What does the assassination of Charlie Kirk reveal about the state of political discourse and public safety in America today? In this powerful episode, Stu Smith, Jesse Arm, Josh Appel, and Kerry Soropoulos discuss the shocking murder of the conservative activist. Their conversation explores Kirk’s legacy, the rise of online radicalization, and how progressive policies may be fueling crime in urban centers. They also examine the deepening ideological divide in American society and consider what it will take to restore civility—and security—in our country.
Audio Transcript
Kerry Soropoulos: Hello and welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host for today, Kerry Soropoulos, and joining me are three of Manhattan Institute’s sharpest minds. Today we have with us Jesse Arm, our Vice President of External Affairs, Josh Appel, a policy analyst on our Cities team, and Stu Smith, our new investigative analyst. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me.
Josh Appel: Thank you for having us.
Jesse Arm: Thanks for having us.
Stu Smith: Happy to be here.
Kerry Soropoulos: We’ve got a lot to talk about, before we dive in, everyone, please remember to like and subscribe so you never miss an episode and we can keep growing the conversation. Now, starting off, it’s been a long and kind of tough week. It’s a story sweeping the nation. I’m sure all of our viewers have been tuned into this. Last week in the middle of a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed. Charlie was a proud advocate for free speech, open debate, and American values. Our condolences go out to his family and his many friends and to the millions of people whose lives were positively impacted by him. Charlie’s work touched the lives of millions, including some of us here today. Jesse, you wrote a piece last week for City Journal talking a little bit about the impact that Charlie Kirk played in your life. Tell us a little bit about how he led you to get to where you are today.
Jesse Arm: Yeah, well, I think in broad strokes, Charlie Kirk’s assassination is differentiated from many of the other kinds of political tragedies that we’ve seen because it’s a break with precedent in so many ways. This wasn’t, you know, shooting at a president. That’s something we’ve seen before in this country. And Kirk himself was not a polarizing agitator who was far out on the political fringe. This was somebody who, rather than pushing the envelope, was kind of a 31-year-old father who really made it his mission to debate anyone, anywhere, including in the most hostile environments imaginable for conservatives, which are the hotbeds of progressive idealism that are college campuses. And this is somebody who sort of succeeded to make conservatism feel a lot younger and more confident and more mainstream, perhaps the most successful man in doing so since William F. Buckley.
I remember the first time I heard him. It was a freezing and bitterly cold night in 2018 at the University of Michigan. And I walked out kind of convinced he was in many ways a rival to maybe the faction of the conservative right that I had been being built up in. I was doing work for a different right-of-center think tank at the time as their campus ambassador, one that really kind of prized this bipartisan respectability and, like Kirk did for so many, many more people over the years who were much further apart from him than I was on the ideological spectrum, he changed my mind that evening. He had this rare mix of charisma and humor and really relentless kind of preparation and a command of the facts that made him dangerous to the left and inspiring to young conservatives from kind of across the political right.
Kerry Soropoulos: And he did it the right way, as you’re saying. He did it the right way. And as the New York Times said, to their credit, he was an advocate of debate and really focused on changing hearts and minds. Josh, Stu, were you viewers of Charlie Kirk? I know that he was a giant, even for those who didn’t watch him.
Josh Appel: Yeah, I certainly would watch his debates and what always struck me was not just, as Jesse said, his command of the facts and his charisma, but his elegance. And I’ve never seen a clip of him, as far as my knowledge extends, of him yelling or exuding any ad hominem attack. He really was respectful. He cared about the issues, not necessarily the people and the emotions. And he always remained very composed. And that’s something that not a lot of people can say when they enter, like Jesse said, these hotbeds of progressive idealism. And so I think it’s a huge loss for us that we lost that person who was able to exemplify conservative ideas and present them in a way that was palatable and calm and composed. And it just troubles me that we no longer have that representative.
