Evan: 1:28

Welcome back everybody. Another episode of the Unmentionables. As always, I'm Evan. I'm here with Melissa.

Melissa: 1:35

I'm here.

Evan: 1:38

It's a couple days after a pretty devastating time in our country for many who both agreed and disagreed with Charlie Kirk, who was killed the other day by a mentally unstable left-wing lunatic propelled by anti-fascist ideas, desensitized by video games and detached from reality. I, like many in the conservative political movement around the Tea Party, years, came into contact, met Charlie a couple times when he was a teenager, in his very early 20s, when he was just a kid. He had an idea, he had a plan and a passion and he got a lot of people to buy into that idea and ultimately I followed his career and he built one of the most incredible outreach organizations ever conceived. He reached a portion of the electorate and a portion of the population that the conservative concepts hadn't reached in many decades. He was a guy whose mission was to engage people in dialogue, and one of I think the quotes that stands out to me the most from his life is, he said when people stop talking, really bad stuff starts. When marriages stop talking, divorce happens. When civilizations stop talking, civil war ensues. When you stop having a human connection with someone that you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence against that group.

Evan: 3:06

This is a guy who invited those people who vehemently disagreed with him to be the first ones at the microphone. He wanted them to share their ideas and be exposed to his, and this is the same reason that we started this podcast. Our goal on the Unmentionable is to talk about things that we're not supposed to, because we believe truly that it's darkness that creates fear, fear that creates hate and hate that creates suffering. He was killed by a guy who literally lived his life on the internet, and we know this because of some of the things that are coming out about him. I'm not even going to talk about the guy's name, but the guy who killed him was so dependent on the internet and the isolation that comes with the internet that he literally wrote internet memes on the casings of the internet, that he literally wrote internet memes on the casings of the bullets that he was prepared to fire. One of them was references to furries and support for the furry movement. For those of you that don't know, furries are adults who think they're animals.

Melissa: 4:07

And children.

Evan: 4:08

There's children that are getting involved in this as well. Yeah, it's a wild culture. Another one said, hey, fascist catch. And then it was followed by a cheat code for a video game that drops a big, huge bomb on an area. Another one said, oh, bella Ciao, bella Ciao, bella Ciao, ciao Ciao, which is an old Italian anti-fascist song from World War II. And the fourth one said if you read this, you are gay L-M-A-O, which is laughing my ass off.

Evan: 4:41

To give kind of a sense of where all those things come from. Every one of those is a reference to some kind of alt lifestyle or anti-fascist left-wing ideology and that lifestyle, those ideologies on the left, tend to press people into an online society. They tend to press people into isolation. They pit groups one against another. You think about things again. The anti-fascists are one. Bl BLM is another, that it takes something about a group of people, finds the differences from other groups and then says if they're not like you in this way, they're evil.

Evan: 5:24

Many people out there are shocked and they're surprised by this shooting, but I'm really neither one of these things. This was inevitable. It was foreseeable. It's a consequence of us constantly seeking to treat the symptoms of our problems and not the root cause. I want to talk about root causes and the root cause in this case and I think in a lot of cases of violence, is rooted in disassociation, in detachment from reality and in desperation. So, in the spirit of the unmentionables, where I ask the questions and you get to do the answers, melissa, what drives people to isolate and to lean so far into this disassociative kind of thinking?

Melissa: 6:03

Well, you know I do trauma, so my go-to answer on this is trauma. We don't escape reality and isolate from other humans. It's not how we were designed. We were designed to live and be in communities with each other. And I think you really you hit the nail on the head when you said it's disassociation. It's also dehumanization, when one person can take life or talk about the loss of a life, and this you know. I think people should know that we were coming into this week wanting to talk about the Ukrainian refugee.

Evan: 6:50

Irina, irina Zvortka.

Melissa: 6:58

Ukrainian refugee, irina Irina Zvortka, that was brutally stabbed on that train in Charlotte while people around her either walked away or looked and then looked away or just had no idea it was going on. And I think this concept of life hits me particularly this week. My dad passed away on Tuesday night and it doesn't matter what kind of relationship I did or didn't have with him, it's still the loss of a life. And I hadn't, I hadn't talked to my dad in about five years and there's a lot around that, and still we can look at that and say a life is gone.

