Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme

Ryan & Grant talk about the fallout from Charlie Kirk's killing, including what we know about the suspect in custody and what this means for current political climate in the US. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Ryan Broderick?

  Courting.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  That's a good start.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  Have you eaten?

• 0:31Ryan Broderick?

  I had a massive, massive sandwich from Bagel Pub. And Doritos and a big Pepsi.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 0:38Ryan Broderick?

  I really just like loaded up today because I was like, I need all the brain power I can muster to read the whole internet.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  I can't think of a better way to be prepared. I'm glad to know I feel like you're like we're both equipped to do this. Intro music.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  I'm Grant Irving. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And sometimes we say that, and I think it's funny. And other days we say that, and I think it's very scary. And today is the latter. Joining me, the host of this show, who has been writing on pure sugar for the past 12 hours, Ryan Broderick. Hi.

• 1:41Ryan Broderick?

  Hello. Hi, how's it going? Thank you for having me on my show. So what you're about to hear is a little less produced than we typically do.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Brian trying to take my job?

• 1:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, but things are moving really quickly and we're just going to try to do our best here. So what you're about to hear is.

• 2:06Ryan Broderick?

  An episode recorded over about two days as we are getting information about the Charlie Kirk shooting. We held it thinking there would probably be a press conference this morning, Friday, September 12th. Now that there's a suspect in custody and we have a bit more information about the suspect and the shooting. So I want to run through that now, just so we have all of the information we know out there and we can kind of talk about it. So, a 22-year-old man named Tyler Robinson was taken into custody on Friday morning. He is believed to be the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk. There's conflicting reports circulating about how he was taken into custody.

• 2:49Ryan Broderick?

  I've heard one report, I read one report where his pastor recognized him and reported him to the FBI. It seems like the main one that the media is going with right now, though, is that Tyler Robinson's dad held him and basically like locked him in a room after Tyler Robinson confessed to him and then called the authorities. So that's, that's how this seems to have gone down. I think the most important thing for us today to talk about are the details that have emerged about what was inscribed on the bullets, the one fired at Kirk and the others that were recovered from the scene. And I want to run through those right now.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  And this info is coming from the press conference?

• 3:35Ryan Broderick?

  This is coming from a press conference that just wrapped in Utah. So-

• 3:38Speaker 02

  So it's confirmed?

• 3:39Ryan Broderick?

  The bullet that killed Charlie Kirk, I can't believe I'm about to say this. This is like breaking my brain and this, and I am someone who's covered this for a long time. The bullet that killed Charlie Kirk read, notices bulge, woo woo, what's this? Which is a meme that started in the furry community. It's one that I use quite often. Up until today, I would have said it's one of my favorite memes. It is like from like furry roleplay.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  God damn it.

• 4:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And then the other bullets that they found at the scene read, hey fascist, catch. Oh Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow Chow, which is an anti fascist sort of gang chant. If you read this, you're gay, LMAO. And the one that said, "Hey fascist, catch", uh, is worth explaining a bit more about because it, it, it had, um, up, right, down, down, down.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  We're cooked.

• 4:45Ryan Broderick?

  So that's the input code to trigger a 500 kilogram bomb in Helldivers 2. So, obviously, there's gonna be a lot of people today speculating about what this means. The other piece of information about the alleged shooter that I think is worth pointing out is that his mom's Facebook had photos of various Halloween costumes he's been. One was clearly a reference, so she describes it as like, "This is my weird son", in like a loving way, "This is my weird son", and he's dressed like a meme, and the picture is him wearing an Adidas tracksuit and squatting. Now, uh, Robert Evans from Behind the Bastards

• 5:27Ryan Broderick?

  said that this was a reference to a like Pepe the Frog meme. It could be. It could also be a reference to an older sort of internet trend, which was called squatting Slavs.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:37Ryan Broderick?

  Where basically like there are blogs that like were collecting photos of like Eastern European guys in tracksuits, like squatting in the park and drinking like hard cider or whatever.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Oh, no, Ryan, he's taking all of your favorite things.

• 5:47Ryan Broderick?

  So, I mean, I do love squatting Slavs.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  You've brought it up to me so many times, I'm so sorry.

• 5:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think it's really funny, it's really funny. I, yeah, and then in 2017, Robinson, according to his mom's Facebook, wore a costume where like, it's like one of those ones where it looks like you're riding someone, but he's riding Donald Trump, but Donald Trump has been painted green to, to, I believe, look like the Pepe the Frog meme that Trump shared in 2021. It was kind of like the big moment where Trump engaged with the Pepe meme for the first time.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Do we think that was a positive Trump's?

• 6:19Ryan Broderick?

  So, let's talk about this because I think, I think there's a couple of ways to look at this.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Uh-huh.

• 6:26Ryan Broderick?

  Up until now, there's been kind of like a running list of, of, of, you know, what kind of person the shooter could be.

• 6:36Ryan Broderick?

  I'm just gonna run through it, just so you understand any sort of misinformation, disinformation.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:41Ryan Broderick?

  So it was either, you know, a leftist, a liberal. There were all kinds of rumors that there was like trans ideology, quote unquote, written on the bullets. That has been kind of struck down now. I'm looking at this, there's, there's nothing. I mean, it could be that there's like an FBI analyst that like thinks memes are inherently trans, whatever. But like, that was one idea. Another idea was that like, it was a fan of Nick Fuentes and the Groyper. So the Groyper's are a Gen Z offshoot of the MAGA movement. They don't particularly like the MAGA movement because it doesn't go far enough for them. And they don't like Charlie Kirk, because Charlie Kirk has always kind of been seen as a center of the road, conservative, which is not true, but that's how they see him.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  And in case there's anyone new here, Nick Fuentes is the one who actively calls for a race war and also was like, recently, relatively recently was like, "We've been focusing so much on hating immigrants and black people, we need to get back to hating women." It is a more nihilistic sect.

• 7:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's, it's closer to the accelerationist rhetoric we've seen from like 764 and the com network. But it's, it's a little more elevated and a little more politically coherent. So the theory that in certain corners of the internet has been that like this was a Groyper hit. Like that, that someone was trying to impress Nick Fuentes.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:03Ryan Broderick?

  And then of course, there's a million conspiracies about the idea that this was like an Israeli, you know, professional assassination. So, the question right now is, what kind of brain rot does this kid have? And based on the reporting that we've been doing over the last year, I feel fairly confident in saying there are like three possibilities here. One, that this is a, this is a Groyper who is trying to impress Nick Fuentes. He is dressing up like Pepe the Frog memes and he is... Trying to cause chaos and it's funny to him.

• 8:42Ryan Broderick?