Jesse Arm: Well, look, I’ve seen videos of him yelling and tossing out ad hominem attacks. So we should, you know, paint the picture of the man in full here. But I actually think in many ways, the fact that he did that was an indicator of the fact that he was the one who was prepared for the political warfare that we were entering in the Trump era. For many young conservatives, I think he stood out as this larger-than-life figure because finally there was someone who was fighting with the same toolkit that the hard left was that they encountered on these college campuses, and at the same time, was somebody who I think was intensely concerned with, well, what might happen in the absence of someone like him. One of his last interviews before his assassination was actually on Tucker Carlson’s show, of all places, and he cautioned himself and said that he really thought of his political project in large part as preventing radical revolution. He was someone who was deeply concerned with online conspiratorial, sometimes antisemitic rabbit holes that young men could go down if left with sort of unchecked access to the internet paired with an intense grievance culture and an attitude that was sort of like, It’s too hard to date, so I guess I just won’t. It’s too hard to find community in church, so I’ll just stay on my computer. Charlie was someone who, until the very end, cautioned aggressively against that instinct and was trying to build a healthier right, whether or not you liked his strategy to get there.
Kerry Soropoulos: I want to bring you into this as we try and parse this really senseless crime. We’re trying to figure out the motivations. Over the weekend, his alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, was arrested, in part due to the help of his father. Details are still emerging, and the motivations of the killer are not entirely sure, but there are clues. And one big clue is the engravings found on the bullet casings. And we don’t want to be too salacious here, but Stu, you’re somebody who’s done a lot of work in these extreme and radical circles online, heavily online. Can you help us parse a little bit and understand what these phrases were? I think there was maybe four phrases engraved on the bullets. Could you just take them through, take us through them one by one and give us very quick hits on what they mean.
Stu Smith: Yeah, so we have two inscriptions that I would say are clearly anti-fascist. One is very obviously “Hey Fascist Catch,” followed by a video game input from Helldivers 2. The next one is “Bella Ciao,” which has a long history, decades long, going back to the Second World War as an Italian anti-fascist song. And you also have that being part of the anti-fascist just lexicon here in America. You have a media company in LA that Andy Ngo has noted shares the same name of Bella Ciao Cinema. then also “Bella Ciao” was also used in the manifesto for the 2019 Tacoma Antifa Gunman. So it’s something that has been used quite recently.
The next two inscriptions are a little bit tougher to parse. And I think speaks more to what Jesse was talking about, online radicalization, going down weird rabbit holes, where, you know, this is, Robinson was clearly someone who was on the internet way too much, his own mother noted it back when he was doing a meme-inspired Halloween costume in 2018. But these next two inscriptions are, “If you read this you are gay, LMAO,” which I just think was supposed to be this sort of like nihilistic absurdist internet gen Z kind of humor. And then the next one I think has is the inscription that’s leaving the most people with a lot of confusion, which is “Notices Bulge OWO what’s this?” And this has origins and the furry community. Yeah. And but I think it’s…
Kerry Soropoulos: This was very confusing for a lot of people.
Jesse Arm: You’re have to explain “the furry communio our listeners and I’m really sorry to task you with that, Stu.
Stu Smith: Yeah, I would say the furry community is a form of sexual deviance that is where people like to dress up as animals, anthropomorphic animals, you know, take that as you will, but…
Jesse Arm: And there is now credible reporting from a number of outlets that suggests that the murderer was a furry himself and that his partner, or… correct me if I’m wrong, what’s the story there, Stu?
Stu Smith: Yes, so Robinson appears to be in a relationship with someone named Lance Luna Twigs. This is a MTF trans possible femboy and even a lot of the humor of that “notices bulge” on TikTok. A lot of people are openly saying this seems like someone who was a terminally online femboy. So mean, this is something that people are…
Jesse Arm: What is a femboy?
Stu Smith: Yeah, no, so with a MTF trans this is someone who is …
Jesse Arm: Meaning male to female?
Stu Smith: Yes, sorry, so male-to-female trans. That’s someone who believes they are a woman. A “femboy” would be a man who just likes to be excessively feminine, so dressing up. You know, it’s one of those distinctions that I personally eyeroll at, but I think it’s something that, as we try to actually understand the full scope of this terrible crime, we’re going to have to actually dive into the nastiness of these online communities and what they’re pushing.