Melissa: 7:39

And this dehumanization of people, the name-calling, the rhetoric around the evilness of certain people because they have beliefs that are different than yours, it really is people who are no longer recognizing that they're amidst other humans. We all live and breathe, we bleed the same color blood. These differences, this divisiveness, it causes more trauma, it causes desperation, it causes people, especially with these video games. Right, if you're shooting people up on a video game day in and day out and not seeing the consequences of that especially? I know nothing about this individual. However, in a profiling way, I could tell you from an emotional standpoint he was very emotionally stunted Because by the age of 22,.

Melissa: 8:41

You understand object permanence. You understand that when you take life, that life is gone. That concept is something that we develop and come to understand. So you look at this and when somebody exposes themselves to that environment day in and day out, like I said, it dehumanizes people. It gives you, just like anything else. If I tell myself that the grass is blue and the sky is green, for long enough, I'm going to believe that the grass is blue and the sky is green. For long enough, I'm going to believe that the sky is green and the grass is blue.

Evan: 9:19

And when people who have that sort of desensitization and dehumanization, desensitization, desensitization to violence and dehumanization of humanity and individuals as people and they've isolated themselves within their own echo chamber, when you start to use hot-button words that trigger those individuals calling someone Hitler, fascist, a threat to democracy, all of these kinds of things does it trigger a fear response inside of the brain of someone like that, where they feel like they are sent into sort of a fight or flight and they need to do something and they need to stop all of this and maybe their delusions of grandeur take over and any kind of narcissistic complex that they might have is activated and triggered. Is that kind of how that works?

Melissa: 10:14

Well, sure, think about a video game. What happens when you kill people in a video game?

Evan: 10:18

Well, you continue on with the game.

Melissa: 10:20

Don't you earn points or?

Evan: 10:22

prizes yes, you're rewarded. You're right, you're rewarded.

Melissa: 10:26

And we live in a reward-based society. We go to work because we get money. We call that a reward, sometimes we call it a bribe. But how many people can actually sit back and say they're doing what they love and it wouldn't matter if they got paid or not? I mean, I can say that, but I don't think there's very many that can. So when you are rewarded for these maladaptive behaviors and people who are enmeshed in video games in that way, it's a coping skill. Outside is uncomfortable, but this world is my new reality and really what we're seeing is the nervous system and you brought up fight or flight. But what these video games do is they put people into the dorsal part of their nervous system. Have you ever seen somebody playing video games that almost looks comatose?

Evan: 11:19

Yeah, yeah, sometimes our own kids right.

Melissa: 11:21

Right, but that's why we limit them. That's why we limit them. Staring, you might see a little bit of drool sneaking down. It's a blank look, because they may as well be in a turtle shell. And when we access that dorsal part of our nervous system it is like a turtle shell, because the outside world is so unsafe, there is imminent risk of death, and we've got to tuck inside and imagine our own reality where all that stuff isn't happening. And that is this level of isolation of video game use. We can add in drug use, alcohol use, using sex. In that way I'm thinking particularly about the epidemic of pornography use, prostitution, massage parlors, all of it, even exercise shopping. If they're taken to that degree, it's an escape.

Evan: 12:27

I mean, what role does the media play in this as well? As you know again, sort of putting yourself in that echo chamber, when you have not just political figures but every news channel that you turn on for the most part, you get a steady stream of these people that think this way are fascists. They hate you, they want to murder you, they want to kill you, they don't care about your life, they don't care what you think, they want to take the things you have away from you. And it's in all kinds of media. It's not just the news, it's in television shows, it's in movies, it's embedded into video games, social media, social media.

Melissa: 13:09

That is what triggers fight or flight and propaganda. Right, but the term I used was gang mentality. What's the one that you had used earlier? Group?

Evan: 13:20

Group think.