  Possible, although I'm a little doubtful only because of the use of the word fascist and and oh Bella Chow Bella Chow Chow Chow like that to me feels like a deeper cut than I would expect from like a garden variety Gen Z like griper fan. So then that leads me to, okay, is this a 764 comm network muddy the waters?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Accelerationist.

• 9:08Ryan Broderick?

  Accelerationist attack. As we've talked about in our previous episodes, they have a habit of one inscribing messages on bullets. That's like a big thing that they do. And two, they like to inscribe on those bullets conflicting political ideas.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Just one second on that. If that is a new concept to you, you can go back to our last bonus or episode a month ago. It's the cult is in the title.

• 9:36Ryan Broderick?

  It's one of our cult ones.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Cult Minecraft, I think is in the title.

• 9:39Ryan Broderick?

  The Minecraft cult one.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  If you want to understand more about this new form of terror, those are those are your go to places from us.

• 9:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So that that feels a little more likely than a than a griper. The fact that you have something like, if you read this, you are gay. Next to like a bunch of anti fascist stuff makes me think that this is not like a true believer leftist. Like even like the quote unquote dirtbag left kind of people aren't really talking like that. So, but that is a third possibility here. So those are, those are, I think the three and then I guess like honorable mention, but also probably the most likely is that like this person just doesn't have coherent politics at all. And it's just a is totally brain poisoned by the internet and and doesn't think in a political spectrum that we recognize.

• 10:33Ryan Broderick?

  But the important thing is that for for us is that the internet

• 10:42Ryan Broderick?

  is.

• 10:47Ryan Broderick?

  How would I describe this? This was an extremely online attack. This was, this was, this was going after an influencer and killing that influencer with literal memes inscribed on bullets. And as we've said in previous episodes about, you know, this kind of terrorism, like the motive almost never satisfies you. Like if we find a manifesto that this kid has written, it's not going to be satisfying. His beliefs are not going to be satisfying. It's not going to give the, you know, any political side any benefit to understand it more. I've already seen this morning, right wingers talking about how he was, this kid was radicalized

• 11:31Ryan Broderick?

  in college and how we need to shut down colleges, which are bastions of liberal speech. Like every side is going to use this and I'm not both sizing this. I'm just explaining that like, it doesn't really matter because this will work for, you know, in whatever way you want. Like Trump will look at this, Trump's team will look at this and say, this kid was brainwashed by trans people on the internet to talk in memes, even though they've spent the last 15 years grooming 4chan users to, you know, wage cyber war for them. Like this is, it won't matter. And the, I mean, the FBI, if, if, if the report yesterday about the trans ideology, you know, is anything that go off of, already see this stuff as inherently leftist and liberal.

• 12:16Ryan Broderick?

  They see the internet, you know, language as the language of blue sky. So it doesn't really matter.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  I'm very worried about like, this, like, like, I, I can fully foresee a world where we're screaming into a void that this gobbledygook has been horribly misinterpreted, sometimes on purpose, sometimes just because like, it's there to just stir up shit. And like, this is used to justify a lot of horrible, atrocious attack.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't, wouldn't go as far as shutting down all colleges, but like, I, I, I like this.

• 12:58Ryan Broderick?

  You wanna shut down all colleges to stop people? Yeah, I think we just gotta, gotta not give them laptops anymore.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Uh, that's. I, I do think, I'm, I'm getting closer and closer each day to thinking we should just not give them laptops anymore. But, but I do.

• 13:11Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, so, okay, wait, I wanna, I wanna hit that for, real quick, because I was thinking about this, like, I do, I do wonder if the way we feel about this is the way like baby boomers felt about, like, domestic terrorism in the sixties and seventies that was referencing pop culture, which there was plenty of. Like, I, I, I sort of think it has always operated this way because like terrorism is inherently a media project. It's inherently about capturing attention. And so hijacking popular culture

• 13:55Ryan Broderick?

  is, is part of it. Like, the most effective terror campaigns of, of the twenty first, of the twentieth and the twenty first century have an element of that, I think.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's jihadist rap songs on YouTube.

• 14:07Ryan Broderick?

  I mean ISIS, the, the, we, I, I had a playlist for a long time of, of the failed SoundCloud rappers that joined ISIS. There was a reason they had to become terrorists, like, they were not good, but like.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Was that just your workout music?

• 14:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, just my work, yeah. Well, I, I was, I was just, you know, I, I love, I love culture. Um, no, I just, there's, there's always this contingent. I mean, you know, you can go and download a, a library of all of the video games that Osama bin Laden had on his Nintendo DS if you want. Like, like, there's always this sort of thing tied, uh, tied to this stuff.

• 14:42Ryan Broderick?

  But, I, I, as, as, as online as this all is and as jarring as it is for me to see, I do wanna use this space real quick and really loudly to say that like, the internet did not, the internet obviously produced.

• 15:02Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, the sort of like framing of this, you know, like to target an influencer in front of an audience surrounded by smartphones with bullets that had memes written on them, allegedly, reportedly, that is obviously staged for the internet. But I don't think, like, you could just take this and you could just do it in a different time period, in a different context, and it would work probably the same way. Like, you know, an anarchist waiting to eat a sandwich and then killing Franz Ferdinand in a busy street. It's not so different.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Manson family.

• 15:41Ryan Broderick?

  Right, the Manson family sneaking into people's homes, like, and using Helter Skelter, a Beatles song, as like, you know, their idea.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  This is a really good point.

• 15:50Ryan Broderick?

  These, these things are not because of the internet, but they are obviously shaped by the media landscape of the time, and that media landscape creates like a very specific set of incentives and ways to hijack attention.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  And of course, they're always going to sound like the most deranged version of that. Because, because they're taking deranged action, so it's like, it's seeped in this thing that you're like, whoa, this is way too much of this thing, because like, of course, the thought pattern isn't normal if you're like, this is the action I want to take. Like, it's just always going to seem like the most exaggerated form.

• 16:33Ryan Broderick?

  Right. So, yeah, so I think, like, there's going to be a lot of people over the weekend, you know, saying that, like, I have already read a bunch of, like, people on Blue Sky being like, the media is just not ready to handle Groypers. And it's like, yeah, that's true. And I say that on the show all the time, like, the, the- The tone that you have to sort of take to deal with this stuff is not meant for television. Like a guy in a suit on CNN being like, "The notices bulge meme", which is like from like, you know, furry erotic roleplay. Like, they're not gonna be able to handle this. But...

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Unless... No, I don't want you that busy.

• 17:15Ryan Broderick?

