Lee Elci: Good morning, Red. How are you?
Red Jahncke: I am good. A little bit saddened by the state we are in. A little bit angry at the state we are in as a nation.
Lee Elci: So, we’ve been talking about this. You believe there’s a critical difference between the violence or the rhetoric on the left and the violence and the rhetoric on the right.
Red Jahncke: Yeah. There is. Let’s focus on exactly what Charlie Kirk was doing when he was shot. He was opening a three-hour open debate under his campaign slogan of Prove Me Wrong. He was inviting the left to engage in open debate.
The left has been engaging for at least a decade in shutting down debate, shouting down speakers on college campuses. Perhaps the first, most prominent instance occurred at Middlebury College when Doctor Charles Murray was shouted down and could not speak a word, having been invited to campus by a student group, under the auspices of the Middlebury College administration.
They not only shouted him down, but they followed him and the professor, who was the advisor to the group, out to his car as he was departing and assaulted them. The professor sustained a head injury.
That is a fundamental difference between the violence on the left and the violence on the right. That does, I hasten to point out, not deny the fact that the right has been engaging in violence. We know that two Democrat legislators were shot dead in their home in Minnesota a couple of months ago. But there is a critical difference between the left and the right. And not to observe that is to gloss over a very important issue.
Lee Elci: You know, that’s a great point, Red, one that has slipped a little bit through the cracks in all of this. The right is absolutely the champion of free speech, that there is there’s really no debate on that. You are 1,000% right. I could not agree with you more. And I cannot think of any situation anywhere, ever, where a conservative group shouted down a liberal who was going to speak. Can you?
Red Jahncke: I cannot.
Lee Elci: Red Jahncke is with us. The red-line.com is where you can find him. He’s a fantastic columnist but today is more focused on Charlie Kirk and sort of the direction of the country. You know, is this even remotely repairable? If you bring two sides together in the same room, very quickly, it becomes very contentious. It’s almost inevitable.
Red Jahncke: Well, contention is a good thing. And being in the same room is a good thing. And that’s not to gloss over the idea that there are vast differences in outlook on the left and the right.
Lee Elci: I mean, it’s the only way maybe to do this. Get everybody with different ideas in a room and you’re not allowed to do the what-about-isms? You’re only allowed to talk about the issues at hand. I mean, I don’t know if that’s even possible. Once you get to the what-about-you and what-about-me? And he said this and they did that. Everybody gets angry.
Red Jahncke: Well, again, I’d much rather have what-about-ism going on and people angry in the same room. When people won’t even enter the same room, we’ve got a much more serious problem. That’s kind of what we’ve got going on today. It is what the left prefers. They don’t want to be in the same room with the right. Otherwise, they wouldn’t shut you down.
Lee Elci: It does seem to happen. It does seem to happen over and over again. So, is this is this solvable? Can we get these two sides together?
Red Jahncke: The evidence shows that the right is willing to engage with the left. And that’s really the legacy of Charlie Kirk and the importance of Charlie Kirk. And if the left is really committed to tamping down violence in this country, they have to come into the room with the right and debate these issues genuinely. So, there’s going to be anger in the room. Again, I’d rather have that than the two sides in separate rooms.
People have to engage. For one thing, if people go in the same room, each side has to acknowledge that the other side are human beings. We are, as is often said, all God’s children, no matter what your religion is; we’re all part of the same cloth. So it’s hard to demonize someone who’s in the same room with you. It’s very easy to demonize someone whom you never lay eyes on, right? They become boogeymen who live in the dark spaces of your mind.
Lee Elci: Red Jahncke is with us. The-red-line.com. I’ll tell you one, one other thought about Charlie Kirk and, another political talking head said this, so I can’t take credit for it. But on the 10th of September one person died, but, about 10 million Charlie Kirks were immediately born. And I think that that is going to resonate around the country.
Red Jahncke: Yeah. This is a wake up call. Remember his opening remarks in Utah: “we’re settling in for three hours, get comfortable.” Right. He was not coming in for a 15 minute hit and run with with prepared questions planted in the audience. You cannot plant enough questions for three hours. It was genuinely open debate.
Lee Elci: And he doesn’t win every debate, Red. That’s what’s amazing about him. I know people are going to nitpick and point to certain things that he may have said, and I don’t know whether they’re taken out of context or not. I haven’t had the opportunity to look at all of his videos. But, I mean, it does seem to me that this is a guy who was genuine about his convictions, genuine about his beliefs. Sadly, he’s been taken off the playing field.
Red Jahncke: Yeah. He was expressing his beliefs. And some of his beliefs were probably unpopular and extreme.
Lee Elci: Sure, sure.
Red Jahncke: But no one should be disqualified from debate because their view on this, that or the other subject is in the minority.
Lee Elci: All right. I’m just trying to answer some emails from some folks telling me that there are all kinds of examples of free speech being shut down on both sides. Show me them, send them to me. I don’t believe that for a second. What I stand for, what you stand for, is free speech.
Red Jahncke: Absolutely. You don’t open up a debate for three hours and have, as your mission, to limit debate in any way.
Lee Elci: All right. Right. We’re running out of time, but do we have any financial news?
Red Jahncke: Let’s focus on Charlie Kirk this week. And what he means for America. And acknowledge that this is a great tragedy– beyond just a personal tragedy for his family, which is horrendous. At 31 years old, to be assassinated is unbelievable.
We have a new phenomenon in this country: celebrating murder on the left. If you went on X on Wednesday, there were thousands of celebrants of his assassination.
That hasn’t happened in America before. Democrats and Republicans were unified and horrified by JFK’s assassination. RFK’s assassination, Martin Luther King’s assassination. We were unified and horrified all together. Now we have the radical left celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Lee Elci: All right, brother. Thank you, man. Have a great weekend. I’ll talk to you on Wednesday.
Red Jahncke: All right, Lee. Thank you.
Lee Elci: Thank you. Good stuff.
Red Jahncke is a nationally recognized columnist, who writes about politics and policy. His columns appear in numerous national publications, such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, USA Today, The Hill, Issues & Insights and National Review as well as many Connecticut newspapers.