David French on Political Violence in America and Charlie Kirk's Assassination
Good Faith
Good Faith
5 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2025
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What Does Charlie Kirk's Murder Reveal About Extremism and Division?
Host Curtis Chang sits down with Good Faith "founding friend" and New York Times writer David French to reflect on the shocking assassination of Charlie Kirk and what it reveals about the rise of political violence in America. Together, they explore how formative experiences have shaped Baby Boomers and Gen Z differently, the role of influencers versus institutions, and the dangers of extremism across the political spectrum. With compassion for the personal tragedy at the center of this event, they also highlight the church's role on the path toward healing and rebuilding trust in a deeply divided nation.
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Mentioned in this episode:
- Poll Results: Is Political Violence Ever Justified?
- Why Do So Many Young Americans Justify Political Violence? (internal WSJ generational poll %s)
- How recent political violence in the U.S. fits into 'a long, dark history' (Politifact/PBS)
- Political violence in polarized U.S. at its worst since 1970s (Reuters, 2023)
- Spencer Cox's calls for civility spark introspection, and some GOP backlash
- Utah Gov. Spencer Cox decries 'cancer' of social media and its 'direct role' in every assassination over past 5 years
- Pope Leo criticizes surge of nationalist political movements in the world (video)
David French on Charlie Kirk's Murder and Political Violence:
- David French: There Are Monsters in Your Midst, Too
- David French: If We Keep This Up, Charlie Kirk Will Not Be the Last to Die
- Roundtable discussion, including David French: The 'Fork in the Road' After Charlie Kirk's Death
- David French's Divided We Fall
More From David French:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When you accurately point out that there's a lot of violence, threats, intimidation coming |
| 0:06.1 | from both sides of the political spectrum, if you're immediately running to say, well, which |
| 0:09.8 | one does it more, and then that's the real enemy, you're doing this all the wrong way. |
| 0:15.4 | We have a violent extremism problem, period, and is a violent extremism problem on the left and a violent extremism problem on the right. |
| 0:39.9 | Welcome to the Good Faith podcast. |
| 0:41.9 | I'm your host, Curtis Chang. |
| 0:47.6 | Good Faith is where followers of Jesus help each other make sense of the world. |
| 0:54.9 | And this podcast is a production of redeeming Babel, a 501C3 nonpartisan organization. |
| 1:02.1 | Now, our world has been shaken by the news of the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. |
| 1:04.0 | And every day we hear the latest revelation of the event itself, the manhunt, the background, |
| 1:10.4 | potential motivations of the shooter. |
| 1:12.7 | Now, our listeners can get this information in the news. |
| 1:15.1 | What I hope to provide here is some sense of the larger meaning of this event, especially |
| 1:22.1 | for followers of Jesus. |
| 1:24.3 | And there's no better person to help us do that than founding friend of the Good Faith |
| 1:29.4 | podcast and regular guest, David French. David, welcome back to the Good Faith podcast. |
| 1:35.3 | Thanks, Curtis. It's always great to be back. |
| 1:39.0 | All right. Now, before we jump into those larger meetings, I actually wanted to ask you more |
| 1:42.5 | personally, did you know, Charlie? |
| 1:46.4 | Not well, only a little. We met briefly one time. We were both at the NRB, I believe it was |
| 1:55.0 | NRB 2021, the National Religious Broadcasters Convention down in Texas. |
| 2:06.0 | And by that point, I think I had disagreed with Charlie on a couple of things. |
... |
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