charlie-kirk – Page 2 – Martin Simpson

Part 1 of 3 Columns on the Aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s Murder (posted 9/15/25)

I know: I’ve got to get over Charlie Kirk’s assassination. But please bear with me, because that story is haunting me, and I can’t stop thinking about it just yet.

(As the Book says, “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” And for me, this is still the season for mourning, and for railing against the evil a-hole who murdered Charlie Kirk, and those who celebrated his murder.)

I’ve already got enough drafted for several more columns, so I’ll make this Part 1 of 3. And sure, once I’ve done a little more praying and confessing, and I edit out of all of the “F” bombs and the physically impossible sexual acts that I’ve invited the Charlie-haters to do to themselves, that’ll cut the rough draft by a good 500 words or so. So I’ve got that going for me.

Anyway, I’m going to focus mostly on the Left, and their reaction to Charlie’s murder, and at least partial culpability for it. But I can’t help talking about Charlie just a little more, too.

Over the weekend I was watching some of his public speeches, and I landed on an excerpt from his recent debate at Oxford. The details aren’t important, other than that his responses were thoughtful and smart, as usual. But I caught my breath when the debate was interrupted with a plug that Charlie gave for a book by Todd Nettleton (which I am now going to get and read) called “When Faith is Forbidden: 40 Days on the Frontlines with Persecuted Christians.”

What stopped me, and landed like a physical blow, was when Charlie read the name of the organization that Nettleton leads: The Voice of the Martyrs.

And now Charlie is one. And I am still so pissed.

Then, just last night, I came across a full video of that Oxford debate. (I’d recommend watching it if you haven’t seen it, though doing so might make you even angrier about the mind and spirit that we lost last Wednesday.) Remember: Charlie had a high school diploma, and decided to forgo a college education in favor of creating one of the most important political organizations in the world instead.

But he also asked some wise mentors for a reading list of the great works, and over the next 13 years – while he was doing the work that 10 average men might be able to do in a lifetime – he read voraciously, and educated himself on the Western canon.

The debate took place in front of one of the oldest and most august debating societies in what used to be called Christendom, and it was broken into two parts. For around an hour, Charlie responded to challenging questions on very controversial topics, from birthright citizenship and mass deportations to racism in the US justice system and free speech restrictions in the UK. After that, he did a Q&A debate with a series of six Oxford debaters for forty-five minutes.

And that self-taught American high school graduate coolly, respectfully and politely wiped the floor with the most expensively-educated alleged brainiacs in the Mother Country.

USA! USA! USA!

Actually, they weren’t all hyper combative, and the give and take was respectful on both sides. But as a teacher of argumentative and persuasive writing and debate, it was a pleasure to watch Charlie think on his feet, and deftly construct and refute arguments with unflappable good humor.

One particular opponent of the six in that debate was less impressive, and he is actually back in the news now. But I want to save that story for part 2 or 3, so that this one doesn’t get too long.

In my column on Friday I said that the mainstream right doesn’t encourage, sanction and justify violence like the mainstream left does. But for this entire weekend, I repeatedly thought about an equally important fact: we also don’t react to violence like they do. And they should be damned grateful for that!

In Charlie Kirk, the malevolent left has created a martyr, as they almost did – twice! – with our president. And as they did with a number of the aforementioned murdered Christian school kids, and Jews in several cities. They murdered an unknown healthcare company CEO for the crime of running a company in a field of which the left disapproves. They’ve attacked and assaulted and shot too many cops, border patrol and ICE agents to count, all for the “crime” of enforcing our nation’s laws.

Now please get out your notebook and your number 2 pencil (yes, I’m old) and make a list of similar conservative atrocities committed against commensurate leftist targets.

Include all of the times when righties shot up a rainbow church while non-binary warlocks were teaching the kiddies inside such lefty hymns as, “Stalin loves me, this I know, ‘Cause Das Kapital tells me so,” and “What a friend we have in Gaia, all our sins and griefs to weaponize.” And all the times when GOP assassins shot Democrat presidents and influencers. And all the times when conservatives shot NPR executives in the back like micro-phallic loser cowards.

I’ll make myself a cup of coffee while I wait for you to complete your list.

What’s that? I don’t even have time to make a cup of instant coffee, because there have been no similar right-wing murders of similar left-wing targets?

Huh. What do you know about that?

