00:00:00
He was too smart, too open, too honest,
00:00:04
too willing to engage in discourse, too
00:00:06
willing to debate. He was too effective
00:00:09
in changing people's minds. And I think
00:00:11
that's why he became such a cultural
00:00:13
threat. It wasn't his controversy, it
00:00:15
was his effectiveness. And it wasn't
00:00:17
necessarily the things he said, because
00:00:19
there are people out there who say far
00:00:21
more controversial things than Charlie.
00:00:23
It's that he sounded sensible and he
00:00:26
changed people's minds through his
00:00:28
discourse. And as he changed people's
00:00:31
minds, I think he became a real threat
00:00:33
to the ideologies that he spoke up
00:00:36
against. One of the things that we've
00:00:37
seen is the power of going direct. He
00:00:40
went to college campuses, but he also
00:00:42
recorded it and put it on the internet
00:00:44
and millions of people saw it. And that
00:00:47
new form of media, that new form of
00:00:49
communication where someone can actually
00:00:51
have a town square, the internet, that
00:00:53
they can stand at and speak their mind
00:00:55
and be heard. There's no longer these
00:00:58
filters and these controlling powers of
00:00:59
influence that decide what we get to
00:01:01
know and not know and what our opinions
00:01:03
need to be. The media and the
00:01:05
traditional kind of systems are being
00:01:07
degraded. I think it's important to
00:01:09
continue that. But since that time, I
00:01:11
think it's been
00:01:13
amazing to see the optimism not just
00:01:16
from one side, but from a lot of
00:01:18
different people from different
00:01:19
backgrounds standing up and saying
00:01:21
discourse is so important and
00:01:23
re-underwriting this American process.
00:01:25
So, I'm very sad, but I'm very hopeful
00:01:27
that people take this as
00:01:29
a sign of how important this discourse