Melissa: 13:21

Group think, and that is what this is is. I am going to think like those around me, because it's a sense of belonging, it's a sense of community in a lot of ways, and so I will align how I think to help me be part of this group where I feel like I fit in. And when ideas are introduced and you go against the fray, well then I'm losing my family and that's scary for people, scary to lose family. We don't just walk away and restart because it's fun.

Evan: 13:55

Yeah, I want to go. You brought up Irina Zarytska. For those who may be unaware, just a little bit of a background on this. This was last month in Charlotte, north Carolina. Irina was a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who fled Kiev from the Russian invasion with her family. Her father is still in Ukraine, wasn't even able to come to her funeral because he's conscripted into the armed forces. He's a fighting age, so he's busy doing his job. She had a degree in art and restoration. She was studying English. She wanted to be a veterinary assistant. She was all the best things of to be a veterinary assistant. She was all the best things of immigration that you could think of. She was killed by a 34-year-old career criminal, homeless man.

Evan: 14:40

14 separate convictions since 2007,. Felonies including larceny, armed robbery, breaking and entering Multiple, multiple times this guy has been in a courtroom. He served five years, starting in 2015 for armed robbery, possession of stolen goods, resisting arrest. Immediately after his release which, by the way, was a year early, he was arrested for assault. Then he was arrested separately for communicating threats and misusing 911. All of this happened prior to the murder on a train car with five other people right next to him. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, delusional behavior, claims of mind control. And after he pulled out a knife it was a knife, by the way, not a gun. But once he pulled out the knife and slit this girl's throat who was sitting in front of him minding her own business, he reportedly said I got that white girl before leaving the train car at the next stop. And I want to talk about this not from necessarily a view into the mind of the killer, because I think we can all agree he's a mentally disturbed individual and there can be a lot of, you know, medical diagnoses of why someone acts the way they act when they're in that kind of a situation. But it's pretty clear there's disturbed mentality there. But I want to look at it from the perspective of the others.

Evan: 16:04

On the train and you brought this up earlier there was a woman sitting across the aisle from the murdered girl. She looks to her left, she sees what happens and then she turns her head and she actively ignores it until the killer leaves the train and then she gets up and moves away. There is a man behind that woman who sees the crime happen, stands up from his seat, takes a step back, waits for the killer to walk forward, avoids the bloodstains and moves away. There's a man that's sitting behind the murderer, sees the crime, leans over in his seat to look at the aisle and the blood trail in the aisle never moves.

Evan: 16:39

Then there's two others at the back of the train. One of them in the opposite aisle, opposite the aisle, sees the crime happens and just sits there with this shocked look on his face never moves. The other one, who's in line with the murderer, at the back of the train, probably five seats back, maybe four. He's so engrossed in what's going on in his phone and with his headphones on that he doesn't even react to the commotion. So I need to ask how do we disassociate ourselves so much as regular people? Because I'm sure these people are not criminals, they're not murderers. No one went to help Irina either during the commission of the crime and I can certainly understand the self-preservation aspect of that nor after the fact, when the threat was gone, no one moved to help her, to see if they could help her, to check on her. What can create that?

Melissa: 17:31

I'm still overwhelmed. I'm still overwhelmed by the lack of response and, in all fairness, none of us knows exactly how we would respond in that situation. I would like to think that as soon as the immediate threat was off the train the immediate threat was off the train that I would have run to help her, to put pressure on her, to, to at least talk to her and tell her you're not alone, I'm here with you. And when I think about the fact that she died she died alone around how many people like that, just that, really it hits and we can say they didn't do anything because we live in a, in a culture where many, many people have criminal activity. It will also put me at risk and when you've grown up seeing and hearing and believing, don't get involved, that's not your problem, leave it over there. That's exactly what we saw on this train and it's interesting because I was talking to somebody earlier today and a person happened to be in law enforcement and shared with me this view and and I asked for permission to share this here said so.

Melissa: 19:02

What happens when a cop call it downtown chicago? What happens when the white cop shoots the black kid? What? What do all the people. Oh, they surround the the cop and they black kid. What do all the people?

