Charlie Kirk, RIP

By now, I suspect all of you gentle readers are aware of the fact that Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA has been assassinated.  I say "assassinated" because his murder was quite political.  So far, we still do not know who perpetrated this horrible crime.  I have my suspicions but will withhold discussion of them until more is known.

I did not know Kirk personally.  Therefore, I will defer to others who did know him.  First up is Kurt Schlichter, at Townhall.com in They Murdered Charlie Kirk and They Must Pay. Schlichter tells us that lashing out is not the answer. What we need to do is cultivate a cold fury, and bring the perpetrators to justice legally. We don't need to make stuff up either, since murder is already against the law.

We will be tempted to hit back to hurt people who’ve hurt us. That’s not the way. As much as we want to take out our anger on the left, as much as we want to strike out and lash out, that’s not what our Constitution demands. That’s not what Charlie Kirk would want. We’re not terrorists and we’re not murderers. We’ve got the Constitution. Our Constitution addresses how to deal with this situation. We have laws, and we control the federal law enforcement apparatus. We will turn its full weight against not only the perpetrators of this crime, but the people behind the web of subversion from the left. Think of a J6 prosecution-level effort, except it will not be an attempt to frame people by contorting the law and perverting the justice system.

...snip...

Individually, what do we do? Well, we don’t shut up. We don’t submit. We don’t cower in silence because we’re afraid some freak will try to hurt us if we dare stand up and speak out like citizens. That’s where being armed comes in. It’s not about being macho. It’s about being free, free from intimidation, free from threats, free from domination by the same bastards who are on BlueSky chuckling over the murder of Charlie Kirk.

As Americans, we will rally and move forward to protect our country. But, at the same time, there’s a family out there that’s devastated. Charlie had a beautiful wife and two lovely little kids. Those lovely little kids are never going to see their daddy again because somebody shot him to death for daring to speak words that offended the killer. Those kids are going to spend the rest of their lives without a father. But, at least, they can know that their father was no coward. He went, unarmed and unarmored, in front of a couple of thousand people who hated him. He undoubtedly had death threats. He knew what the left is capable of because he talked about it. And yet he walked out there and did his duty as an American, to speak freely about what he believed. The man was a hero, and we can only hope that that knowledge will give his orphaned children some iota of solace.

This is a gut punch. This is real. It’s not social media imagery. It’s not a meme. It’s a bullet, striking bone, spurting blood, and killing a precious human being. We are not only justified in being angry; we are also obligated to be angry. But we must be righteously angry. I want retribution, but righteous retribution. We’re not going to frame anybody. We’re not going to trash our Constitution. We’re not going to besmirch what Charlie Kirk stood for, even as we try to validate it.

As the subhead of my blog has spoken since I started writing it, "The truth has no agenda" Yes, I stole that from Glenn Beck, but it is nonetheless true. We all must proclaim the truth loudly, whenever and wherever a lie is spoken. Not in anger, or by calling the other person names, but politely. Just as Charlie Kirk did. That is how best to remember him.

Next up is Laura Hollis, again at Townhall.com. Her piece is Why Is America So Polarized? I Can Tell You.

I'm sickened by this. Charlie was just 31 years old. A devout Christian. A husband and father of two little children. We had mutual friends. A founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie made a name for himself traveling to college campuses, engaging with young people, debunking falsehoods and presenting evidence for the positions he took, challenging his audience to think.

And for that, he was murdered. Killed in cold blood at an event where the shooter knew there would be phones and videos, so Charlie's family, friends, loved ones, colleagues and followers could watch him die not just once but over and over and over again.

All because Charlie had the courage to tell the truth.

Did you catch that? Because he told the truth. Are you sensing a theme here? And why is America so polarized? Because our institutions have lied to us, to our faces, knowing that they are telling lies, knowing that we know they are telling lies, yet expecting us to accept these lies even though we know they are lies. I no longer watch the news expecting to be told the truth or even a vague simulacrum of it. Indeed, the only reason I watch it now is for the weather forecast. Even that is clouded by the climate change alarmism narrative.

America is polarized because Americans have been betrayed and manipulated and exploited and lied to by the most important cultural institutions we have -- government, the medical profession, the justice system, the educational system, the media, the entertainment industry.

I could write a book with examples, but here are just a few:

We were lied to about the origins of COVID-19. We were lied to about our government's role in funding the gain-of-function research that made a virus like COVID-19 possible. We were lied to about the safety of the mRNA shots, which were never vaccines. We were lied to about who was at greatest risk from contracting COVID-19. We were lied to about the actual immunity that came with contracting the virus versus taking shot after shot after shot.

We were manipulated and forced by the government, employers and educational institutions into taking those injections, shutting down our businesses, closing our schools and masking our children. We were lied to about the real dangers that the mRNA shots posed to young people and pregnant women. We are still trying to discover the health risks of those shots and to calculate the economic and educational losses caused by those decisions.

In fact, it now appears that we've not been told the truth about the safety of the childhood vaccines generally -- at least with the current scheduled amount of them.

During the 2016 presidential election, our government was actively using social media corporations to censor us, and only Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter (now X) exposed that vile conspiracy.

We were lied to about Joe Biden's mental capacity and actual engagement not only while he was running for reelection in 2024 but throughout his entire term as president of the United States.

We continue to be told by medical professionals, school administrators, teachers and others that men can become women, and vice versa, by force of will. We are told that toddlers can change their "gender" and that biological males have no physical advantage over females in sports. Families with children suffering with mental or emotional illness are manipulated and exploited, told that their children will commit suicide if not allowed to "transition," assisted by drugs that will destroy their future fertility, prevent adult sexual maturity and possibly exacerbate mental illness, and with surgeries that will mutilate or remove otherwise healthy body parts.

We have been told that retail theft on a widespread scale is "reparations," that rioting and burning are "mostly peaceful protests," that keeping criminals incarcerated is "racist," that allowing the homeless, the mentally ill and those with addictions to live out their horrors on public streets is "compassionate," and that opposing illegal immigration is selfish and xenophobic.

We have watched as the death of a drug addict is celebrated with thousands of news articles, elaborate funerals, a gold casket and weeping politicians, but an innocent young Ukrainian woman stabbed to death by a repeat felon on public transit doesn't even warrant a single story. (And when she does get news coverage, her death is downplayed by the legacy media as just clickbait for conservatives.)

America is polarized because the people and institutions we should be able to trust lie to us as a matter of course for their own benefit, and because anyone who tries to get to the truth and bring it to the attention of the public -- in fact, anyone with an opinion that runs counter to that of the elites is this country -- is denounced as a conspiracy theorist, a kook, a threat to "our democracy," to "public health" and to some people's very existence.

Please go read both articles and pray for Charlie Kirk's family and friends as they grieve. All death is tragic. But a murder is especially so.