Theory of Change Podcast With Matthew Sheffield What Charlie Kirk knew
Episode Summary
If you pay any attention at all to American politics, you have heard by now about the death of Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist who was killed at one of his events. No one deserves to die for their political views, of course, but there is no question that Kirk was a complex figure and far from the saint that reactionary media and activists have been portraying him as.
There is one thing, however, that everybody agrees on, and that is that Charlie Kirk had a phenomenal grasp of how to organize and fund-raise for his beliefs. He was able to turn his group Turning point USA into a political behemoth with tentacles that reach into all major political issues.
For years here at Flux, we’ve been trying to warn people about what Kirk was up to and how he was growing his groups. And so I thought it would be good at this point to catch up with a friend of the show, Matthew Boedy, to do an update about his reporting on Turning Point and what he found out since he appeared on the show in 2022.
Matthew is also out with a new book that describes the Christian supremacist movement that Kirk was part of called The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy, and it’s very much worth checking out.
In our discussion, we talk about Kirk’s organizational prowess—and his split presentation to the public as a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist while also working tirelessly to censor and suppress the speech of people he didn’t like, including Matthew himself.
We also talk about the future and what left-leaning people can learn from Kirk and the organizations that he created.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
05:52 — The Seven Mountains Mandate explained
09:56 — Kirk’s evolution from free speech to militancy
11:20 — Democrats’ failure to respond to reactionary organizing
14:05 — The power of events and community building
17:20 — Evangelical zeal and political colonization
19:25 — Kirk’s rivalry with Nick Fuentes
22:46 — TPUSA’s “Professor Watch List” censorship and Kirk’s hypocrisy
29:28 — Kirk as martyr, not thought leader
34:48 — International expansion to South Korea and Japan
36:33 — Kirk’s bizarre fear of imaginary witches
43:57 — The irony of gun violence and asymmetrical rhetoric
49:06 — The future of Turning Point and American politics
Audio Transcript
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