Evan: 19:12

Oh, they surround the cop and they have their phones out and they're yelling and screaming.

Melissa: 19:17

Murderer, murderer, you're a murderer.

Evan: 19:20

Yeah, racist.

Melissa: 19:21

As they're there with their phones, yelling and, you know, getting violent themselves themselves. So what happens when the gang leader in the same town, same block walks up to a house and shoots black kid? We don't know why. What does everybody do?

Evan: 19:40

They hold vigils.

Melissa: 19:41

They scatter.

Evan: 19:42

And they scatter.

Melissa: 19:43

Yeah, they're not talking to the police. They're not screaming murderer. They're not asking questions murderer.

Melissa: 19:56

They're not asking questions, they're silenced, except that poor baby's mama who's sobbing over him, and I thought it was really interesting how this was framed and this person happens to also be african-american and was sharing it with me in this way because people will look at someone who didn't murder anyone, but they've been trained to believe that person's a threat. That person who's actually there to help them is a threat and must have not been warranted in what happened. It doesn't matter if that kid had a gun that he was aiming at the cop.

Evan: 20:33

Right.

Melissa: 20:34

And yet when the gang leader walks up to the kid that's unarmed and shoots him in cold blood, nobody's calling him a murderer. And that's the same concept. It is fear, it's desperation, it's self-preservation and a lot of this, a lot of the things that are going on right now. It's generational. It is how mom and dad were raised, it's how you were raised and it's how you're raising your kids. And we are seeing more and more people standing up and saying, no, I'm going to change these cycles, I'm going to be a cycle breaker and people aren't going to like it. They're not going to like that. I go help that kid because, god forbid, he doesn't have the same skin color as me. But you know, we're teaching our kids.

Melissa: 21:27

It doesn't matter what religion somebody practices, what somebody's skin color is. It doesn't matter what religion somebody practices, what somebody's skin color is, it doesn't matter what sexuality they choose to practice in their personal life. None of this matters. What matters is the character of the person. Do they have character? What do they do when nobody's watching? Do they put the grocery cart back in the spot that Giant has for the large grocery carts, or do they put it in the small one, or do they leave it beside the car because nobody is telling them they have to do it and so it doesn't matter? Do they care about the people around them? I mean just some of the comments that I've seen about the death of Charlie. I'm glad he's dead.

Evan: 22:14

Yeah, I mean again, we go back to this and I like what you were just saying about being a cycle breaker, because that's what Charlie was. Charlie was a cycle breaker. Charlie was the guy that went and said okay, change my mind, convince me that I'm wrong. I know what I believe as a Christian, as a man, as a father, as a husband, as a conservative, with all the viewpoints that I have.

Melissa: 22:42

He was secure. I know.

Evan: 22:43

Yes, he was secure in what he believed and he was willing to discuss it with you and he welcomed people to dissent him. He welcomed people to bring their ideas to the front.

Melissa: 22:56

Do you know how I found out about him?

Evan: 22:57

How's that?

Melissa: 22:58

From my older daughter.

Melissa: 23:00

Oh she is the one that was like hey mom, have you seen this? Now she's 13 and she's been watching him, I think for about the last two years, and she's the one who's like have you seen this? He On watching politics and watching the news and asking hard questions. We have had conversations about abortion and how that interacts with faith, and where is the line between I believe what I believe and you're allowed to believe what you believe? We don't need to shove that down each other's throats. We've talked about transgendered issues, we've talked about drugs, we've talked about addictions, we've talked about so many different things, and he really did open up, I think, the door for people to talk about things in a civil. Well, he was always civil in a civil way.

Evan: 24:04

Yeah, yeah. Whenever you have a debate, if you're going to have a civil debate, you'll have to have a civil debate with two people who are utilizing facts and figures.

Melissa: 24:13

But isn't a debate about right and wrong, winning and losing?