Kerry Soropoulos: And this comes as certain, many groups are trying to, at the same time as they’re celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death, paint his killer as somebody from the right, of the right, aligned with certain more radical factions of the right. But from what you’ve seen, Stu, including people on the left celebrating his death using these terms, this would appear to be terms associated with the left, including but not exclusive to the Antifa slogans.
Stu Smith: Yeah, absolutely, and I think it’s disingenuous for anyone to push it as anything other than that.
Kerry Soropoulos: Yeah.
Jesse.
Jesse Arm: I just want to say, I appreciate Stu going down some of these ugly dark internet rabbit holes in an investigative capacity so that the rest of us know what the hell is going on.
Stu Smith: Thank you, it’s tough work sometimes.
Kerry Soropoulos: Jesse, you helped to coin the term, Luigism. Does this fit the profile of that same wave of political violence, perhaps best embodied by the killing of the United Healthcare CEO by Luigi Mangione?
Jesse Arm: Well, when I wrote the piece about Luigism for City Journal, I should explain that I was referring to Luigi Mangione, the killer of Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO in Manhattan a few months ago. Yeah, I think that this does fit the profile as well because of the factors that Stu mentioned. I define Luigism as an online meme-driven ideology which says violence is justified in instances where it punishes capitalism, Zionism, or other kind of outward manifestations of success-driven American capitalism. What is Charlie Kirk if not that? I mean Charlie built Turning Point USA into the Republican Party’s most effective ground game operation, so much so that in 2024, the Trump presidential campaign essentially outsourced all of its voter mobilization efforts to him and away from the traditional vehicle for such activities like the Republican National Committee. Charlie was somebody who obviously owned the Libs online plenty, but he did that, in addition to that, he showed up in hostile rooms and was really actively recruiting a new generation of voters and changing the electorate.
So from our perspective, as people who kind of work in and around politics and policy, Charlie is so unique because he’s someone who just a couple of years older than me at 31 years old, rose to the top of the game in so many different areas of specialization, right? Many of us will be over the moon in our professional circles if we succeed tremendously well at fundraising or at communications or at electoral politics. Charlie really dominated in all of those aspects. And beyond just that, built a behemoth of an organization that, like I kind of alluded to earlier, actually went on to far surpass even the Republican party nationally, the Republican National Committee at least, in terms of its importance to the American right.
Kerry Soropoulos: Successful in all aspects of life and built a really beautiful and successful family, and loving family and part of the…
Jesse Arm: Which is of course the most important aspect of life, if you ask him. Family and God.
Kerry Soropoulos: Indeed. Yeah. And the really disgusting part of the reaction from a lot on the left, a lot of people on the left to Charlie Kirk’s death, including making fun of his family. Josh, you’re a spiritual person. This seems like a much deeper malady than the political. Can you just give me a quick, maybe very brief explainer and a take on why? What’s happening? How could anyone celebrate the murdering of a man in front of his wife and children? What’s wrong with these people?
Josh Appel: Yeah, well, I think this goes back to a long legacy of history, you really started by Robespierre during the French Revolution, that terror is virtue. And it is this belief that has been passed down throughout the generations to Marx and Lenin and Mao. And now it has come to the shores of America. And the idea is that I think we have become so polarized in our politics, part of it because of the social media, you know, and that environment that Stu and Jesse are really talking about, but also, I think, a deeper cultural shift that began in the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. We have become so atomized and really inverted the moral underpinnings of good and evil. Just as a cultural example, this might seem silly, but I think it does say a lot. One of the best and most well-known movies last year was Wicked. And the central question in Wicked is, are people born evil or is evil thrust upon them? And I really think that says a lot about where we stand now and that that movie was so well-known and ubiquitous and an Oscar nominee and the idea that evil people are not responsible for their actions, but instead are products of a system. We have turned around and basically outsourced our responsibility to then pin all of our problems on the system that has created the prosperity in the West. And we have taken that for granted for many reasons. But at the end of the day, I think people have been raised with this ideology of taking things for granted, not recognizing how amazing and terrific the West has been overall, despite its imperfections, of course, but as a force against other forms of democracy. As Winston Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government except for the others that have been tried from time to time. And I think we have forgotten. We have forgotten that lesson.
Kerry Soropoulos: Going back a long way here, but yeah.
