The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - September 16, 2025


PREVIEW： Realpolitik #12 ｜ Charlie Kirk's Murder and the Horrors of Civil War


Episode Stats

Length

15 minutes

Words per Minute

134.46635

Word Count

2,036

Sentence Count

125


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello, welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Bouadad. Today, I'm going to
00:00:11.680 be talking about the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, what it means in general for the West,
00:00:20.060 why it's important, and to try to find a way forward. The themes that I'm going to touch on
00:00:27.580 are not going to detail the mechanics of the murder or the killer. We all know what happened.
00:00:36.140 Charlie Kirk was shot while he was debating, while he was doing what he loves, including
00:00:41.760 professing the Word of God and explaining the importance of Christianity to young students.
00:00:48.360 He was shot by a leftist who had a transgender boyfriend, and it was in large part the result
00:00:59.080 of the vilification of even the center-right as being Nazis, fascists, and so on. So that's not
00:01:08.820 the part that I'm going to cover. What I'm going to cover is a little bit about why the worldview of
00:01:14.260 the left is so wrong, and if there is some space for compromise. And I want to emphasize the
00:01:20.920 importance of compromise from the beginning. I'm going to read for you a small segment from Thucydides,
00:01:31.540 from book three of Thucydides, part 82. Let's start with that.
00:01:39.400 During seven days, the Corkians were engaged in butchering those of their fellow citizens whom
00:01:49.720 they regarded as their enemies. And although the crime imputed was that of attempting to put down
00:01:56.960 the democracy, some were slain also for private hatred, others by their debtors because of the
00:02:04.420 money's owed to them. Death thus raged in every shape, and, as usually happens at such times,
00:02:13.720 there was no length to which violence did not go. Sons were killed by their fathers,
00:02:20.680 and suppliants dragged from the altar or slain upon it. So these were people trying to pray
00:02:26.020 to be saved. While some were even walled up in the temple of Dionysus, and died there.
00:02:35.520 So bloody was the march of revolution, and the impression which it made was the greater as it
00:02:41.720 was one of the first to occur. Later on, one may say, the whole Hellenic world was convulsed,
00:02:50.040 struggles being everywhere made by the popular chiefs to bring in the Athenians, and by the
00:02:57.060 oligarchs to introduce the Likodomians. In peace there would have been neither the pretext nor the
00:03:04.340 wish to make such an invitation. But in war, with an alliance always at the command of either faction
00:03:10.940 for the hurt of their adversaries, and their own corresponding advantage, opportunities for
00:03:17.560 bringing in the foreigner were never wanting to the revolutionary parties. The sufferings which
00:03:23.360 revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and will and
00:03:29.520 always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same, though in a severer or milder form,
00:03:37.540 and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases.
00:03:42.380 This section is important, and I always think about it, because
00:03:48.960 it shows how horrific civil conflict is, and why it is very important for us, especially for Christians,
00:04:00.520 to try to avoid it, because of the evils that come from it. It's not one where you, everybody thinks
00:04:09.340 about civil wars, and imagines that he's going to be the militia leader, and he's going to be the tough guy.
00:04:15.920 But everybody else is thinking in the exact same way, and everybody else is trying to do the same
00:04:23.080 precise thing, and to be the leader of some faction. And the result of that is chaos. You don't get rid of
00:04:30.020 tyranny. You end up with thousands of petty tyrants, some more intelligent than others, some better than
00:04:37.680 others, and it's just evil upon evil. It's injustice upon injustice. It's destruction. It's something that
00:04:46.640 you should really want to avoid. So when the left, through the incitement that it has engaged in,
00:04:55.900 leads someone like the shooter, Tyler Robinson, to become so ideologically possessed as to shift from
00:05:05.140 being a regular conservative Mormon to a murderer with a transgender boyfriend. So he turned gay and his
00:05:18.200 boyfriend was trans. The ability of the left to unleash demons on those that end up supporting its ideology
00:05:30.540 is very dangerous and very destructive. Equally dangerous is the way, is a couple of things.
00:05:40.060 First, Charlie Kirk was not by any means a radical. He was not by any means an extremist.
00:05:45.780 He's not different from the 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 people who just attended the Tommy Robinson rally
00:05:53.360 in London on Saturday. He's not different from Trump voters who had previously voted for Obama.
00:06:03.980 This isn't some radical extremist guy. He's just a normal debate me bro guy with center-right views,
00:06:12.820 including the necessity of keeping his own country recognizable, which is 90 plus percent American,
00:06:20.980 including the importance of managing migration, including the importance of realizing that the
00:06:31.540 West is fundamentally Christian and acting in a Christian way. So they're trying to cast him as
00:06:38.760 some kind of radical, at least some of the left is. He's nothing of the sort. He's really nothing of
00:06:45.220 the sort. They chose to kill the person who wanted to talk to them. The fact that they killed him while
00:06:54.760 he was advocating Christianity and preaching Christianity makes him a martyr. He's a Protestant.
00:07:02.700 I'm a Catholic. We disagreed on that detail. Not that I knew him personally, but he's still a Christian
00:07:08.920 martyr. This is a Christian martyr. This is a guy who died for his faith. He died for what he thought was
00:07:13.520 right. And he died peacefully. He wasn't attacking anyone. He wasn't inflicting violence in anyone.
00:07:23.460 These guys on the left will tell you that silence is violence and they will tell you that words are
00:07:30.080 violence. So no matter what you do, you're stuck in this totalitarian loop where unless you profess their