Evan: 24:16

Debate is just about two different opinions, or not even that different of opinions, but it's a discussion of, it's an exchange of ideas, it's a sharing of ideas. We have painted debates, as you know, an opposing viewpoint to an opposing viewpoint. That wasn't always the case. In some cases, early on in America's founding, you had people that very much agreed that we needed to be our own nation. We had people that very much agreed that the king of England was treating us poorly. They disagreed on aspects of that, they disagreed on nuances of that, and they had those discussions and those debates.

Evan: 24:56

And sometimes those things can get heated when the passions rise and people's emotions take over. But what you need to think about and what you really need to do is realize that this is a person's opinion or their ideas, if not destructive to you, are simply thoughts, and words are words and they are conveyed in such a way that they formulate opinions, and that is okay. For people to have their own differences of opinion. It's not evil to have an opinion. Some opinions are evil, but it's not evil to have an opinion.

Melissa: 25:33

So I pulled up New Oxford Dictionary and as a noun it defines debate as a formal discussion on a particular topic in a public meeting or legislative assembly in which opposing arguments are put forward. An argument about a particular subject, especially one in which many people are involved. As a verb, it's argue about a subject, especially in a formal manner, consider a possible course of action in one's mind before reaching a decision. And I think that's the difference here of what we're talking about is debate versus conversation. And I don't think Charlie was about right and wrong, necessarily. He was about let's have a conversation where you get to share your opinions on things and I'm going to share my opinions and nobody's saying anybody has to change them, right? We're allowed to just share how we believe and it's pretty cool. I know it's pretty cool when I can have a conversation with somebody. Nobody's trying to be right, we're just saying hey look, this is my view on it, share with me about yours. And I always walk away from those conversations learning something new, and it's pretty cool.

Evan: 26:49

Yeah, yeah, I think that's a lot of what Charlie was doing. I think you know he also had a propensity to. You know he was very learned, very smart. He had a lot of facts inside that very young head of his very learned, very smart. He had a lot of facts inside that very young head of his and he would push back on narratives that were incorrect or narratives that didn't stand up to the facts.

Melissa: 27:08

I was going to say, he called out the difference between opinion and fact.

Evan: 27:12

Yes, yes, absolutely. And I think that's where the element of debate comes in, because a lot of people would see that back and forth, yes, and you know what? Not every discussion has to be a change my mind discussion, no, sometimes it's just about learning what other people's viewpoints are.

Melissa: 27:30

I think this is where so many people fail in their communication and I'm not just talking about in these huge ways, I'm talking about in marriages, in friendships, sibling relationships. The person on the street is we have such a mindset of I need to be right and that means you need to be wrong, instead of healthy communication. That involves listening and an attempt to understand where somebody else is coming from and having that be the priority to understand over to be right. If we really want to come together with somebody and not be divisive, the whole point is let's understand where the other person is coming from, because I think you just touched on on this that so often we share parts of that middle ground. We're so worried about the extreme difference that exists on a fraction of a fraction of a conversation instead of just focusing on everything we have in common, again, across relationships and environments and systems.

Evan: 28:45

Yeah, there's so much involved in all of these discussions and there's a lot of feelings, there's a lot of emotions that get wrapped up in it. I think, really focusing on again root causes as opposed to symptoms of all these things that we-.

Melissa: 29:06

We can't band-aid. We can slap a bunch of band-aids on a hemorrhaging wound and it might stop the bleeding for a couple seconds, but it is never going to fix what's underneath. And what we are looking at is a humanity problem. We're looking at a heart problem, and my personal opinion is that we are looking at a world that has stepped away from God as the source of our humanity. And when we look at a society like that, I mean what did the Constitution say? It said that the Constitution is only as, not the Constitution. It was one of the writers of the Constitution. The Constitution will only be.

Evan: 29:47

Yeah, that was John Adams when he was president in 1798. He was writing a letter to the Massachusetts militia and he was saying that we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution just as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. The idea that he was espousing is that our constitution must be accepted within the bonds of morality. When you take morality out of the equation, the constitution becomes a flimsy document. Anybody can change it.

Melissa: 30:34

And I think that's where we've gotten is everyone isn't on the same ground, using the same moral compass, and when we have a killer, be it with a knife or a gun, that uses a knife, and then one group stands up and uses what was the platform, they're raising money for the guy.