Thank you. Thank you for that historical context, Josh. And Stu, you’ve done great work chronicling a lot of the reaction to Kirk’s death. Could you just maybe say a few words? Is this a really localized effect or is this quite widespread?
Stu Smith: I think it’s really widespread. You know, when Trump was almost assassinated, you saw a wave of this, but we… It was the…
Kerry Soropoulos: It seems like even to a greater degree than Trump’s assassination attempt.
Stu Smith: Yeah, and the only thing it’s reminiscent of is when Queen Elizabeth died, and this is way more gleeful. I would go so far as to say evil, and it’s widespread in the sense that I’m seeing very young people celebrating it, comedians. You’re having teachers, professors, even someone, a colonel with the Department of War was celebrating it. You had a Canadian teacher force school children to watch Kirk be assassinated on repeat, which I don’t even get me started on that, but it’s just it’s to a level that I’ve never seen before in terms of barbarity and just extreme malice.
Kerry Soropoulos: Yeah. You would have expected to… You know, the attempted assassination of the president, but this is even greater, whether because they succeede… and that is the wrong term, because the assassination was… Yeah.
Jesse Arm: Because it’s unprecedented. I mean, presidents have been shot at. Presidents have been assassinated, for better or worse. But the targeting of a guy, right, a 31-year-old guy with a wife and kids who goes around and sets up a tent on college campuses and challenges anybody, whether it’s a tenured academic professor or a blue-haired sociology major sophomore, to challenge him on the merits of the arguments. And this is a man with admittedly a very large platform, but he invited anybody to come and despite not having a platform, debate him on the merits, toe to toe. And that was what was perceived as so threatening that he had to be eliminated by this individual. And it is worth saying that at the end of the day, an individual killed Charlie Kirk. A culture that, as Josh talked about, I mean, it is bizarre that so much of this kind of left-driven nihilism, envy-soaked rage is elite-driven. That’s very bizarre that there are, in the movie Josh reference is not the only one. I think there’s another one with Leonardo DiCaprio coming out soon that plays with some of these same themes.
You know, we just had, I think one of the acceptance, Hannah Einbinder accepted her award at the Emmys last night and threw out, you know, kind of callously as part of her celebration, “Go Birds, Fuck Ice, and Free Palestine,” as if those were all….
Josh Appel: I want to say, just on that by the way, not only did she say those things, but the running joke throughout the Oscars, the Emmys, sorry, was if you go over 45 seconds, there was a $100,000 donation to the Boys and Girls Club, and if you go over 45 seconds, they’re going to deduct, every second they’re going to deduct $1,000. So her extra 15 seconds that she took to denounce all of her, these political taboos that she doesn’t like, it resulted in $20,000 being taken away from actual children in America.
Jesse Arm: Yeah, and she said she’d make up for it. But I think the point is that that’s why she does it, right? It’s not about a direct positive impact on any people in particular. It’s because she knows that in the attention economy, she will be rewarded for this tomorrow by people who both hate her message and, you know, through the crowds of people who support omni-cause leftism, whatever the issue of the day is.
I don’t know how they feel about the Philadelphia Eagles, but on net, that’s why she’s doing this. And we should be clear-eyed about that and clear-eyed about the fact that far more people have been attending vigils and have been impacted and affected by the death, the murder of Charlie Kirk than watched the Emmys last night.
Stu Smith: And then just a quick note….
Kerry Soropoulos: Indeed. But she’s big, she can defend, you know, she’s not going anywhere, unfortunately. A lot of people who have been caught celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death have been fired. I personally think that is a certainly appropriate reaction to somebody in the workplace celebrating the murder of another human being openly. But it does has raised questions about cancel culture coming from the right this time. Is there any merit to these claims? In five words or less, go around, start with you Stu. What do you think?
Stu Smith: I don’t think it’s remotely cancel culture. I don’t want to work with someone who is celebrating murder, and it violates your standard social media clause at any company.
Josh Appel: Yeah, think that cancel culture is Brett Weinstein getting fired because he didn’t think whites should be kicked off campus or James Damore saying that there are differences between men and women, which are, those are claims that are normal and you could defend. Calling for the death of conservatives who you disagree with or celebrating that is, if you would go into an office and say that, you would be fired on the spot. So I don’t see why just because you said it on social media, now you should be protected.