But it’s not just that we don’t react to our opponents’ violence the way that leftists react to right-wing violence – which, inconveniently for them is exceedingly rare. We also don’t react to our political opponents’ mere EXISTENCE the way that the left does.

Consider this: most conservatives can give you a long list of leftists whom we believe are terrible people who have done terrible damage to our country. For example, I think that Joe Biden was an egregious grifter of a president who got 13 good American soldiers killed in the incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan, enriched himself and his family by using his addict son as a bagman for bribes from Chicom mass murderers and corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs, and is a cadaverous creeper around young girls. (And also, just plain cadaverous. Not a joke. I’m being serious.)

I think Obama is a narcissistic whitey-hater who poisoned American race relations and doubled our national debt to no good end. I think Bill Clinton is a sleazebag who raped Juanita Broaddrick and left no female bottom within arm’s length ungroped for his entire adult life. I think Hillary Clinton is worse than her terrible husband, and that the most useful public service Que Mala Harris ever did was that thing with Willie Brown.

I think George Soros’ original name was George Sauron, and I wouldn’t give you a plug nickel for every Democrat in the House and Senate, except for the hulking, man-child weirdo John Fetterman. (And I still think he’s better suited to don some fake plastic bolts in his neck and scare trick-or-treaters at Halloween than to be a US Senator.)

I could go on a lot longer. All conservatives could. But have you noticed that none of us have tried to kill any of those people?

Donald Trump is intermittently a great president, and an irritating jackass. But the Left calls him Hitler, tried to jail him for life, and tried to assassinate him twice. Most conservatives think the last four Democrat presidents (at least!) range from “horrible” to “also horrible,” and yet none of us have tried to jail, bankrupt or kill any of them.

We watch their SCOTUS judges and can’t believe their non-responsive, a-constitutional ramblings. Sotomayor looks like a mediocre, partisan hack, and Ketanji Jackson – who somehow sounds like she’s got advanced CTE despite having never played a down of football in her life – makes Sotomayor look like Maimonides.

And yet our leaders have never stood outside the Supreme Court and screamed that they will reap the whirlwind, and won’t know what hit them if they don’t rule our way. And we’ve never inspired an armed right-winger to travel cross-country to Kagan or Sotomayor’s house (I assume that Ketanji lives in a van, down by the river) on a mission to kill one of them.

You can also see the vast gulf between the parties by the quality of their “martyrs.”

Trayvon Martin was a ne’er-do-well kid who was justifiably shot in self-defense, while in the process of bashing George Zimmerman’s skull into a concrete sidewalk. Zimmerman was called a “white Hispanic” – a genus which had never before existed, until the Left needed a way to blame whitey for a false racial crime committed by a Hispanic guy. And Obama said that “Trayvon could have been my son.” (If you were the kind of parent who raised the kind of son who went around committing attempted homicide, I guess?)

Michael Brown was on film committing a strong-arm robbery against a small Indian convenience store worker shortly before he attacked and beat a cop, fracturing his orbital bone and trying to get his gun before he was justifiably shot. Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson lied that Brown had been shot while holding his hands up and not resisting.

(You may have seen the story that Dorian Johnson got shot to death last week, allegedly by a girlfriend he was beating at the time. Unexpectedly!)

George Floyd was a junkie and career criminal who once put a gun against a pregnant woman’s belly during a robbery. When he was committing another crime and the police were called, he died of an overdose that was wrongly attributed to a white cop’s restraint of him, despite the coroner’s report saying that the restraint didn’t kill Floyd.

Jordan Neely was a homeless black guy and violent recidivist criminal with a record as long as JB Pritzker’s grocery list (#putdownthatoversizedturkeyleg), when he threatened and menaced a bunch of subway riders in NYC. When a Marine put him in a choke hold to protect the civilians and Neely died, corrupt leftist DA Alvin Bragg charged the Marine with manslaughter, and put him through a criminal trial that ended when even a lefty New York jury came back with a verdict of, “You’ve got to be sh*tting me!”

Each of those four criminals, despite dying in the act of committing yet another crime, have all been elevated to the Mount Rushmore of Leftist Martyrs.

“Hands up, Don’t Shoot” became a lucrative, fraudulent nationwide money grab, and racial arsonists like BLM, Al Sharpton and most of the black caucus have made hay out of portraying Neely as a harmless Michael Jackson impersonator and Michael Brown as a “gentle giant.” Pathetic pandering leftist politicians put on dashikis and bowed on one knee to honor Saint Floyd, the Patron Saint of Opioids.

