H1 - Charlie James reflects on the anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s death and discusses growing political division on campus.

What this episode covers

Episode Transcript Charlie James: And welcome to the program on your Thursday afternoon, September the 10th, 2026. September the 10th, 2025 was a normal day, it was a Wednesday, lot like many others. I was in this studio, I was getting ready to put the finishing touches on the program for that day. About a little after 2:30 in the afternoon, all of a sudden my phone started blowing up—text messages, emails—alerting me that Charlie Kirk had been shot at Utah Valley University. Okay, well, shot. That's horrific. That was horrible. Started trying to get more information, because it hadn't hit the news yet, hadn't hit Fox, hadn't hit any of the monitors that we have here in the studio. What does "shot" mean? What was the severity of the shooting? So we finally got the initial video of Charlie Kirk getting shot. And, I guess, hoping, you know, you always have that little bit of hope in you when something like this happens, that everything was going to be okay. We don't know what kind of firearm it was, we don't know the caliber, we don't know the distance, we knew nothing at the time. But we saw the video of Charlie Kirk being shot, and for a brief moment, minutes, you would think, "Okay, maybe. Maybe he's going to be all right. Maybe he's going to be okay, maybe he can survive this." And that's when I got the other video from another angle. And that's when I, on this program, warned you guys. I said, "Listen, you need to get ready for some bad news," because after seeing that video, I knew, and anybody would know, that that wound was not survivable. A little while later, I got a text message that said that Turning Point USA had just alerted all of their chapters that Charlie Kirk had died. I mean, that was just—that was an agonizing amount of time. Between the first shot—or the only shot—between the shooting and the announcement, everybody held their breath. Everybody was praying that Charlie Kirk was going to be okay. And then we got the news, like I said, that Turning Point USA had alerted their chapters that Charlie Kirk had passed away. Moments after that, the White House issued a statement from President Trump, and the entire world knew that an assassination had taken place at Utah Valley University of Charlie Kirk. A young man whose only crime was speaking the truth. That was it. And then, in that moment, all of these people started exposing themselves as to who they really were. In a lot of cases, trying to imply that in some way Charlie Kirk brought all of this on himself. He was responsible for him being shot. That's what they were trying to tell you. "Oh, Charlie Kirk said this, and oh, Charlie Kirk..." None of that! All they would do is take little tiny snippets, and they would never put them in their complete context to listen to what Charlie Kirk said. What Charlie Kirk said about empathy? Absolutely right. Empathy is a man-made construct. You cannot have empathy for another person. You can have sympathy, you can have pity, but you cannot have empathy for another person; it is humanly impossible. But they tried to make this some sort of a big talking point. They took his words, they took those clips, and they twisted it to make it sound or to simply agree with their narrative that in some way this guy deserved it. And let me tell you what they're doing today: 365 days later, they're doing the same thing. They're doing the same thing today. But again, they expose themselves, because we saw them celebrating. Celebrating the loss of a life! Let me tell you something, folks: the people on the left changed that day. They changed in that moment. We all know that they wish Donald Trump was dead. They wish the shooter in Butler was more accurate; they wished that he hadn't missed. But this shooter didn't miss. And then they celebrated. They celebrated. That was the moment that these people's ideology overrode their humanity. Coming up in just a minute, I'm going to give you some examples of what's going on in colle ...

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