Evan: 30:57

Oh, GoFundMe.

Melissa: 30:58

They're two different GoFundMes for a murderer and there go fund me, they're. They're two different. Go fund me is for a murderer and there's no doubt in my mind that there will be another group that steps up to go fund me for Charlie Kirk's killer. And when we live in a society where people continue to support this, the the taking senseless taking of life over conversation, it's going to continue.

Evan: 31:21

Well, taking senseless taking of life over conversation, yeah, it's going to continue Well, and the senseless taking of life for somebody just existing on the same rail car as you. You know, I I agree with you. I think the root cause of all of this is desperation. People feel alone and then they feel tribal, attached to their tribal identities. So, whatever the you know political affiliation that they have people that look like them or think like them, they're going to gravitate to those kinds of situations. They're going to behave like them, they're going to support them. I think people look. We're living in a time when I think people are living their lives in a constant state of, you know, fight, flight or freeze, as you say Right.

Melissa: 32:08

Sure.

Evan: 32:09

Every day is a struggle to stay above water for some people. Financially For some, their communities are so unsafe that it's literally self-preservation every day, just to wake up tomorrow.

Melissa: 32:21

And I have to protect me and my own first.

Evan: 32:24

Yeah, for so many people in our cities and our communities it's a daily trauma, add-on time and time again, moment after moment. I think in a lot of ways our major cities are mirroring what Soviet Russia looked like during the Cold War, where you have tribalism and desperation and depression and so many things are allied against people. In those kinds of situations there's a lot of I don't see a path forward, I can't get ahead. Who can I blame for this?

Melissa: 32:58

We're living. We know this. We are living in a broken world that's full of broken people and there's I'm so good with, like, pulling out these. You know so-and-so said something about something. The whole concept of hurt people hurt people and healed people heal people and it's inadequate because we're all broken, we're all hurt, we all have trauma. Some of us take our trauma and say how can I use this to help other people? And then there are the people that have the trauma and they don't trust the world. They put up their walls and decide that feelings are harmful and vulnerability is harmful. So I'm going to isolate. I'm going to build my own little world here where everything revolves around me and I get to do what I want. So hurt people don't always hurt people. Sometimes.

Evan: 33:56

Well, they hurt themselves.

Melissa: 33:57

They do. But hurt people can also choose to help heal people.

Evan: 34:02

Yeah, I think we're just. We're living in a culture and a world where it's just continuing to breed apathy and ignorance and tribalism and violence. It's breeding silence and, I think, again shutting down those conversations. I mean, this assassination of Charlie Kirk was intended to silence debate and discussion and dialogue, and yet what is it doing for us? Well.

Melissa: 34:25

What did you text me after it?

Evan: 34:27

Well, we're getting louder.

Melissa: 34:29

We're going to get louder.

Evan: 34:30

We're going to get louder.

Melissa: 34:31

And I think that that is the sense among people is, if you're going to try to silence me and this is my whole mentality the more you try to silence me, the louder I'm going to speak, because it means I'm a threat.

Evan: 34:44

Critics and where killing critics created fear among the population because they'd live for generations in that kind of a society. That's not America. That's not who we are as a people, that's not how this nation got started and it's certainly not how this nation's going to go. We are not a population that can be controlled. We're not a population that's going to listen to your mind, your own business. Shut up, sit down, take it. You don't matter and you can't help anyway. Even if you do and if you do, you bear the risk. Well, we don't kowtow to that. No, we're not afraid of that. We don't believe it. We know that each of us individually can make a difference. We know that each of us individually can make a difference. We know that all of us together can make a huge difference, and it takes the free exchange of ideas in order for us to make a more perfect world.

Melissa: 35:50

For our kids and their kids.