And the Left rioted and justified widespread, continuous, lawless destruction in the name of their Four Horsemen of the Race-pocalypse.

Tomorrow, I’ll compare the Right’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder, and examine the media’s orgy of rake-stomping self-beclowning reactions in the aftermath.

Spoiler alert: we can never hate the media enough!

Hamas delenda est!

Some Thoughts on the Depravity of the Left After an Assassination (posted 9/12/25)

I’m still under a dark cloud after Charlie Kirk’s murder, but the aftermath of that heinous act has thrown into stark relief the radical differences between the left and right, writ large.

I don’t want to do a simplistic, Manichaean “they’re all terrible and we’re all great” thing. Primarily because it’s never true. All of us are fallen and broken in some way, and there are good and bad actors on both sides.

It’s also useful to remember the line from Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn – a great man who knew more about the evils of totalitarian leftism than any of us – to wit, “The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.”

But that truth doesn’t excuse or prevent us from trying to honestly judge the varying degrees of evil or corruption in competing groups or ideologies. And I think it’s just demonstrably true that the left has a real problem with its own base, in the form of a sick propensity to embrace and justify political violence.

Consider the most significant recent examples of serious violence that were politically motivated. There have been three mass movements of organized, long-lasting political rioting in the last 5 years, all propagated by those on the left: the BLM riots, the Antifa riots, and the recent anti-ICE riots in LA and several other cities. The first two continued for months, causing billions of dollars of damage, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands more, in cities all over the country.

When it comes to individual attacks, we’ve got the shooting attack on the GOP softball practice that nearly killed Steve Scalise; two assassination attempts on Trump in the span of a few months; the attempted burning to death of Jews in Boulder, and the murder of the young Jewish couple in DC; the mass shootings of Christian school children in Nashville and again in Minneapolis; the murder of the health insurance CEO by back-shooting coward Luigi Mangioni; and now the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

What counter-balancing examples are there from the political right? When it comes to group violence, I can think of only two possibilities: the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, and January 6^th. One person was killed in Charlottesville, and the only one killed on January 6^th was a Trump supporter. Both were events lasting no more than a few hours, carried out by several hundred people who acted violently – as compared to the many hundreds of thousands in the organized mobs of violent leftist rioters who wreaked havoc for literally months, and all over the country.

When it comes to individual attacks, the only ones I’m aware of were the shooting of Gabby Giffords, the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, and the three Democrat office holders recently murdered in Minnesota. And none of those turned out to be committed by right wingers for recognizable political motivations.

Gifford’s shooter had no discernable or rational political beliefs and was mentally ill, believing among other things that “the government was controlling people’s minds by controlling their grammar,” that the Mayan calendar apocalypse was imminent. Pelosi’s attacker was a schizophrenic, intermittently homeless, commune-dwelling hippy.

And after some excitement in Democrat circles because the Minnesota Democrat killer appeared at first to be a Trump supporter, it turned out he was a whacko who killed the three pols because he thought it would help Amy Klobuchar and Tim Wolz.

In fact, the white supremacists at Charlotte were also not affiliated with any mainstream conservative group or school of thought. Trump denounced them at the time and since, saying they should be “condemned completely,” and no white supremacists hold any office or sway in GOP circles, in congress or any other national office.

(I know: many Democrats scream about white supremacists throughout the GOP. But they are either lying, delusional, or both. Because when you examine their claims, it turns out that in their world, “white supremacist” means anyone who opposes racial discrimination of any kind, and supports the constitution, merit-based hiring, hard-work, punctuality, and every other good thing under the sun.)

In fact, the closest you can get to any political violence from the right that had any support from any mainstream Republican or conservative groups was arguably that committed on January 6^th. And initially, the violent minority among the J6ers were almost universally condemned by every corner of the conservative world.

That only changed after the Democrats went after all of them so viciously, imposing a double standard so blatantly unfair that by the time Trump was re-elected, most Republicans agreed with his decision to pardon them. (Even then, there was at least a strong plurality of opposition to pardoning the small number of January 6^th protestors who had been violent.) After watching Democrats let hundreds of thousands of violent thugs, rioters and looters in BLM and Antifa go without so much as a slap on the wrist, we conservatives were no longer willing to tolerate the wildly disproportionate punishment of non-violent J6ers who peacefully walked through the Capitol and then went home.