Jesse Arm: Well, five words or less is tough, but Josh and Stu blew right by that. I’ll try to keep it five sentences. How about five?
Kerry Soropoulos: 20 words or less.
Josh Appel: At least you don’t lose $20,000 for this one.
Jesse Arm: Well, I’m not denying money from the Boys and Girls Club, but I’ll keep it to five sentences or less nonetheless. Yeah, John Podhoretz from Commentary Magazine was talking a little bit about how social media really just kind of unlocks the stream of consciousness in people’s minds. People without discipline to prevent themselves from putting every thought that comes through their mind out into the public ether. Yeah, I mean, if somebody made a horrific comment like that during a staff meeting as a snide remark to one of their colleagues, you call it out and there’d immediately be a social cost for it. But because this stuff goes into the public record and everybody in the world is seeing it immediately, there’s a temptation for people themselves and villains to kind of dig into their heels with the most radical egregious things that could possibly be uttered. It’s not like someone bumps into you on a subway platform and you think, this jerk nearly got me killed. I hope he falls in front of the tracks or something like that. Who among us hasn’t had, you know, in a brief moment, some kind of ugly little thought. But the point is it’s a thought. And these people, when they take to social media platforms and they go and speak to the masses and they create a permission structure by which we say that political people with the wrong beliefs like Charlie Kirk can and should be killed and we should celebrate it, you’re actually moving into action territory. It’s no longer just a thought crime. And yeah, you’re causing serious damage to society and there should be a social cost for it up to and including termination from any private employer who cares about having employees that respect basic human decency.
Kerry Soropoulos: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We’re all in agreement, but you know, it’s easy when you’re right. And so I think that’s a good place to leave this conversation and move on to another heavy topic. The Charlotte stabbing, which happened last month, but has continued to gain steam all around the United States.
The story of somebody being arrested more than a dozen times, being free to roam the streets and kill an innocent woman on a light rail transportation system has really made salient the point that disorder is a choice. It was said by the Free Press last week, other people have said it, disorder is a choice. We’ve been beating that drum for years here at the Manhattan Institute, long before I was even born. Josh, if disorder is a choice, why are our elected officials making it?
Josh Appel: Yeah, it’s a terrible tragedy that this keeps happening when it is so preventable. This man who murdered on the train, he was certainly able to be stopped had he just been put in prison and kept in prison, which he could have been. But I think progressive lawmakers and policymakers and activists have committed themselves to social justice over actual justice. There’s a few reasons why that is. I think a lot of it goes back to the anti-Westernism or anti-Americanism that we spoke about before. And how it’s a very general tendency in human nature to try to outsource responsibility. So you start, again, blaming the system for all the inefficiencies rather than individuals. And so what happens as a result is, again, instead of saying this man is evil and needs to be put behind bars to prevent him from hurting others, you say, well, he’s probably only evil because somebody caused him to be evil. And therefore, if we just are nice and we play nice and kind, then he’ll be fine, he’ll be fixed. But in the effort to create a utopia, we’re really creating this dystopian society where people don’t feel safe on the subway, people are always looking over their shoulder, and it’s a horrible thing.
Kerry Soropoulos: Yeah. It doesn’t even have to be a question of evil, right? The guy was severely mentally ill. He should have been in the institution, if not behind bars for his previous crimes.
Josh Appel: Right, exactly. Right, which is why the involuntary commitment moves by the Trump administration, I think, are very beneficial for society. You can’t have this misplaced sensitivity for someone who is clearly mentally ill and then hold all the people hostage, the regular citizenry, to not be able to live their lives commuting to work.
Kerry Soropoulos: You spoke a little bit…
Jesse Arm: Yeah, not just that, but also to tie this into the broader national environment around this issue and a lot of what’s being talked about in the media, we’re coming up on the 30-day mark of the National Guard’s heavy presence here in Washington, D.C. And I think the response to that from the Democratic black female mayor of Washington, Muriel Bowser, who has kind of made her peace with it and expressed some actual positive enthusiasm about the impact that…
Kerry Soropoulos: Peace and pride.
