God help us. I'm Rich Lowry, and I'm joined as always by the Wright Honorable Charles C.W. Cook, the good neighbor, Noah Rothman, the sage of authenticity, Woods, Jim Garrity, and the notorious MBD, Michael Brendan Doherty. You are, of course, listening to a Nashville podcast or sponsors this episode, our Donors Trust and Justice Amy Coney Barrett's new book. If for some reason you're not already following us on a streaming service, by the way, you can find us everywhere from Spotify to Apple Podcasts.

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So Jim Garrity, unspeakable horror at Utah Valley University prior to this horrific event.

You know, this era was not going to be written about without Charlie Kirk being part of the story.

The same way, these are imperfect comparisons, but you don't write about the 60s without mentioning Mark Rudd, the Columbia University activist on the left, or you don't write about the 1960s without writing about the Sharon statement.

And what Bill Buckley and young activists on the right did was an amazing contribution. Now he's going to be remembered because he was the victim of

a heinous act of a heinous assassination. This was this what Charlie was this is the bulk of what he

did. The main thing that he did or the thing that catapulted him to fame more than anything else, he went to campuses, he sat down, and he answered questions.

And he challenged the other side to prove him wrong, and he had a free and open debate.

And before this horror, before that shot ran out, you look at that tiered space there at Utah

Valley and say, okay, that's how democracy has worked since Athens, right? You're on a hillside

and people are discussing things and they're debating. And that's how it's supposed to work

in this country. Then that shot rang out. And I just fear that that was inflection

point, that phrase a little bit of a cliche. But there was one America, one contemporary

America, where everyone was sitting, standing, eager to engage in this debate. And then there's

the other America that we're living in right now

when everyone was running in fear. And Charlie was slumped in the chair prior to being rushed to the

hospital. You know, Rich, we're taping this on the 24th anniversary of 9-11. A lot of people,

everybody remembers where they were that day. This is a different scale of a

tragedy, but it doesn't mean that it's like, it's still hitting hard. We've taped a lot of these

podcasts and I feel as dark and as depressed and as angry and as, you know, this is really sticking with us.

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