  Bring me on, yeah, sure. Bring me on air. I'm happy to describe all of these memes in detail and why they're used and how they're used. And, and, and also use that opportunity to, to apologize for using that meme in like so much of my work. Uh, cuz I think it's one, it was one of my favorites I've been told today. But at the same time, like, these, these memes did not like influence this kid. This kid, uh, I say kid cuz I'm 35 years old, but this, this 22-year-old picked Charlie Kirk for a reason. Reasons that we'll maybe eventually learn, and maybe they're coherent. Luigi Mangione's manifesto and his political beliefs are totally off the walls nuts. But he did pick a target that made sense, right? So it's possible that, that, that there's something similar here.

• 17:59Ryan Broderick?

  But it's also equally possible that he just picked the, uh, very, very internet famous person coming to his local community.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Totally. Uh, and, and I mean also,

• 18:10Speaker 02

  the one of, the, the guy there that has like used the internet probably the best of that ilk.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Like he's a, like, like Charlie Kirk was the one who was able to like cross-pollinate to everyone and to get in everyone's feeds in a way that like, like Laura Loomer's too crazy that I don't see her shit frequently. Like Charlie Kirk had like, uh, an ability to like trickle into everyone's different content feeds. Like if, if you were that online, like, he's the one who, who you would be confronted with constantly.

• 18:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, it's no different than, you know, 30 years ago attacking Howard Stern.

• 18:56Ryan Broderick?

  Like, like

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Did that happen?

• 18:58Ryan Broderick?

  No, but I mean, I'm just saying like, I mean, there were absolute threats on his life during his like free speech era, you know, sort of a culture has changed so vastly, but like conservatives hated him. Liberals did too, but like it is equally possible that this was just like a high value target. But the nature of the memes that were chosen, which I don't want to read too much into, make me think that like there was some thought put into this. And then we loop back into the 764 aspect of it all, which is like, is this a legit person who has anti fascist or leftist beliefs? Or is this a person who wants to pretend like they do to cause a complete, you know, dissolution of of of of society?

• 19:43Ryan Broderick?

  We might find out, we might not find out. There's going to be a lot of information trickling out.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, we might find out what was what was really happening behind the scenes, but the door is certainly open for this to be co-opted.

• 19:59Ryan Broderick?

  I don't have the door open. I think it just will be.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's not a good case scenario. What this might be, but but the phrase always use a crisis is coming to mind.

• 20:10Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, this is a gift. This is a massive gift.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  The mom's Facebook post that is going around. Or she's like, my, my kids are weird. You know, look at their Halloween costumes.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  I don't know. That got to me like.

• 20:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's exactly what my mom would say. It's what exactly what my mom has said. She helped me make a Yu-Gi-Oh costume when I was in in high school and I was not doing it because I liked Yu-Gi-Oh. I did it because it's like Yu-Gi-Oh was funny at that point. Yeah, no, I the I don't want to, you know, dig too deep into into the shooter's life because we just don't know much yet, but like by all accounts, fairly standard American family in Utah. There's photos of him learning how to shoot guns. I think his dad was a veteran or had some sort of connection to the military. The mom seems like just a normal mom.

• 21:03Ryan Broderick?

  And they don't have any sort of, I guess, sense of what was happening on that kid's computer or phone. Or in his mind, which is something we've come back to a lot over these episodes.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, exactly. We've talked a lot about like. What, you know, uh,

• 21:25Speaker 02

  in the, in the weapons episode, we did that we, that we're gonna release, uh, like you, you, you, you, you brought this up about like, first, it's the, the, the family that fails and it's a school, etc. Is like, is like the theme that runs through there. And I like, I see that post and I think like,

• 21:45Speaker 02

  is a parent supposed to understand their kid better than like, my kids have weird Halloween costumes? Like, is that like, really?

• 21:54Speaker 02

  The, the, I mean, like, obviously, there's like way more going on, but like, I don't look at that and think like, how did she not understand what, you know, what her son's culture is? Like, it's just so hard. It's just such a hard, like, parents are supposed to only know one aspect of their kids and not understand their culture.

• 22:14Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I mean, let's put it this way.

• 22:18Ryan Broderick?

  Like, understanding your kid's culture, like, what they're looking on the internet is not gonna stop this. Like, it's, I, I just, I don't think, I don't think that matters, actually. Like, I don't think that there's a moment where you'd be like, uh-oh. I mean, I mean, maybe. But then we get into this, like, we get into this, like, very strange world where it's like, we don't know the political beliefs of the family. If you want to say that if your kid espouses anything inherently conservative in any way, you should do something about it, but then I'm like, okay, well, what would you do about it?

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:56Ryan Broderick?

  Like, i-if your kid is like, thinking that Pepe the Frog memes are funny and he's seventeen or eighteen years old, like, what are you gonna do about it? Even if you understood. I think it's much easier and actually much more, like, a much better use of your time to be like, okay, is my kid? Saying weird things about minorities or, uh, you know, gay people, trans people. But then we get into the thing of like, women, especially women. But it's like, if, if we do that, then it's like, okay, well, then there's like a massive chunk, like 50% possibly of the country that does not give a shit about that. So, okay, like if you, if you're listening to this and you have a teenage son, good luck. But like-

• 23:35Speaker 02

  You're Jordan Peterson.

• 23:37Ryan Broderick?

  No, but like, no, like, good luck because like, we have, we have created a culture, both online and in our politics, that is grooming your son actively to help, like, start a race war. That is the reality of America in 2025. The people in charge of our government and the people who run the largest platforms on the internet, either actively want your son to take up arms and, and go and hurt people, or they don't care that that's happening. They don't care that your son might be in a Discord server with militia members, you know, playing video games and talking about like, critical race theory.

• 24:22Ryan Broderick?

  Like, they, they don't care or they want it to happen. So, I don't know what you do with that. Good luck, is why, is what I would say, because like, there's no off switch there. And it gets even weirder and even messier the longer we live in this world. You're not gonna understand popular culture online as fast as your teenager is. And now that we're so deep into this world, it is funny to ironically talk like Trump, ironically talk like a 4chan user, ironically talk like an incel. So, there's no way for you to even know if your kid really thinks that way, until they grab a weapon. So, I don't know. Uh, the, the FBI can't handle this? They can't handle anything. They waited for someone to, to, to call them in.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  I, I was thinking that, as you said, that I'm like, the parents had a good enough relationship with their kid to be able to-

• 25:11Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah.

• 25:13Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, the kid, the kid confessed. And then that's how we know any of this. So, allegedly, that's how we know any of this. So, I don't have a lot of advice at this point because like, you, i- i- it's, it's like, "Oh, I live in a casino and I wanna save money." I don't know, man. You live in a casino. "Oh, I, I, I don't want my son to be radicalized." Well, you live in a radicalization engine.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

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• 26:34Speaker 02

  So when you first got the alert that Charlie Kirk was shot, what was your reaction? And then when we saw that the video was fucking everywhere, what was your response? Were you thinking about the platform failures? The response that we were us being able to see it would cause? Or were you thinking about something more personal?