Again, I would challenge my leftist friends to cite any examples of representative conservatives, motivated by and espousing mainstream conservative beliefs, who have committed acts of political violence. To the extent that they can point to anyone, they’d have to dig up some far-fringe sliver of whackos with no serious connection to any legitimate, influential conservative candidate or group.

Compare that to the leftist practitioners of political violence listed above. BLM and Antifa might not speak for ALL Democrats, but they certainly speak for the majority of the most energetic Democrat base. The central views which can be found in any of their manifestos, speeches, banners or chanted slogans – the condemnation of free-market capitalism, of America as irredeemably racist, and of the “evil” rich, along with disdain for straight people and white people and the police – have been commonplace in the last half-dozen DNC platforms and Democrat presidential candidacies.

Steve Scalise’s shooter was a mainstream Bernie bro and campaign volunteer. The Muslim Jew-murderers in Boulder and DC (and elsewhere) are no more anti-Semitic than the jihad enthusiasts in the Squad. Trust-fund coward Mangioni is a folk hero to bloodthirsty, dimwit leftist fangirls (of both sexes) throughout the Democrat party and blogosphere.

And the transgender venom spouted by the murderers of Christian kids in Nashville and Minnesota – and, if early reports are right, by the killer of Charlie Kirk – could be lifted directly from the malicious, pseudoscientific babblings of the “57 genders” mainstream of the Democrat party.

And this isn’t new. The totalitarian Left has always justified political violence. Marx’s obsession with revolution was never about peaceful, democratic change. Lenin is often credited with the cold-hearted cliché about needing to break a lot of eggs to make an omelet (though it may have come from that earlier proto-Leninist, Robespierre). Stalin dismissively called the murder of a million people a mere “statistic,” and Mao happily noted that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Today many senior Dem politicians were smart enough to condemn Charlie Kirk’s murder, and I hope that for the sake of their souls, they were sincere. But we also saw an outpouring of vile celebration over this good man’s death from Stalin’s heirs, eagerly pursuing the bloody family business. If the Democrat party wants to avoid disaster, it needs to do something about the poisonous progeny it has allowed to spawn.

I think it’s a good sign that a smattering of leftist hate-mongers have lost their jobs today because of their wicked tweets, posts and videos. MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd (and boy, does that guy put the “anal” in “analyst) lost his job, along with his audience of literally dozens. So did a couple of creepy academics, and an even creepier “transgender” comic creator lost his new series.

On the other hand, the cesspool of Bluesky is full of vitriol, and Democrats in congress wouldn’t even allow a moment of prayer in the House when Kirk’s death was announced. Evil blimp Pritzker (#putdownthegiantturkeyleg) and phony squaw Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher) both rejected the idea that they should tone down their vile rhetoric, and said that Trump is the problem.

That’s right. The people who have called all conservatives “Nazis, fascists and existential threats to democracy” non-stop for years can’t see why that might have inspired some of their more unstable coreligionists to act as if those slanderous lies are true. And they’re simultaneously offended because Trump shoots his mouth off about Rosie O’Donnell being fat, and calls lunatics and illegals “lunatics” and “illegals.”

Ugh. At times like these I feel a kinship with H.L. Mencken, when he said, “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

But even momentarily indulging in that fantasy would be betraying my faith, and the cause that Charlie Kirk died for. While his foes spouted hatred and justified violence, Charlie did what old-school liberals always said they wanted: he engaged in spirited debate. He gave as good as he got when confronted by trolls and bad-faith homunculi, but he was even-handed and told the truth to those who would hear it.

He always made a point of allowing people who disagreed with him to come to the front of the line – as Ben Shapiro and many other conservatives routinely do. And I think it’s telling that I can’t think of any leftist “intellectual” or influencer who does the same. They prefer stacked partisan audiences, classrooms where they have power over cowed students, and the ability to cancel anyone who defeats them in a fair argument.

I’ve read a few Christian commentators over this last, sad 36 hours, pointing out that for the faithful, death is not the end, nor should it be sad.

But then I think of the famous, shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” Most of us know that one if we know any, and it is a favorite of lazy students who were assigned to memorize a Bible verse. (I respectfully plead the Fifth on this point.)

