ATR Special: Reflecting on Chaos: The Assassination of Charlie Kirk

Vance Crowe [00:01:08] Hey, so this is gonna be a special edition of the Ag Tribes report. I, I didn't wanna bring anybody on. I had a guest lined up and I was all set to do that, and it just didn't feel right. I, I really feel like after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, that I wanted to take a break from the news affecting the culture of agriculture. 'cause this is the kind of news and some of the other things going on in the world that affect the culture of everyone everywhere. And, you know, I was up in Fargo, North Dakota yesterday, and I was watching a really interesting speaker, and I was really engaged in it. Happened to look down at my phone, clicked on it, and, and saw the very real assassination of a human being that I had a lot of respect for, wasn't my like thing that I tuned into all the time. But Charlie Kirk was somebody that sat down and talked with anyone that had a challenge for him. And as somebody that has gone out and talked to people that are upset or disagree, I know how difficult that can be. And Charlie did it at orders of magnitude higher than anything I've ever done with thousands and thousands of people watching, hoping that he would fall down, you know, challenging him. And he found a way to be respectful and kind and considerate and thoughtful, and bring people to a new understanding.

Vance Crowe [00:02:45] And to see that somebody would kill him is beyond my understanding of the world. You know, it's, can I believe it happened? Yes. You know, there are bad people out there, there are bad state actors, there are all kinds of bad people out there. But I was really unprepared for just how shocking something like that could be. You know, I have often said, and I'm sure I heard it somewhere else, right? When you are in a disagreement with somebody, you have three options, really only two options. The three options are you can play dead, you can just lay down and give up. You can talk or you can go to violence. And Charlie, throughout all the hatred, throughout all the excitement, throughout all of the ups and downs, he kept choosing to talk. And, and he was showing other people how to talk. And he was demonstrating how to be the type of person that is worth engaging with. Even if you didn't like his ideas, he was a worthwhile human being, somebody that had a point of view and perspectives. And so I am absolutely heartbroken that he was shot. I look at him and I see for the first time in my life that it's a young person, right?

Vance Crowe [00:04:20] I'm now old enough, and maybe many of you are that the people that are being assassinated are now younger than us. And it's not some, some person you've never heard of or somebody way older that's in a history book. It's a, it's a real man that has two daughters and a wife. And the stain of killing him is going to last for generations in that family. And, and so I just wanted to come here and kind of talk some things out, because one of the things I have noticed in social media and some of the people that I listen to, even people that I really respect, people are trying to come to answers really quickly. They're trying to be like, ah, it's, it's this group of people, or it's that person, or, we know why they did it. And I, for one, have no belief in anything that I am reading at all. And I, I found myself being like, I'm just gonna put this, this doom scrolling down because it's just filling my mind with ideas and frustration and outrage that I don't need. And I think that we are right now in our culture, in a three body problem. And this, there's a famous book that is fiction, and it's not about this at all, but, but the three body problem is really describing that if there are three different masses pulling on one another, it's impossible to predict how they will behave.

Vance Crowe [00:06:05] And so when the, the three bodies come close enough together, they have what is known as a chaotic era, and that is where nothing makes sense. Gravity all of a sudden shifts in a completely different way. You know, things get incredibly hot, everything melts. But it is in this chaos that I don't know which ways forward. I don't, I don't have any idea. And I am naturally, because of my disposition and because of what I've seen in my life, I am deeply resistant to the mob. You know, I'm, I'm very much trying not to synchronize with other people right now, because in these chaotic times, people become afraid and they band together and they come up with simple answers. And those simple answers are usually pointed at one person or one group or one thing. And they, they push all their fury onto that person with the very real belief that if they can just smash that thing, then they won't feel afraid anymore. And I don't know if that's what's happening, but I definitely see people trying to synchronize with one another. And yesterday I was, I was flying home on the plane feeling incredibly lonely and, and watching people say, this isn't the time for forgiveness.

Vance Crowe [00:07:39] This isn't the time to be patient. We need to take action. If you don't, this tolerance is going to be used against us. And that may actually be true, that you have to take action, but no action taken in haste, or in anger, or in frustration or fear, is a good action. It it, if it does end up being the correct action, it was completely out of luck. So, yeah, I am not afraid to have people be mad at me if I'm saying, let us first try and understand more deeply what's going on here. And I mean, it isn't just Charlie Kirk, right? It is that Iryna Zarutska, you know, that 23-year-old woman that was cowering on the, the light rail that was stabbed to death by that, that deranged, you know, black man that, that, you know, poured over her. And I will never forget for the rest of my life, the look of fear on that, on that girl's face. And it's the children being shot and killed while trying to go to school and attending mass. These things are incomprehensible. And so in this chaos, it will be very easy to whip people into a group and point at our anger at someone or something.

Vance Crowe [00:09:13] And or it will be the exact ripe conditions like what happened at nine 11 where we say, Hey, government, we empower you to solve this problem. We want you to go make whoever did this pay for this. And we gave over enormous amounts of power to them that we never got back. I am not an infinite pacifist. I of course, believe that whoever did this deserves meaningful, deep, permanent punishment. And the man that stabbed that woman deserves that too. And, and we wanna have punishments that are both fitting the crime and also deterring other people from those crimes. But man, I do not know what we should do right now. And, and so I guess I wanted to be a person that came online, and instead of having answers, I told you that I didn't have answers. And I don't think you do either. And I don't think any of the pundits have them, and I don't think any of the political leaders have them. I don't think anybody has any answers right now. And the way that we will get to a better answer is by talking about it. It's by sharing what we are feeling about it and what kind of a society we wanna live in, and then trying to find a way to get to that solution using the principles that got us here.