• 26:56Ryan Broderick?

  I think my major first thought was

• 27:03Ryan Broderick?

  politically, which would be more devastating for him to survive or for him to not survive? Everything that happens now in America, unfortunately for me, is filtered through the lens of like, does this help the Trump administration consolidate more power? Or does it stop them from doing that? And neither outcome would have been good. But I spent a lot of the afternoon yesterday wondering that.

• 27:37Ryan Broderick?

  I also watched the video. I watched first the faraway video, and then I unfortunately watched the close up.

• 27:45Ryan Broderick?

  Which probably one of the worst videos I've I've seen in a long time. Um, I've seen a lot of bad videos, but I really didn't like it. I didn't like it. But from there, I basically just moved to start saving as much as I could. The way that the internet works now is things happen so quickly that it gets lost in the shuffle. And a lot of times when those things get lost, they still influence narratives and public understanding later.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:16Ryan Broderick?

  So I was like, okay, like, let's just start saving everything that could be important later. And then I um, set the whole garbage day team on it. So there's about five of us yesterday, just dropping stuff into Discord and trying to track how it was moving.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we're going to be talking a lot about the the immediate reaction and and the ramifications we might see and how all gas this reaction has been compared to other moments.

• 28:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  You wrote today that the reaction on the right is like nothing you've ever seen before. Can you describe what is unique about this? And maybe a good comparison point is the Trump shooting?

• 29:04Ryan Broderick?

  If Trump had died, that would be like, like unthinkable, like the the level of violent rhetoric if Trump had died, we edged, maybe. At the same time, like,

• 29:18Ryan Broderick?

  a lot of what I've read about political assassinations, like,

• 29:22Ryan Broderick?

  like if it's a leader or like a candidate, like it actually kind of likes oftentimes squelches any support, like it makes people uncomfortable. But to answer your question, no, I've not seen anything like this before. This is pretty unique. Charlie Kirk is a very unique figure within the right, and it's it's been frustrating to watch a lot of the mainstream media try to write about him. I mean, we've used him on Panic World quite often, because he was the most professional of Trump's digital foot soldiers, and he was the most dutiful, you know, he was very good at

• 29:58Ryan Broderick?

  Creating the narrative that he was told to create, or like stumbling across it himself and leading the pack, he was, he was the tip of the spear. He was probably next in line to be groomed for like a, a presidential run. His thing was taking older conservatism, like the kind of like stodgy, boring nineties conservatism, and figuring out ways to repackage it for the internet without sounding like a psychotic neo-Nazi. That was his real, um, power. And he was very palatable. Like he looked the part, you know, he was extremely religious, he had a family, he didn't have the baggage of someone like Benny Johnson or, or Steve Bannon.

• 30:41Ryan Broderick?

  He could be relied upon, unlike someone like Jack Posobiec, who like has gone off the rails several times and like, can't, you can't really count on him. So he, this was like the most dependable, most moderate guy of the Trumpist movement. And for him to be killed so violently and so publicly, I think has sent a real shock across this whole ecosystem. I, I kind of take it them at their word that they're freaked out because i- if someone could kill Charlie Kirk for doing what they think is the most lukewarm version of their movement, they're all in the crosshairs.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's, I, I was thinking about that too, that weeks ago, children were murdered in a, in a, in a Christian school, which certainly gave the right fodder for a narrative that, that we were seeing them start to like gear up at, to, to use. But the reaction was not this, and the difference is, is that the people in power, th- this is like a threat to them directly.

• 31:45Ryan Broderick?

  This is, this is very threatening. This is very, very threatening. I was a little on the fence about this, and then I kind of convinced myself that I agree with my own idea, which was that I compared it to nine 11. And we've talked about nine 11 often on this show. It sort of haunts the show, which makes sense to show about mass hysteria, but the perfection of nine 11 as a media object.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:09Ryan Broderick?

  An event like calculated specifically to take over airwaves, linear television.

• 32:18Ryan Broderick?

  This is that for social media. So the dynamics are flipped. So, you know, we've had this thought that mass violence and social media go really well together, but social media is evolving and it's changing. And in a post-COVID social media landscape, all of the attention is directed towards individuals. What this attack has, I think, revealed is that instead of using terrorism to attack a large population, a school, a shopping mall, a concert, if you can localize political

• 32:58Ryan Broderick?

  violence on the most influential figure with the largest possible audience, you then turn that audience, as we saw in Utah, into vectors for sharing that violence. You know, Christchurch, the guy's live streaming it himself, right? This is the inverse. And I think that's why it's so effective, because you have an entire crowd of phones that were already filming him. And so there is no chance that someone didn't catch the exact moment the bullet hits him. And that is, that has unnerved me by how, I am someone who writes about the internet every day and thinks

• 33:42Ryan Broderick?

  about the internet every day and have been doing it for 15 years. And I am unnerved by how effectively this killing has hijacked the shape of the internet in ways that I didn't understand until I was literally realizing that I am, I am part of it. Now, everyone is part of it. The algorithm unthinkingly started promoting it, like it's, it weaponized the whole internet. I've been struggling for the last 24 hours to really wrap my head around what that means going forward, because that's scary, that someone, someone we don't know anything about, has been able to figure out how to do that. And I don't want to give them too much credit, but it's undeniable

• 34:23Ryan Broderick?

  to me that it was constructed this way. Even if it wasn't conscious from the shooter, like it was someone who 200 yards out waited for the exact moment for him to be on stage to do it. That's...

• 34:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, highly effective.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  We've been talking a lot recently about the the school mass casualty obsessed psych little psychos online. But that happens in a very specific corner of the internet and is mostly shielded from the rest of us. They have to go search that out. This is unavoidable.

• 35:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, there's there's been a few interesting debates within American media about how to deal with mass shootings. One of them is, do we name the shooter, which in most countries, they don't. Like, Canada doesn't do it, the UK doesn't. But that was one debate and American media will never have a consensus because of the First Amendment. And you just sort of have to get used to that as an American, like, fine. Uh, garbage day, for instance, like if we don't have to name the shooter, we won't. And I think we extend the same rule to panic world where like, unless we absolutely have to, we don't. The other debate that has been kicking around forever.

• 35:44Ryan Broderick?

