Escaping The Cave: The Toddzilla X-pod

Toddzilla X-Pod #171 Recorded Sept 17, 2025 In this spontaneous and gloriously unmapped episode, Todd takes stock of a country whose fabric is visibly fraying and reaction has become the story. He opens with the online ghoulishness around Charlie Kirk’s killing and the equal-and-opposite counter-reaction: firings and public consequences for people who cheered it on. The line he draws is clear: speech is free; consequences aren’t, but the state must stay out of it. (He calls out attempts to criminalize awful speech, noting the backlash from the right against that idea.) From there he unpacks why debate keeps collapsing. Using campus showdowns as examples and borrowing from Jonathan Haidt’s “elephant and rider” model, Todd argues that many disputes start with a snap emotive conclusion and then invent reasons to justify it. When the rationalizations run out, the insults start. That feeds a broader doctrine, “words are violence”, which quietly normalizes physical confrontation by redefining speech as a violent