he’s really the Republican Party’s point man for engagement with youth. And they’ve had tremendous success in that area in the last few years. But more than that, to me, it’s a blow against the whole idea of speech and counter speech, that there has been a rising movement on campuses against the idea that something positive emerges from these discussions. And it started with people who were more openly provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos. Let’s just not have him on the campus, and that will be the better outcome. And-

Walter Kirn: And Colter, firebrands. I think you can look at a lot of cape of Charlie Kirk and realize he does one thing that a lot of these others don’t do quite so well, which is, listen. The guy is a good listener. Having been married three times, I’ve learned about the virtues of listening. And my wife will often come back from a party and she’ll say, “Oh, that guy was amusing, smart, and interesting, but he doesn’t listen.” I’ve cued into that and I see a guy whose wheels are turning, not just when he listens, not just because he wants to counter the person, but because he’s absorbing their point of view as fully as possible in order to argue it -

Matt Taibbi: Of course.

Walter Kirn: ... but not merely to argue with it. In other words... And because he was 31, I would imagine that he had change ahead of him. He had evolution. How many of us are the same person politically, culturally, temperamentally we were at 31. And so there’s a reason why the death of a youth is classically much more tragic because the change, the growth, the evolution, the dynamism that we can expect as someone moves from youth into middle age is made to never be.