But many don’t remember the context. It appears in the book of John, and His reaction is caused by the death of his friend Lazarus. He weeps, and the next verse says, “Behold, how He loved him.”

Even though most of us never met Charlie Kirk, that’s how we feel now, and it’s right that we should. Let those whose poisonous politics are shriveling their souls wallow in their hatred; we shouldn’t lower ourselves to their level, and their misery is its own punishment.

Regular readers will remember that I discussed one of my favorite Shakespeare sonnets (#73) last month. It’s a somber meditation on death, by an old man facing the end of life. The speaker sees in his own frail body, “bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

Though the context of a dying old man couldn’t be more different from Charlie being cut down in the prime of life, the final couplet could have been written about what just happened on a beautiful, early fall day in Utah:

“This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Charlie is definitely gone too soon. However, since the news broke, it’s become clear that he inspired so many young people.

We can take comfort in the prospect of a thousand Charlie Kirks stepping up and continuing the work that he had started. And in the words often read in Advent services: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not overcome it.”

But even so, it is heartbreaking to be talking about Charlie Kirk in the past tense.

Charlie Kirk is Gone, and Our Nation is Worse For It (posted 9/10/25)

Yesterday afternoon I was noodling around with some snarky thoughts on today’s politics for my Friday column, when the news hit that Charlie Kirk had been shot, and then that he had died.

Like most conservatives, I followed him often over the last several years, and admired his energy and his committed leadership. He was a solid debater, by turns generous and pointed; he was combative without being hateful, and matched his responses to the good faith (or lack thereof) of his opponents.

A self-educated and hard-working college dropout, he routinely bested his “educated” interlocuters with a combination of good humor and well-chosen counters to the logical fallacies that leftists routinely tried to use against him.

It’s so sad to see him stolen from us so soon, and right now I’m more angry than anything. Already a lot of the usual leftist suspects are gloating about and celebrating his murder, while continuing to think of themselves as the good guys in our political debates. The same creeps who call us Nazis and implicitly justify the violent attacks by their leftist co-religionists – on Steve Scalise, on Trump, on Jews in Boulder and DC, on the Christian school kids in Nashville and Minneapolis, and now on Charlie – have the gall to blame Charlie’s non-violent rhetoric for his murderer’s cowardly act.

As I write this there is no info yet on Charlie’s killer, but if he turns out to be the kind of hateful, leftist narcissist we’d most expect, I hope good guys with guns can run him down quickly. And I hope that they shoot him a lot, and that he dies painfully. But not too quickly.

I’ll repent for these thoughts later. But the best I can do right now is to try to find some slight silver lining in this dark cloud of a tragic killing.

When Rush Limbaugh died in February of 2021, I was glad that he had had the chance to see Trump elected the first time, and to get a Presidential Medal of Freedom from him at Trump’s last SOTU. But it had to be a bitter pill for him to see Trump lose in 2020, and to see Trump and the GOP at their lowest point, in the wake of January sixth, shortly before Rush died.

By contrast, I’m really glad that Charlie got to see his hard work come to fruition when Trump won in November. I just re-watched the video of him on election night, surrounded by the conservative young men and women he’d helped inspire and lead.

At a little after midnight, after months of hard work and hours of frantic coverage and endless reading of tea leaves and exit polls, the early returns had begun to look better and better for Trump. When the news came in that Pennsylvania, and thus the election, had been called for Trump, Charlie got quiet. With tears of joy in his eyes and his pretty wife hugging him, he took it all in, while the other guys were buzzing and chattering all around him.

When one of them noticed that Charlie had become speechless for once, he laughingly called for him to say something. At that moment, all Charlie could get out was, “I am just humbled by God.”

A few minutes later he said, “I want you to remember that we did not earn this, that this is God’s mercy on our country.”

I never met him, of course, but that’s how I’m going to remember Charlie Kirk. Over the last months I’ve had cause to contemplate the many ways that death can come for us – from Alzheimer’s in old age to a brain tumor out of the blue; from a sudden heart attack to a long, debilitating illness.

And although 31 is way too soon, and though Charlie leaves a young wife and two children under 3, he died in honest service to God, a good cause, and a great country. Painful though it is, there are many worse ways to die than that.

Our nation owes him a debt, and to uphold his widow and his children.

Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.