00:07:38.360 dogma, they will view you as evil and they will say quite openly that they're willing to kill you.
00:07:47.640 This is the situation that we have. And I wanted to sort of pause here and mention something about the
00:07:56.360 importance of God. There was a woman who was explaining the problem of African times,
00:08:08.340 time. This is the clip here, where she says that the future in Africa doesn't really exist. It's just the
00:08:17.520 eternal present. And that this is why the Africans have this relaxed attitude about time. And she herself
00:08:26.700 is a black woman, but white anthropologists will tell you something very similar. What distinguished the
00:08:34.740 thinking of the West was the ability to think of the future. And that kind of started with the Greeks,
00:08:41.760 with the idea that it was a Kronos, the god who ate his children, that had to be killed first,
00:08:50.920 before there was humanity and civilization. It was the ability to make a pact with the future
00:08:58.560 that allowed people to evolve from being purely animalistic, relying on the seasons, relying on
00:09:06.940 hunting and gathering, and allow them to become civilization builders. It's the same idea that is
00:09:15.360 expressed in the Christian covenant. Abraham is promised that his seed will be more numerous than the
00:09:24.240 sands of the sands of the sea. But throughout his own life, he must suffer endlessly. And he suffers
00:09:31.600 embarrassments and defeats and wars. One time he has to pretend that his wife is a sister. He has to fight his
00:09:38.860 enemies. He has to go and rescue Lot from people who captured him. He has to intercede with God and ask him to
00:09:46.740 spare the good people of Sodom and Gomorrah. And he even has to sacrifice his own son for God,
00:09:55.220 with God at the last moment saying, don't kill Isaac. This idea of a pact with God
00:10:04.180 is what allows us to build the future, is what allows us to think of more than the present.
00:10:10.260 And the starting point of the left is to deny God and to deny the family. But when you have children,
00:10:18.740 and I hope all of you will marry young, those of you who are still young, I hope you will marry young
00:10:25.460 and have lots of children. Those of us with children understand that if you exist only for yourself,
00:10:34.080 your entire existence is meaningless. But the position of the left begins with hostility towards
00:10:40.000 the family. The family is seen as oppressive. The family is seen as tyrannical. It's seen as the
00:10:45.600 first bond that you don't choose. You don't have a life if there are only choices. You don't have a life
00:10:55.840 if there aren't some obligations that are imposed on you by where you are born, by who you are born to,
00:11:03.520 by your community, by your society. The minute that you're born, you incur debts. In a state of nature,
00:11:13.440 if a pregnant mother is sufficiently stressed, she will either automatically and involuntarily
00:11:22.880 abort her baby, she will have a miscarriage, or in some cases she will stop giving milk,
00:11:29.520 meaning that the fact that there were people around your mother keeping her safe instantly
00:11:37.360 place you in debt the minute that you are born. If you have any kind of talent, it's been developed
00:11:44.800 because somebody discovered it, because previous generations have worked on developing their talent,
00:11:51.920 and on creating a safe enough society where you can learn and do things more than hunt and gather.
00:11:59.200 And so the minute that you express your talents, you are already in debt, because somebody recognized
00:12:05.920 you, them, and somebody trained you. But the premise of the left is that we're all fully atomized
00:12:12.880 individuals with nothing binding us together. This is the view of extreme capitalism, and it's the view
00:12:21.680 of the far left, of the communists, of the kind of people who killed Charlie Kirk.
00:12:28.160 Their entire worldview is wrong. And because their worldview is wrong, they hate religion.
00:12:35.120 They reject the idea of a higher purpose, of a source of morality that is beyond us,
00:12:40.480 that is objective, that is absolute. They will say to you, well, why is there evil in the world?
00:12:46.800 Because God is good. If God is good, why is there evil in the world?
00:12:51.200 They simply ask the wrong question. Because the question isn't why is there evil,
00:12:57.120 it's why is there morality? Why is there good and why is there evil?
00:13:01.680 And the only religion that offers a sensible answer is Christianity. There is good because of God.
00:13:09.120 There is evil because of free will. It doesn't mean that it explains everything.
00:13:14.240 We don't know why people die in earthquakes. We don't fully understand God's wisdom.
00:13:19.520 But there isn't a better answer. In the worldview of the left, if you were to sort of abandon religion,
00:13:26.560 the maximum capacity for organization is going to be limited to the level of a troop of chimpanzees.
00:13:36.480 When a troop of chimpanzees who organize themselves by cousin groups at the end of the day,
00:13:40.880 so they're tribes, when it becomes too big and a smaller group can separate and live on its own,
00:13:48.720 that's what they do. And if the limit of your cooperation is just the people who are directly
00:13:55.520 related to you by blood, your first cousins, you're not going to build the Acropolis.
00:14:01.440 You're not going to build Rome. You're not going to build any kind of worthy civilization.
00:14:07.360 So the starting position of the left is a horrific one. And it's because of religion that Africa is
00:14:12.960 so backwards. They don't have that kind of covenant with God. And it's going to take them centuries of
00:14:18.400 living that covenant in order to improve. It's going to be a very long time. The religions that they have
00:14:25.200 are animistic. They sort of worship the tree or the lion or some animal or the other. It's just
00:14:34.000 there is a connection between your beliefs and your ability to build civilization.
00:14:38.640 And you see this reflected all the time. The left hates this line of argument. They reject it.
00:14:45.840 They reject the capacity to build civilization. This is why everything that they do is about tearing things down.
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