  You know, how much do you show from a mass casualty event? Like, do, like, if you had photos from inside of Sandy Hook, would you publish them? And when I was younger, I got in a fight with an editor, actually, because I wanted to publish the photos of the little boy who washed ashore, trying to cross the Mediterranean, the refugee. And some newspapers around the world did publish them and I, I was angry, I was an angry young journalist. And I said, everyone on earth should like stare at this and see what this looks like. And there's all kinds of debates around, like, you know, does it desensitize people? Is it, is it sensational? You know, you can go around and around. The point is, the reason I bring it up.

• 36:28Ryan Broderick?

  The Charlie Kirk attack

• 36:32Ryan Broderick?

  has circumnavigated that entire debate.

• 36:37Ryan Broderick?

  And has made very public and very visible.

• 36:42Ryan Broderick?

  A deep shame and and a deep terror at the heart of modern America. It it has it has forced us all in a way to be complicit and hijacked. Algorithms to mindlessly promote footage of political violence of of a man being shot to death. So it has yet it has pulled that imagery out of people's minds and showed it to them. And and now we are seeing the sort of like intense, intense emotional reaction to that. It is it is hard to really hit like a true taboo in modern America. And this killer did it by the way he constructed the attack.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Can you just break down for people?

• 37:23Speaker 02

  Why the algorithm works in a way that makes this kind of impossible to not be spammed everyone? I I tested this out, by the way, I went on my I I've a. I have sports accounts where I try to only look at things that I want to see. And then sometimes I run tests to see if I am logged into the places where I'm supposed to just see horror movies and like equals propaganda. Am I confronted with the real world and like this is impossible to keep out?

• 37:50Ryan Broderick?

  If you made a hierarchy of platforms excluding porn sites of like how unfiltered they were. Obviously, like X will be at the top. And then beneath that would be Reddit, which is pretty definitely downstream of X. It is sort of just like aggregating what's on X. And then you get, you know, Instagram and TikTok, which are a lot more cleaned up. Facebook is sometimes cleaned up and also sometimes just like a complete rat's nest. It really depends on like the day. So what that means is like, if everyone is uploading. The video to X. Or watching the video on X that starts triggering X's algorithm, which starts promoting it. Most people don't know that they have autoplaying video just turned on by default. So the video is now autoplaying in everyone's feeds.

• 38:35Ryan Broderick?

  They're engaging with it, even if they don't want to engage with it within causes it to go more and more viral, which then causes it to get spread to subreddits. Which from there, you know, gets. Moved over to TikTok and Instagram. If those filters don't knock it down, you might end up just seeing conversation about it, which then people want to know what people are talking about. So then they go back to X to try to find the original video and it creates this, what we saw yesterday, this, this really, really extreme loop where it's just promoting horrible, horrible content all day. And the reason why it was so inescapable was because also these video platforms over time have grown to incentivize the sharing of trends or individuals who operate like trends, which is why, what I would define an influencer in 2025 as.

• 39:19Ryan Broderick?

  It's a person who can create trending content by the very nature of themselves. So it's like very, it's very useful for a platform. So an influencer like Charlie Kirk, like I get Charlie Kirk content all the time. And I don't follow him. So the machine is just seeing a video involving a popular influencer is creating discussion. I should show this video to more users because the, the, the algorithm can't determine whether or not it, it's a, it's a, it's a video of a death.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Sure. Okay. Uh, I think that brings us to how this has been processed and discussed. And I think we should hit on the doxing campaigns and the bot videos. But um, maybe before we get to this sort of movement, um, can you just describe what the white, what the White House released? I think, I think, I think we should start with Trump and then work our way down.

• 40:18Ryan Broderick?

  So Trump posted a bunch about Charlie Kirk on Truth Social. He was, he very well might have been actually the, the person to confirm Charlie Kirk's death first, which is strange. I, I hadn't, I couldn't see any other sources besides Trump's Truth Social at one point yesterday. He then put out a video with a bunch of, you know, normal Trump boilerplate stuff. 20 seconds into that video though, Trump's hands basically move in a way that's like totally independent of the rest of Trump's body. Like it doesn't look, it doesn't make sense visually. A lot of people started to say he was using an AI avatar and this is tied together with uh, rumors that he suffered a stroke.

• 41:02Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, there's now photos like emerging from the nine 11 memorial this morning of him like, yeah, drooping. He's drooping hard. Um.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  To be fair, lots of people, if you just, if people have the raw access to this footage, you could get me making a face that looks like I am having a stroke mid motion.

• 41:20Ryan Broderick?

  Different, different episode for us. But if you, if you look at the footage though, of in the Charlie Kirk video that Trump put out, most likely, the best explanation I've read is that they tried to splice two takes together and they used what's called a morph edit, like a morphing edit. So instead of just being like a hard cut, like you would see on YouTube, it's trying to like morph the shape of two takes together. And then it looks like to clean it up, they upscaled it with AI, which isn't the same as generating a video with AI. It's asking the AI to clean it up by adding information to the video.

• 42:01Ryan Broderick?

  So the result looks totally nuts. It does, I mean, it just looks awful. And I can't believe they put it out, but I don't think anyone's, you know, awake at the wheel over there.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  How has that video helped the matter?

• 42:14Ryan Broderick?

  It really, if anything, is just sort of adding to the general paranoia and unreality of the web at the moment. No one really believes anything that's going on. I've seen all kinds of breakdowns of the Charlie Kirk shooting video, you know, people asking like why his ring changes fingers at a certain point. He'd like to take it off and play with it as he answered questions, I guess. There's all kinds of conspiracy theories about, you know, the shooter escaping on a private jet and, you know, people in the crowd who look suspicious and trying to identify them. There's a massive information vacuum. Users are just really spinning out of control with all of this stuff. And all, almost every single

• 42:58Ryan Broderick?

  conspiracy theory about this that I've seen ends up like leading back to something really antisemitic.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  I want to get into the actions and the call for actions that, that people are taking. But I think.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  The like boilerplate conversation of what is happening is the first things I was seeing were people who hated or disliked Charlie Kirk reposting him quoting saying that for the second amendment deaths are just gonna happen, we just gotta get over it. I was seeing that go around a lot. And then, of course, the other recurring character who comes up as much as Charlie Kirk had, Dave Portnoy tweeted last night, absolutely disgusting, disturbing video from Charlie Kirk shooting today, hoping for the best for him and his family. Anybody who is happy about this is a disgusting human, to which somebody replied

• 43:53Speaker 02

  with a, this is so 2025, a pop crave quote, when Portnoy hoped that Greta Thunberg would get hit by a missile while delivering aid. Those are the most normal faction of conversation that people are having. Would you agree?

