Our Town Chapter 4: All Metal Mode

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Meribah Knight** (0:08)
Previously on Our Town.

**Diana Naff** (0:11)
Golly, one of the tracks of land that's been bought, that land belonged to his great granddaddy.

**Barry Naff** (0:16)
Yeah, that's right, that's a tough one.

**Diana Naff** (0:19)
Were we gonna end up in that Moscow situation? No.

**Doug Wilson** (0:22)
Our tagline is all of Christ for all of life.

**Diana Naff** (0:25)
Murray Street's very important.

**Diana Naff** (0:27)
It needs to be protected, that street.

**SPEAKER_7** (0:29)
I want to get back to the town that's being built, which I assume is a fascist Christian theocracy.

**Andrew Isker** (0:35)
That's what the TV news in Nashville has said.

**Nancy Pruitt** (0:38)
Iskher was so excited. It's like a puppy that found a new bone.

**Diana Naff** (0:43)
That tells you that they've got big plans for your little piece of the world.

**Meribah Knight** (0:57)
It was mid-September, 2025 Charlie Kirk had just been assassinated, and Nancy Pruitt, the retired art teacher in Gainesboro, got a call.

**Nancy Pruitt** (1:08)
Someone called and told me I needed to look at this podcast and be aware of what was going on, and so I did.

**Andrew Isker** (1:16)
All right. Hello, everyone. Today we are discussing all the fallout from Charlie Kirk's assassination, everything that has happened in the last week and a half since he was killed.

**Meribah Knight** (1:29)
Andrew Isker, the Christian Nationalist podcaster, and his co-host, CJ. Engel, had just released a new episode of their podcast, Contra Mundum.

**Nancy Pruitt** (1:39)
I just listened to the podcast. Obviously, he was upset, you know.
Anybody would be upset. But it was not a rational podcast, what he was saying.

**Andrew Isker** (1:54)
And so the things that I believe, which are basic standard conservative Christian things, is called hate. It's not just, oh, we have a disagreement of opinion. No, you're preaching hate.

**Nancy Pruitt** (2:05)
The podcast referred to his neighborhood and the signs that were in it.

**Meribah Knight** (2:11)
Nancy's signs, the ones she'd made nearly a year before, when news first broke in Gainesboro about the Ridge Runner project.

**Nancy Pruitt** (2:19)
Hate has no home in Gainesboro.

**Andrew Isker** (2:21)
When you accuse someone of preaching hate, they're saying, I hope somebody puts a bullet in your neck. Right? That's what that means.

**Meribah Knight** (2:28)
Phil Williams, the reporter who had broken the story about Iskir and Engel's arrival in Gainesboro, heard about this too.

**Phil Williams** (2:35)
In a post in a Jackson County Facebook group, Iskir compares himself to Kirk, telling his neighbors that those signs, quote, mean you support violence against people you hate.

**Andrew Isker** (2:45)
They would like for my children to grow up fatherless. They would like that. They'd like my children to be harmed.

**Nancy Pruitt** (2:51)
He led people to believe that his neighbor, which was me, that put the signs up in our neighborhood, wanted harm to come to him, which was, I said, what am I going to do? Hit him with a biscuit.

**Meribah Knight** (3:03)
Iskir was doing what a lot of people on the right had been doing, taking this terrible, awful thing and using it to recast any opposition as threatening, even life threatening.
Now, he was saying that Nancy's signs, the ones opposing hate, were actually endorsing violence. He called on his neighbors to take them down.

**Susan Berfield** (3:26)
You didn't think about taking them down?

**Nancy Pruitt** (3:28)
No, I put more up the next day. It never entered my mind that I would take a sign down after he said that, because it was just ridiculous.
It was like he was stirring the pot.

**Meribah Knight** (3:41)
How many more signs did you put up?

**Nancy Pruitt** (3:44)
I painted some. I did some hand-painted signs.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:48)
What did they say?

**Nancy Pruitt** (3:51)
One said, dangerous, educated woman lives here. And one said, all are welcome.

**Meribah Knight** (3:56)
Others in town also saw Iskher's post.

**Cassie Kessler** (3:59)
Charlie Kirk at least went out and talked to people on the opposite side.

**Meribah Knight** (4:03)
Cassie, the restaurant owner, was unimpressed.

**Cassie Kessler** (4:06)
Like, they are chicken shit to come out of their echo chamber online, their little building down there. They only will go into the places that they know that they feel safe.

**Meribah Knight** (4:19)
Contra Mundum, of course, was a safe place. And there, in the days after Kirk's killing, Iskher went full throttle, demanding an immediate and forceful response.

**Andrew Isker** (4:31)
Unless a massive amount of force is wielded against the left in this country. To such an extent that even I might get uncomfortable. Right? If I start to get uncomfortable, then it's like, okay, we're on the right track.