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