• 44:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't care. I think all that shit is just like, I don't know, I, it's all very cute and like, doesn't matter. It's like very, one time I had this like line in a garbage day post and Adam was looking it over and he's like, feels a little daily show, doesn't it? And I was like, oh, and then I, we deleted, we removed it. And like, that's what I think every time someone's like, oh, actually, you said that you want to Greg Thunberg to die. And it's like, yep, they probably did. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. But if it feels good, you know, do it. If you want to get

• 44:54Ryan Broderick?

  in a fight with Dave Portnoy right now, go for it. But I don't, I don't know. These people don't care. And I'm not actually even included Dave Portnoy in this. He's like small potatoes anyways. But I, the, the, these people want to kill.

• 45:13Ryan Broderick?

  Everyone like they've made it really clear that the Jesse Waters on Fox News is like, we're gonna kill you like everyone, all these people want to kill you.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  That's kind of, that's, that's kind of why I wanted to set it up to say like, this is like, this is the noise, but there's, there is a part that you have been like beyond the noise, the signal that you're like, this is not good. This is different and this is bad.

• 45:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, I've been following all summer as these guys have been trying to create a narrative that can get through the noise, you know, cut through the noise of the Epstein investigation. Like, that's the big existential risk to the movement.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  And by these guys, you mean the Jesse Waters, the?

• 45:58Ryan Broderick?

  The MAGA sphere, the, the, the, these influencers, these pundits, these commentators, these right wingers. They are trying to figure out a way to salvage the movement because the, the Epstein stuff is real and it is serious and they're not really equipped to handle it. And they're, they've been rope-a-doped all summer and it's like, that's why they're talking about Sydney Sweeney's jeans and they're talking about Cracker Barrel and they're talking about all kinds of stuff, right? And last week, they tried to elevate this local news story in North Carolina about a Ukrainian refugee being stabbed to death on, uh, public transportation by a black man and turned that into a racial, you know, a, a, a race war.

• 46:40Ryan Broderick?

  And it wasn't probably going to work. Uh, it's like a little too localized, a little too odd. Um, but they really were pushing it. In fact, Charlie Kirk's final posts on X were all about this. They have been desperate for some kind of larger cause that they can rally behind because we talk about this on the show a lot and so our listeners might be familiar with it, but if you're new to the show, then you might not be familiar with it. These people don't like each other. They really hate each other. They hate each other because they're competing for the same dark money and the same ad revenue and the same attention from the president. And they, they all want to be king shit and they all hate each other. Laura Loomer has posted many times about how she wants Charlie Kirk to die. She's deleting all of them right now.

• 47:23Ryan Broderick?

  Nick Fuentes has spent his entire career, he, he developed his entire career as a response to Charlie Kirk and has routinely said he thinks that he should die. And now he's like crying on a stream about it. This is. A perfect way to align and a perfect thing to align around because it gives the blood and soil white nationalists direct access to like violent pretext, which is what they want. They want to go into the streets and they want to hurt people. It also gives the sort of more cut and dry conservatives a lofty cause, a sort of like a noble, a noble path. So like all these people can now say, this is for Charlie. And that is

• 48:04Ryan Broderick?

  very, very, very scary because the only thing that's really stopping.

• 48:11Ryan Broderick?

  I don't, I don't want to like overstate what, you know, what we're, what we're looking at here, but like

• 48:19Ryan Broderick?

  a unified right wing and far right movement with paramilitary support and a majority government is an extremely frightening thing to consider.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Uh, I think that, I think that lays out where we are. I want to, I want to kind of shift gears and talk about the post that, that melted your brain that then subsequently melted my brain, but that's like a, it's connected, but it, but it is a separate conversation unless you have something else you wanted to say here for the sort of like summary set the stage for where we might be going section.

• 48:53Ryan Broderick?

  You're talking about my man elder Tik Tok, elder Tik Tok 11?

• 48:56Speaker 02

  I want to talk about elder Tik Tok after getting a glass of water.

• 49:00Ryan Broderick?

  I want to tease it then with a great blue sky post I saw right before according today, which reads, "The future is watching a Mormon influencer doing self-promotion, following an assassination through your phone screen until you are the Mormon influencer filming." So yeah, uh, let's, let's go to break.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  The rest of this is going to be on Patreon, but Patreon is free this month. So, or it's essentially free. It's 50 cents. So.

• 49:27Ryan Broderick?

  I think we should just run this on the feed.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Okay. We're running this on the feed. So.

• 49:31Ryan Broderick?

  You can keep that part in if you want.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  You should still go to patreon.com/panicworld. It's free this month and, uh, give us $5 eventually.

• 49:37Ryan Broderick?

  But like, let's, let's go to break and give people a second to breathe. Yeah.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Bye guys. See you in a second.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  That was big picture, big ramifications.

• 49:50Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  Big concerns, but there was an event that already happened that brought us into a different, a different era. I think you are right. You wrote, I like this quote, so I wanted to read it.

• 50:07Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. You wrote, "A very dark day has finally arrived." When I read that line, I thought, Ryan, I watched January 6th. I think you're being a little bit dramatic. And then I watched the video you were referring to, and then I agreed with you that a different dark day has arrived. I pulled it from, from the TikTok, so, so we can, I can play it for us and we can stop it and talk about it, or I can just, or we can just describe it. Your call.

• 50:39Ryan Broderick?

  You don't need to play it because it's burned into my brain forever now. I could write a book. I could maybe a series of books about it. I think it might be the most important document of the modern world I've ever seen.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  This is an odd way to be saying that the podcast and the newsletter are over. Ryan is going to be busy writing a play solely about this video for the rest of his life.

• 51:07Ryan Broderick?

  It is the most incisive portrait of the rot at the heart of America that I, I could imagine. It is effectively a Mormon influencer screaming at panicked children running from gun violence to pray to Jesus Christ. And then he signs off by telling people to subscribe to his TikTok channel. It would be like almost too much to include in like, like a Paul Verhoeven film. It would be too much to like, put in like Robocop. It's the closest thing to Starship Troopers I've ever seen.

• 51:52Ryan Broderick?

  It's in real life.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  You're so right.

• 51:54Ryan Broderick?

  It's mind blowing. It's breaking my brain.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  If there was like a Netflix action movie where a content creator decided to go live during mass hysteria, you'd be like, this is lazy and gross. But that is literally what happened. Like moments after the, the shooting, he's yelling,

• 52:16Speaker 05

  Is your boy on TikTok? There was just a gunshot. Shots fired, shots fired here in Utah.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  He, he's stopping to pose while people are running by him live streaming when like, he doesn't know that only one shot's going to be fired. Like to, to, to think in this moment of, of ultimate reality, I'm going to go enter the, the, the unreal space is just wild.