Jesse Arm: …the National Guard presence in the nation’s capital has had, which is inarguably positive. Crime rates are extremely low over the past month. And I’ve seen a lot of complaints from kind of left-of-center pundits on cable news and on social media who are making the argument that, look, the National Guard has nothing to do. They’re cleaning up some park in Dupont Circle, or they’re just standing around Union Station milling about. They have no capacity to do it. They have no, you know, to arrest people and they aren’t doing so anyway, so what is the point of all this? Well, the point is the results. And that’s kind of the backbone of the work of the Manhattan Institute, right? Their very presence in these environments has a deterrent effect in and of itself. And if they’re walking around beautifying public spaces and cleaning up trash in parks, that’s laudable too, because there’s also a mass amount of social science literature that tells us that when people live in cleaner, more well-kept environments, less crime comes into those environments.
And I think the smart retort that other voices on the left, or guess some of the same voices have been pushing out is that, well, what about all these crime-ridden cities in red states? And I would point out that those are the deep blue cities within red states, but nonetheless, they have a good point. And what’s happening in the coming days, but a National Guard deployment to Memphis, which has a terrible crime problem in a deep red state. And what’s the reaction? Enthusiasm. There’s a lot of excitement and warm feelings about the National Guard being deployed to Memphis, not just from the Republican statewide lawmakers in Tennessee, but also from people in the state. I saw one data point earlier, I think it was a poll that was fielded by one of the local news stations that said some 84 percent responded to the question of what do you think about bringing National Guard troops to Memphis with “bring them on” rather than “keep them out.” So there’s a lot of excitement and enthusiasm about this even in red America. I know I certainly feel that way. So this is a good sign.
Kerry Soropoulos: And it definitely is a good sign. And there’s clear Democratic support for fighting crime. People hate crime. They want to be safe. It’s been proven. As you said in that poll, Jesse, it’s been proven on the ground in places like San Francisco, where progressive prosecutors have been thrown out. On the other side of the equation, inside the offices of prosecutors, there’s an anti-democratic element. Last week in City Journal, Jason Johnson from the Law Enforcement Defense Fund exposed how progressive prosecutors were influenced by this consulting group called the Wren Collective, which offered free consulting services basically to assist progressive prosecutors in defending choices not to prosecute people, messaging, communications help. They allege in the report that the Wren Collective influenced sentencing decisions in these groups. How do we square this very powerful, well-funded group that was, and other groups like them, who are enmeshed in prosecutors’ offices across the country with the democratic choice that people really don’t want crime and they want their streets cleaned up. Very briefly, maybe Josh, you could give us a little thought on this.
Josh Appel: I think that there’s the… You know, again, it goes back to this idea, but there’s also, I guess people tend to take for granted the progress that is made during these, you know, these periods of destruction in our cities, so they, for example, you know, after the terrible years of the seventies in the United, in America, in sorry, New York, we ended up with Rudy Giuliani and eventually Mike Bloomberg. And then sort of moving after that, you get to de Blasio and then de Blasio creates Adams and then Adams creates Mamdani. And so we kind of are going on this roller coaster of, you know, the safety of the conservative years allows for the progressive groups to come back in and say, well, look, the cities are running great. So now try progressivism again.
And I think that I don’t know why we keep falling for the trap. It happened even in Portland. know, they elected a DA who decriminalized drugs and it didn’t work. And now they’re starting to go more towards conservative ideas. And so it just seems like we’re on this never-ending roller coaster where we try the progressive ideas and then eventually we realize it destroys the city. And then we bring back in the conservative ideas. People say, wow, everything is great. Let’s try the progressive ideas again.
Kerry Soropoulos: I want to get you in.