Evan: 35:52

And their kids, and the founders knew that that's what our country was founded on is the idea that what we have is not good enough for the future. So let's talk about how we get to a better future, and that is ingrained in every single American. It doesn't matter if you were born here or you came here and you adopted our values. It doesn't matter if you come from a long generational history of people that have been here since early days or if your family was brought here by some way or another. If you've been in America, if you've really looked at our history, if you've really enmeshed yourself in the American culture and you understand what this country gives you as a citizen, then you know it's built into you. You come here for one reason and one reason only, and that reason is liberty. You come here because here is where you can be whoever it is you want to be.

Melissa: 36:54

It's so true.

Evan: 36:55

So the answer to our problem, I think, is really reducing desperation and remembering the spirit of who we are as people in America, and it's not to be controlled. We rebelled against the biggest king or the greatest king, the biggest country, the broadest empire in the world, and we said no thanks.

Melissa: 37:16

Well, I think coming up here, you know we're gonna have a lot of conversations about the different parts of our society, the different social systems, the education system, the child welfare system, the prison system, the judiciary and what its purpose is, and how is it really protecting the public? Whose rights matter more in all of these different places? So I think we have some really good topics coming up to talk about and be real about, and bring in people that work in those environments and see it from the inside.

Evan: 37:55

Absolutely yeah, and we're going to, we'll, we'll, we'll talk about some of the, you know, incidents that we've already brought up on this episode in route in regards to some of those topics in the future, and I'm sure other things will come up. But you're, you're right, we, we are going to start having real conversations about these real topics and really dive into, okay, where we are isn't good enough.

Melissa: 38:19

How can we make it better.

Evan: 38:22

Right, absolutely All right. So we want to leave everybody today with a song from Tom McDonald. He's at Tom McDonald official on all the social medias and his websites hangovergangcom. This was a song that he put together just in a 24-hour period about Charlie, and we want to send our condolences and our prayers and our thoughts to Charlie's family, especially his wife and his kids, and we really just hope that God will protect them, keep them, inspire them and comfort them in this time.

Melissa: 39:00

And yeah, absolutely, because hurt people can heal people.

Evan: 39:03

Absolutely so. Here's Tom McDonald.

Tom MacDonald: 39:08

Shot down and he was barely 31. Another woke coward took a life with a gun. He left behind a wife and a daughter and a son. All he did was try to speak for all of us, and I'm so tired of the hatred and the narratives. The patriots ain't dangerous. Woke people are the terrorists. They shot and killed the father Sent a message to Americans they ain't gonna stop until they bury us. Dear Charlie, I don't know if you can see us now, but if heaven has a window, I sure hope you're looking down, cause we ain't going quiet. We gonna scream your name loud and you're gone. But name loud and you're gone. But I swear to god that we gonna make you proud. We ain't backing off or giving up. I'll preach what you taught me they may have killed a soldier, but that man had an army. This is far more deep than some political parties and you can't kill freedom.

Tom MacDonald: 39:48

so this one is for charlie this ain't the america that all our parents love. But good man tried. He keep making it great pray that god will take care of us. The the system is failing us when good men die for the things that they say, and I can't just be quiet. So I gotta be brave, cause this is America Lately it's scaring us, but one good man can change it all in a day.

Tom MacDonald: 40:13

Killed in cold blood for having a discussion. And liberals are celebrating murder like it's justice. You didn't kill a villain or the evil that it comes with. You killed a father and a husband, are celebrating murder like it's justice. You didn't kill a villain or the evil that it comes with. You killed a father and a husband and I'm so tired of the left and all the wokery. We can't get along if you just kill us when we don't agree. Sniper rifle fired from a liberal that no one sees Scared. I might be next to die when I'm just buying groceries. Charlie, we'll make sure your children know that defending all our freedom is why you aren't coming home. I hope heaven has a window. You can watch your children grow and hear your message echo from below, and we ain't backing off or giving up. I'll preach what you taught me. They may have killed a soldier, but that man had an army. This is far more deep than some political parties and you can't kill freedom. So this one is for Charlie.

Tom MacDonald: 40:56

This ain't the America that all our parents love. But good men try to keep making it great. Pray that God will take care of us. The system is failing us, but good men die for the things that they say, and I can't just be quiet. So I got to be brave, because this is America. Lately it's scaring us, but one good man can change it all in a day.