• 52:43Speaker 05

  Hey, make sure you go to church on Sunday. Read the book of Mormon. This is not a drill. Make sure you subscribe to Elder TikTok on Instagram.

• 52:50Ryan Broderick?

  It's the closest I've ever seen in a film to this. It is probably like, there's a scene in a very underrated film called Gamer, uh, starring Gerard Butler, where human beings like play as video game characters in real life for people who are remotely operating them.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 53:14Ryan Broderick?

  There's like a vicious shootout, like a horrible shootout happening at like a, a Sims house full of real people being operated as video game characters. And they're all like dancing as like the shooting is happening and they like can't react to it because like their players are like letting them get killed. Anyways, go watch Gamer. It's great.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  It's a 29 around tomatoes. Oh yeah.

• 53:39Ryan Broderick?

  You, you've never seen Gamer? How can you produce this podcast and never see Gamer? You gotta see Gamer. It's amazing. History will be kind to Gamer. Um, trust me.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  This could be the next movie we do, Hari.

• 53:51Ryan Broderick?

  So all that said, Elder TikTok's video is unspeakable. I mean, the level of egotism and uh, it's a, it's disgusting. It's like a disgusting video, but it's, it's worse than that. It's like,

• 54:11Ryan Broderick?

  It's so myopic in this like very specific way, just peak internet influencer brain.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  To think that the screen is realer than reality in the worst moment. It's like you view everything from the lens of content and streams to a place where you have forgotten that you are a living, breathing human. Like, we've all experienced this on like the smallest end of the spectrum where like you go out somewhere and somebody's only out to take pictures of food, or they're, they're like not actually dancing, they're just posing for the picture. And you're like, you were actually in real, you're mimicking having a real life for the image. But imagine do that when you're like, you just watched a man die and you're like, life might be at risk.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  It's a, what, what is different about this than the, the, the January 6th filming?

• 55:13Ryan Broderick?

  Um, if people were sort of like doing selfie videos of themselves as Nancy Pelosi like hung from a gallows in the background, yeah, like then you could be like, okay, this is similar. But this is a man who effectively just died in front of an entire audience.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:38Ryan Broderick?

  And I mean, I don't want to get too deep into like describing the video, but like, he very visibly died.

• 55:47Ryan Broderick?

  And this guy is like, this is my shot for getting a lot of TikTok followers. And this guy is not someone storming the Capitol. This is not someone who's like come down to DC for a political purpose. This is like a nor, ostensibly normal person who just watched a man's head almost come off his body and was like, this is my opportunity to go viral on TikTok. The level of like sociopathic, just complete disregard for human life you have to have to be, to, to be throwing up like, I mean, he, he like does like a peace sign at the camera. He's like, it's your boy elder TikTok, you know, coming live from.

• 56:34Ryan Broderick?

  A stage covered in blood. It's unthinkable. I, cause I, I actually have like more, I have more patience for the January 6 people. They believed in something. This is, this is, this is like, there's nothing here. This is, this is the void.

• 56:51Speaker 02

  Ryan, how can you say that? He tells people to go to church and read the Book of Mormon. So.

• 56:56Ryan Broderick?

  This guy,

• 56:59Ryan Broderick?

  like, can't be part of society anymore. Like, I, and if this guy is reflective of American society, like, I can't be part of society. I have to go to the, I have to get away. Like, if this is what 20 years of social media has done to, like, people's brains, like, I, I have to get out. I have to go. I gotta go to the woods.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  I think that is the right conclusion.

• 57:19Ryan Broderick?

  That's the one I have.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Like, it, it's shocking to see, but it's not surprising.

• 57:24Ryan Broderick?

  The guy that does a apology video, you know, he deleted the video. He did an apology video from his car, obviously, and promised to be a better content creator, which I, I think makes it worse. Like, I think that, like, if that's like his, if that's his takeaway, that like, I'm a bad content creator and I'll do better for you next time. Like, I think you gotta, like, go to the woods. Like, I think you can't be here.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  The next time I'm at an event and, and there, and theirs are shooting, I will be more solemn in my video.

• 57:58Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like, I'm sorry, like, you just, like, can't be around anymore. Like, we can't have you around. Like, you gotta, you gotta, like,

• 58:05Speaker 02

  You go to phone jail.

• 58:06Ryan Broderick?

  We gotta, like, dig, like, like a hole in the ground and put you in it and let you sit there for a long time before you can come back. And like,

• 58:18Ryan Broderick?

  yeah, like, you know, like that Black Mirror episode where, like, they banned Jon Hamm from society? Like, he can watch, but he can't participate in society anymore.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  Those islands where people who think that they're allergic to phone radio waves.

• 58:33Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, go there. Yeah, yeah, go there. Put you on like a blue origin ship and just send you into space and let you chill there for a while. And like, get it together and you can come back maybe, like.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Well, only VHS is a full house.

• 58:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, no, nothing, no, no media. You can't, you can't handle media. Like, you can't handle it. Like, you can't look at the Bible. You can't look at, you can't read. You can't write. You can't do anything other than just sit and think about what you've done for like a year.

• 59:03Ryan Broderick?

  I'm sorry.

• 59:05Ryan Broderick?

  It's too much for you.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  Is it confirmed that he was the one who was stealing the merch post the shooting?

• 59:10Ryan Broderick?

  I saw a guy with the same color hat, a video of this guy going up to that stage and what looked to be clearly stealing blood-covered Turning Point USA merch. So yeah, this guy's just gotta go. Like he like he can't. I'm sorry, like.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Uh, is there anything else you want to say?

• 59:32Speaker 02

  Do you want to do you want to, now that we're on the other side, now that we're safely on on post the ad break? Do you want to talk more about how afraid you are of what this will produce?

• 59:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm I am scared. I was feeling optimistic all summer. You know, weirdly enough, for someone who looks at this stuff all day, like I was kind of like, yeah, you know, I was optimistic that some sense of normalcy could return to American politics and American society. And it still could, you know, it still could. But it's like every time something like this happens, it just it just increases the timeline. And so I just feel very exhausted thinking about the amount of time it'll take to kind of come through this and come to the other side. As we are recording this,

• 1:00:23Ryan Broderick?

  there are reports trickling in of, you know, black universities getting bomb threats. Last night, there were fights kicking off at vigils for Charlie Kirk. There are databases being compiled of leftists and they're being doxed. And I'm sure there will be some state violence applied in some direction here. I've seen calls for labeling Antifa like a domestic terrorist group and sort of, you know, invading US cities to like take it down. I just, I feel tired. I feel tired when I think about all of it and sad.

• 1:01:03Ryan Broderick?

  Charlie Kirk was kind of like a big, big presence on this show this summer, I feel like, like we did a couple of episodes where he pops up and.