Jesse Arm: Kerry, let me posit something specifically in response to Jason Johnson’s piece on the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, and shadowy ties to a Democratic consulting group. This is not new, okay? And this is a symptomatic problem with Democratic Party politics. It’s why a lot of people from this ideological camp that I actually hope succeeds in the abundance crowd, which says we need to be a little bit more market oriented. We need to be a little bit less burdensome with regulations and burying things in environmental reviews because we believe in the power of government. This is a left-of-center political movement for the most part. Enthusiasm from folks who like government and want it to do more things about making it easier for government to do more in those things. But they’re never going to succeed because there is a massive army of extremely well-funded ideological groups, non-governmental organizations, not-for-profit organizations that exist to muck up the works, that fund people who are intensely ideological, who wouldn’t have marketable skills to take to other private sector jobs, and who work in a kind of permanent extra-governmental bureaucracy that makes it incredibly difficult for the Democratic Party and its multiple arms to respond to the fact that a majority of Democratic voters, for example, don’t want biological men playing in women’s sports. Despite the fact that their own voters agree with that core proposition, the politicians in that party don’t have the permission structure to move away from that position because there is an army of groups heavily embedded into their politics and even more importantly, the funding of those politicians’ campaigns, which says, no, you need to take the maximalist ideological position and we’re not going to give you any wiggle room on that front. It’s a very similar story with crime and it’s why the Democratic Party has moved so far left, farther left than the people who at least used to make up the core of its voters, ethnics who live in urban enclaves and who, it also merits saying, are disproportionately the victims of violent crime in these cities. It’s a lot easier to not get too worked up about crime in urban centers if you’re taking an Uber back to the suburbs at the end of the day.
Josh Appel: That’s… Andrew Cuomo won the support of all of the lower income voters while Zohran Mamdani, who wants to basically abolish the police in favor of mental health professionals, although he doesn’t say defund the police anymore.
Jesse Arm: Anymore being the operative word there.
Josh Appel: Exactly. And all the high-income voters voted for him. And I think a lot of it has to do with, to piggyback on that, that this starts in the world of higher education which is where Zohran Mammdani was made. He is a professional protester turned politician. And those are his followers. Those are the people in his inner circle. And those are the people who are influencing the policy. And it’s no coincidence that a lot of higher education is also dictated by this kind of secret NGO class of professional protesters and professor-activists who are more interested in ideological agendas over statistics, data, actual history, whatever it is. And they kind of are pushing this very anti-establishment vision for us. It is, again, it’s ruining our cities. And like Jesse said, it’s not good, forget the Republican Party, it’s not good for the Democratic Party who needs to be moderate if it wants to get voters.
Jesse Arm: It’s the rise and takeover of kind of global citizens, people who are sort of rootless, not particularly committed to an American project in any unique sense, who don’t believe in anything particularly phenomenal about America, who aren’t American exceptionalists in that sense, people who were maybe raised abroad, went to school abroad, educated abroad or whatever, and just sort of have the same progressive universalist value system that leads them to conclusions of support for things like open borders or enthusiasm for Hamas winning out over a western ally in the middle east. It’s all part of that same ideology. I think that’s an insight…
Josh Appel: Right. And to be American is to be…
Kerry Soropoulos: You just set it up well that on the one hand you have these opposing interests of a kind of permanent class maybe running the show, at least in a lot of prosecutors’ offices and NGOs and a voter base that is often opposed to it. Thinking about how we combat, how we give people back the choice of, give democratic legitimacy back to legal offices, legal authorities, which has really been lost, and giving people the real choice, a say in the policies that they want. How do we do this? One approach has been to raise the salience of issues. That’s why this Iryna Zarutska story has become so big. It’s raising the salience of these crime policies. People are trying to ramp it up even more. Tech CEO, Irish tech CEO out of SF, Eoghan McCabe has announced a campaign to give away $500,000 to paint murals of the Charlotte victim, Iryna Zaruzka, all over the nation to serve as a reminder of the costs of progressive crime policy. What do we make about this approach? Let’s wrap this up, but yes or no, do we like this? Good or bad, is this a positive approach?
Jesse Arm: Who are you expecting a no from on painting murals of Iryna Zarutska? I mean, come on, Kerry, you’re in the host chair and you’re asking like the least divisive questions.
Kerry Soropoulos: I, you know, public art, maybe if it’s done right, that’ll be my hedge. If it’s done poorly, I don’t like…
Jesse Arm: Okay, come on.
Josh Appel: As long as it’s not brutalist art, then…
Kerry Soropoulos: As long as it’s not AI slop, I’ll be okay with it.