Vance Crowe [00:10:48] And I am very reluctant to say what I'm about to say now, because growing up in the conditions that I grew up in and the place that I grew up in, this is not something that is meant to be public. But I want to talk about faith a little bit. And the reason I don't wanna talk about it is 'cause I don't want anybody to follow me or listen to anything that I have to say because I'm invoking my religion. It's just not, it's not the way I was raised. But what got us to this point in civilization, what helped us transcend all of the tribes that didn't make it. All of the people that we conquered, everyone that we surpassed our ancestors surpassed what got us here were the tenets of Christianity, of forgiveness and thoughtfulness and justice. And I'm, I'm not proposing pacifism, but man, I do not see another way back to a civilized society, one that is not completely divided by tribalism. If we do not find faith, God direction, something for us to synchronize on that is not anger and hate and fear.

Vance Crowe [00:12:22] So that's what I'm doing. I'm talking with my kids about those things, and I'm trying to live it out, and I'm trying to talk about my feelings and my thoughts and what is going on in, in my own mind. Yeah, going forward. I don't know what the right answer is. You know, on the one hand, I know that I don't want vigilante or mob justice. I don't that, that's terrible. I do want the government to be the one that steps in to do this, but I don't have any illusions that they're going to solve any of these problems. In fact, they will use experiences like this to either take everyone's guns away and make you vulnerable to governments in the future, or they will become tyrannical and they will use this to increase the amount of power and surveillance and ability to kick down your door someday in the future. And so, I'm stuck. I don't know, I don't know what you should do. I sense that one of the most important things that you should do is get away from anybody that is not able to control their anger when talking in front of crowds and is trying to amp up and, and grab control of the energy of the human mind and the fear and the anger. My sense is that anytime you see somebody ratcheting this whole thing up, you should walk away from them.

Vance Crowe [00:13:58] You should not synchronize with them. But outside of that, I don't know. I don't know. What do you think we should do? My guess is you probably don't have any answers in the same way that I don't have any answers, but I hope that we can patiently, I hope we can patiently approach our fear and our anger. You know, I was, I was talking with a guy the other day actually almost right after it happened, and he was talking about how much Charlie Kirk had influenced his son. He said, my son was a doing nothing in college. He was kind of wasting his life. And he started listening to Charlie Kirk, and he reformed his life. He started, started going to church. He lifted, he got a girlfriend, and I think he said they were engaged and the dad was just devastated. And you know, I think about that kid probably never met Charlie Kirk, or maybe if he did, he was one of the many, many people in the crowds from Charlie. But what Charlie did was use words to change the disposition of the kid. And I hope more of us do that. But I am not a fool. I recognize that there are times in our, in human civilization where what people do is they use violence against you.

Vance Crowe [00:15:36] And you can't answer that with laying down, and you can't answer it with words, but whatever violence you ring out into the world, you have to know, we'll come back to you. And so I am hopeful that we can find a way to be patient and calm. And when we use this violence, it comes in the form of a strong, wise man that is doing the violence in order that more violence doesn't happen. What do you think, what do you think should happen? I, yeah, I think a lot of changes on the horizon. I, I hope there are no more assassinations. I think that there probably will be, I don't know why the world is getting this way. I, I, my personal belief is that our government is stealing from us so much and has been for so long, and we have not taken a hold of that.

Vance Crowe [00:17:15] That people feel nihilistic and they feel like tomorrow is not gonna be better than today. And when you feel like tomorrow is not gonna be better than today, then all you have is the pain that you have right now. And I think this is what prompts people to do bad things. And so, I guess maybe the place that I wanna leave this off, 'cause I don't have that much to say, but the, the place that I probably wanna leave this off is there's a place for the builders in all of this. And it's to make the world better. It's to construct things that make the world better. It's probably not enough. Yeah. I, I hope you don't Yeah, I've, I've never tried to put forward the illusion that I have any answers at all to complicated problems. The one thing that I do know is that be patient, be calm. Try to be wise, build things, but don't be weak. You know, don't, don't, don't let people walk over you.

Vance Crowe [00:18:48] Don't let them trick you into giving them your power. Don't let the chaos be something that lets you lose your mind and lets other people in the future be able to dominate you. So anyway, it didn't feel right to do an Ag Tribes report tonight, and so I thought I would just come on and share these thoughts. I, yeah, I think hug your children, find a great spouse. Learn about your ancestry. Buy Bitcoin. I don't mean that as a joke. I mean, that's freedom money. That's a way out of this chaos. It's not the only way. It's not, and it's not gonna be the end all be all. But anyway, I'm gonna, I'm gonna sign off. I, thanks for joining me on here. I, I, I hope you are grappling with the unknown in a way that you, you don't have to find an answer too quickly. Come to the next answer with patience and wisdom. All right, have a good night guys.