• 1:01:12Ryan Broderick?

  Watching the video where he, where he gets shot is like, I don't know. It bothered me more than, I mean, obviously it just bothers you as a human being, but like it bothered me more than other videos I've had to watch like that for, for work. There's, there's a strangeness to all of this. More unsettling than previous sort of moments like this. Like I, I find this more unsettling than Luigi Mangione shooting, even the Kyle Rittenhouse stuff. Like there's something really, I, I, I tried to put it into words today, actually in the garbage day issue. And I, I tried to sort of like, describe it as like this, like parasocial terror. This idea that like this person that felt so untouchable because of internet fame, so removed from the normal world, so safe. To watch them die, no matter their, their politics or their views.

• 1:01:58Ryan Broderick?

  Strange. Unsettling.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  I think you're lying. Impossible to ignore in a world where it's impossible to pay attention. Really gets at it. Where, when there's a school shooting, where there's a church shooting, normally try to screen it out. Then, then like looking at their ramifications. And then like two or three days later, the like, an image or a detail about that like, these were fucking children. These were normal people will hit me and there will be a genuine emotional moment. This being directly in front of all of us, being confronted with us. And that it was like, all right, everyone's like gloves are off, let's fucking go. And that there's going to be no moment of like,

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  whoo.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  That feels, that feels scary. Instantaneous from it happening. It, it is like, how can we use this event? It was, you, you watched the horrible thing viscerally and you are already seeing it weaponized instantaneously. Makes it feel different. The other thing, the other thing that's like gnawing at me is we've talked a lot recently about this sort of contagion effect of these things. The idolization after a mass shooting. And this got a lot of attention and it makes me really worried that this is the new.

• 1:03:32Ryan Broderick?

  School shooting. I don't think so. I mean, all of the influencers that I I I know personally are saying that like they're canceling in-person events. They're gonna have security teams. Hassan has talked about this for like, he's not going out anymore. I think we're not gonna see AOC. We're not gonna see Zorin, Mondami. We're not gonna see a lot of these people out anymore. So like the idea that like this becomes like the new thing. I don't think that's gonna happen just because like, for the most part, it's pretty easy to prevent, which is like you just don't go out. I think if this leads to anything,

• 1:04:11Ryan Broderick?

  it it leads to more chaotic political violence. And it's hard to predict because it really depends on where we are in the like descending into fascism like spectrum, like where are we on the journey? I don't know. I I went kind of deep into this leftist idea. This morning, we cut it from the piece. It was about how the American years of lead have started. Do you know this term? Years of lead? No. Um, so years of lead or anni di Piumbo. It's that Italian term for the 20-year period of left-wing and right-wing extremist violence and terrorism

• 1:04:56Ryan Broderick?

  between the 60s and 80s that took over Italy. And a lot of leftists in particular in America have been predicting that our years of lead were coming. Arguable that they're already here. That is sort of what I would predict, you know, going forward is just like a lot more sporadic, explicitly political violence. And it could take the form of kidnappings. It could take the form of assassinations, car bombs. It would look something like the troubles in Ireland or the years of lead in Italy, you know, uh, I think

• 1:05:36Ryan Broderick?

  it is safe to say that we're already in it. Two lawmakers in Minnesota were assassinated this summer and everyone forgot about it. Like no one talks about it. The president was almost assassinated twice. Kyle Rittenhouse like killed people in the street. Luigi Mangione like allegedly killed like the CEO of United Healthcare like earlier this year, like we are in a a moment of sectarian political violence and it is just impossible to ignore or deny now and it makes me not feel good. It's uh bad vibes.

• 1:06:14Speaker 02

  What if you left the country?

• 1:06:18Ryan Broderick?

  I've spent most of my adult life not living in America.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not, I'm not saying, I'm not saying like uh because I want you to be safe, which I, you know, of course I do. I'm saying because everywhere you go is a harbinger of of bad.

• 1:06:31Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I gotta get out of here because it's my fault.

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  You leave, maybe.

• 1:06:38Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I, I, I moved back full time at last August, a year ago, so.

• 1:06:42Speaker 02

  Ryan, where, where were you in uh the start of 2020?

• 1:06:46Ryan Broderick?

  I was, no, it was the end of 2019. I was in Wuhan, China.

• 1:06:53Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, look. I just think if you're trying to wrap your head around what's going on here. It is, it is not so much like

• 1:07:05Ryan Broderick?

  things are gonna spin out of control immediately and there's gonna be like, you know, purge level violence in the streets all day long. It's not like a movie. It's just that like we live in a country that has normalized political violence. And you just gotta adjust accordingly. So if you are a journalist, you should protect yourself. If you're an activist, you should protect yourself. Going outside is dangerous. This, things are unpredictable and like, yeah, that's.

• 1:07:40Ryan Broderick?

  That's where I'm at with this.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  All right, well, I'm gonna start editing. You go nap.

• 1:07:45Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, there's gonna be a lot coming out about this over the next couple of days, couple of weeks. We're gonna, you know, pull those threads maybe for larger episodes, but we also might be doing some updates on this, which we'll put as bonuses behind the Patreon wall. So if you want to kind of follow how this, uh, you know, develops, we're gonna be doing some work there. So we've got a special going on right now. So if you want to just like subscribe for the month and, and track what we're doing, you can do that. We just don't want to clutter up the feed because this is going to be a lot of drip and drop stuff, I think. But, oh, Garbage Day will also be following as well. So you can subscribe to Garbage Day as well. But like, uh, this, this is gonna be a circus unlike anything we've ever seen before, I think.

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  Patreon.com. Not to be the guy we're talking about in this episode, but, uh,

• 1:08:30Ryan Broderick?

  Patreon.com slash PanicWorld and you can just go to garbage day dot email. It's all there and we'll be, we'll be trying to follow this as, as best we can and make sense of what we can make sense of.

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  And if you use code PANICYEAR, it's 50 cents for the month. Thanks for coming on your show.

• 1:08:49Ryan Broderick?

  Thanks for having me on my show.

• 1:08:53Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing. YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer, Samantha Hollis. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected].

• 1:09:37Ryan Broderick?

  Be sure to check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com slash at PanicWorldPod. And please give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can. I'm not saying you're an average person, by the way.

• 1:10:00Ryan Broderick?

  I think you're you're an above average person.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  Thank you, Ryan. That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me.

• 1:10:05Ryan Broderick?

  You could put that on a card, yeah.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  I will. I'm gonna. It's gonna be the first Panic World merch. Ryan Broderick said I was above average person. You can you two can be an above average person for $35.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

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• 1:10:37Speaker 06

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