Stu Smith: I think it’s a good start. think it’s one tactic, but you need way more education focused avenues to really bring this to the average person. I think it’s beautiful, it’s great, I love the spirit of it, but we need even more to fight this because it feels like a losing battle sometimes.
Jesse Arm: I think I’m good with it even if it is AI slop, honestly. I saw Ted Cruz tweet out a picture of Charlie Kirk and Iryna sitting together in that bus seat and I was moved. I don’t know. I’m a sucker for it even when it is AI slop, so I’m all for it.
Josh Appel: Yeah, think I would rather not be AI. I just like the edifying nature of traditional art. I do think that it also requires not, I think number one, culturally, it is important to have guardrails and to create a culture, again, that has a stigma around celebrating this type of ideas or policies, whatever it is. But it also requires, like Stu said, on the ground policy against a lot of what is happening in higher education.
Kerry Soropoulos: Thanks, Josh. After these two tragic events in the past couple of weeks, I was reminded of a piece that you wrote, Josh, not for City Journal, but for Real Clear Books about C.S. Lewis, whom our audience may be familiar with as the author of children’s books, The Chronicles of Narnia. But you make the case that Lewis was one of the 20th century’s greatest intellectual opponents of nihilism, pessimism, and spiritual death. Josh, maybe that’s your answer, but just as we’re facing these dark times, I want to give everyone the opportunity to maybe make a recommendation. A book, piece of literature, song, or it’s something you like that gives you strength, hope, spiritual fortitude in these dark times. Josh, is C.S. Lewis your answer?
Josh Appel: Yeah, C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, I just find that their myth and folklore mix together with the sort of didactic vision of bravery and courage and strength. I find them very inspiring and uplifting. And I highly recommend anything that each of those two have written.
Stu Smith: I am a fan of Virgil’s The Aeneid. It starts in the middle of things where the Trojans have just lost the war, they’re scattered, and they’re trying to find purpose again. And Aeneas is rallying his men and he gives the advice, “an hour will come with pleasure to relate your sorrow past as benefits of fate.” And I think there’s a powerful lesson there about even in dark, terrible times, you know, this is an opportunity to rise up, be stronger than ever, and to, you know, use it as inspiration even if it’s, you know, a tragedy like losing a titan like Charlie Kirk. You know, what can we do to honor his legacy and, you know, make something positive out of something terrible?
Jesse Arm: Yeah, well, even though I’m not the religious authority on this particular panel, you know, I don’t know if our audience is fully aware of this, but Josh is actually a ordained rabbi. But, you know, I go to an old classic. I go to the book of Psalms, specifically Psalm 23, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff encourage me.” You know, I play the hits. I play the hits, so.
Josh Appel: They’re hits for a reason.
Kerry Soropoulos: I like it, Jesse. It’s not cliche, it’s just good. I’ve always liked, as a whole book, to borrow Josh’s answer For Whom The Bell Tolls by Hemingway. I know he fought on arguably the wrong side of the Spanish Civil War, but I think it’s great story of courage and willingness to fight for your ideals in the face of dark times. And so that is your reading list, listeners, for next time.
Thank you very much for joining us on the City Journal Podcast. Thank you.
Jesse Arm: Start with the book of Psalms by the way when you’re working through that reading list. It’s a good starting point and it’s where Charlie Kirk would have wanted to kick things off.
Josh Appel: That’s true.
Kerry Soropoulos: It’s a good place, you can read them in the order that they came out. And you’ll go, Psalms, Virgil, or no. Yeah, I guess Psalms, Virgil, For Whom the Bell Tolls and then C.S. Lewis. So that’s the order to read it in. It’s called the Great Books, folks. Great Books Canon. Allan Bloom would be proud. Thank you for joining us. So much, Josh, Stu, and Jesse. And thank you, listeners, for joining us on the City Journal Podcast.
Josh Appel: Thank you.
Kerry Soropoulos: Please remember to like, subscribe, and comment. Let us know what you want to hear about. Helps us grow the conversation. Thank you very much, and we’ll see you next time.
Photo by OLIVIER TOURON/AFP via Getty Images
