If you missed today's edition of our Clubland Q&A live around the planet, click above to listen.

Minutes before we went on air, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was shot on stage in Utah. A quarter-hour after the show ended, President Trump announced on Truth Social that Charlie was dead. As I write, the assassin has just been taken into custody.

Notwithstanding his meteoric rise, Charlie Kirk was still at the dawn of his brilliant career. As I said right at the end of the show, he was only seven at the time of 9/11. That was a rough guess on my part, but proved to be accurate: he died a month shy of his thirty-second birthday, leaving a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son who will grow up with no memories of their fearless father.

Earlier today, the graphic promoting our show bore the headline "The Accelerating Unravelling". Charlie Kirk certainly understood that. This was one of his very last tweets:

The disgusting American media are lying to you about the murder of Iryna Zarutska, as they will surely lie to you about the murder of Charlie Kirk. A prominent conservative star has been gunned down on stage in an almost moment-by-moment recreation of last year's attempted assassinations of the President ..another spasm of left-wing political violence the press has been remarkably uncurious about. Charlie on Twitter just five months ago:

"Mainstream" American culture incentivises and glories in political violence by their approved groups. Thus the "somewhat justified" murders of Musk and Trump soon expand to justifying the murder of you while riding home from work. Here is the official Instagram account of Black Lives Matter, a movement poor Miss Zarutska enthusiastically supported right up until the moment the knife was plunged into her throat:

Charlie Kirk's killer, wherever he is right now, would doubtless agree. In recent days, I have found myself musing on a famous line by Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent: "Calling madness to the regeneration of the world." The left's strategy is to spread madness throughout the land - on race, on immigration, on transgenderism (the last of which Charlie was talking about on stage when the bullet struck him) - and to call that madness to the re-making of the world. The descent into violence was very much the theme of today's show, but it was also a subject Charlie Kirk had considered for some time. Four years ago, I wrote:

Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was not anxious to go down this road:

KIRK: 'I'm going to denounce that and I'm going to tell you why. Because you're playing into all their plans and they're trying to make you do this... They are trying to make you do something that will be violent that will justify a takeover of your freedoms and liberties, the likes of which we have never seen. We are close to have -'

AUDIENCE MEMBER: 'They're already doing it.'

KIRK: 'Hold on. We are close to have momentum to be able to get this country back on a trajectory using the peaceful means that we have at us... They fear us holding the line with self-control and discipline, taking over school board meetings. They are the ones that are willing to use federal force against us.

'And I know that people get fired up. We are living under fascism. We are living under this tyranny. But if you think for a second that they're not wanting you to all of a sudden get that next level where they're going to say, OK, we need Patriot Act 2.0. If you think that, you know, Waco is bad, wait until you see what they want to do next.'

Mr Kirk is trying to thread a difficult needle here: 'We are living under fascism' and 'tyranny', but it is not yet time for getting out the guns.

This is not the normal discourse of a settled constitutional order going back two hundred years. As I said on Tucker and Rush in the wake of January 6th, the danger in the state inventing out of whole cloth 'insurrections' and a 'domestic terrorist' movement is that people take you at your word and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

How long does one side get to maintain its monopoly on violence? Nothing is certain except that there will be more of this in the future - whether you're a prominent conservative figure on stage before a capacity crowd, or just a young woman riding the train home from her pizza shift but whom BLM and the appalling media have decided is a legitimate target.

I do not really wish to inhabit the same space as people who agree with the woman above that the "right to violence" is equivalent to the right to pee. But at this stage I doubt anything so civilised as a peaceful divorce is possible. We are calling madness to the unravelling of society.