Gide humans.

One of the most influential right-wing organizers in America has been assassinated in front of a crowd of university students he was speaking to.

And if you feel the slight nausea in your stomach and tightness in your chest that I do, let's begin with a nice

deep breath.

And remember that you are a child of the earth and the stars and that flowers still exist and there are butterflies fluttering around

and let's just ground ourselves for a moment because I find it difficult to know exactly

what to make of this moment in history. I'm pretty good at political predictions. I'm good at predicting elections.

I wasn't great at the last U.S. election. I didn't think Trump was going to win that big,

but I'm pretty good at smelling the mood of an electorate when other people can't. I'm much,

much less good at understanding whether or not I'm living through something

that's important or not culturally. I thought that the Trump assassination attempt was going to be

a huge history-defining moment, and maybe it had an impact on the election a little bit,

certainly his reaction to it, but the fact that it is now sort of maybe less thought about

than him saying that there were good people on both sides of the Charlottesville rally

or Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters deplorables, like I would never have predicted that those things

were going to stick in the public imagination or consciousness. When I was recently talking about

my father's death, I mentioned the line that he used to say, which is that the problem with life

is that you can only understand it backwards, but you have to live it forwards.

And when something like this happens, I feel very much like there are two possible futures, one in which Charlie Kirk is the answer to an obscure trivia question,

and another of which has today as its own chapter

in the book that is someday written about the fall of America into the troubles.

Let's just talk about Charlie for a moment.

...