RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine-obituary/3802514/charlie-kirk-obituary/

Charlie Kirk loved to argue with liberals. That was apparent to all as he sought them out in national college tours. And if you attended any of his events or followed his viral social media posts, many liberals loved arguing with Kirk.

College students, in particular, would line up to challenge Kirk’s views. He often asked them probing questions in return: Why did they think President Donald Trump was a racist? When does life begin? What is a woman? While there is a tradition of that on the Right from Bill Buckley to Ben Shapiro, Kirk took it to another level for the internet age.

Kirk had an even greater appeal to conservatives on college campuses. With the exception of a select few Christian or overtly conservative schools in the country, academia is a lonely place for anyone a millimeter to the right of Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). Conservative students can feel equally, if more temporarily, beleaguered and often compelled to say things they don’t believe to receive passing grades from their professors or social acceptance from their peers.

As the founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, Kirk helped build a network to connect these students and make them feel less alone. A college campus is also where Kirk was murdered, while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University as part of his American Comeback Tour. He was shot in the neck as he was speaking and slumped over in his seat. Leaving behind his wife, Erika, and two young children, Kirk was just 31 years old.

“I want to be very clear that this is a political assassination,” Gov. Spencer Cox (R-UT) told reporters at a press conference afterward. “When someone takes the life of someone because of their ideas or their ideals, then our constitutional foundation is threatened.”

Tragically, we live in an upside-down world where some view speech as violence and opinions as “erasure” of those who disagree. In their minds, this justifies violence in the form of a bullet to the carotid artery mid-speech and the literal erasure of a father from his children’s lives.

Kirk’s impact wasn’t limited to campus politics. During the nadir of then-President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign, the Democrats had one last hope, which some political operatives thought would be their ace in the hole: an experienced field operation that would get out the vote in the battleground states. Identifying and mobilizing voters is crucial for any campaign in a competitive race. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris inherited Biden’s machine when she replaced him at the top of the Democratic ticket.

Arrayed against this formidable turnout apparatus was the less orthodox Trump mobilization operation spearheaded by Kirk and Elon Musk. Never had they done something like this before, at least not on this scale. Their task was made even more difficult by the fact they were targeting low-propensity voters, younger people with less of a history of showing up at polling places on Election Day.

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/qed/the-assassins-many-accomplices/

Charlie Kirk is murdered in cold blood and now the Democrats come out with their polished statements, their carefully worded condemnations, their feigned shock. I don’t want it. I don’t want to hear Biden or Harris express “disapproval” over this. I don’t want the likes of Rachel Maddow or Joy Reid wringing their hands and pretending to mourn because I do not believe them for a single second.

Their words are ash. Their outrage is theater. Their sympathy is counterfeit.

Charlie was not killed in a vacuum—he was assassinated by a sociopolitical disease. A disease that rots the mind, corrupts the heart, and dissolves every sacred bond that holds a civilisation together. And that disease was not born yesterday. It has been sown deliberately, watered relentlessly, and cultivated day after day, decade after decade, by the very people now offering their condolences.

The left does not get to cry over the corpse of the man whose murder was made possible by the poison they brewed. They do not get to condemn the harvest of the seeds they planted. Their hands are not clean. Their power, their careers, their prominence — all of it has been built on a politics of grievance, resentment, and destruction.

They stoked the envy. They legitimised the rage. They excused the violence. They told generations of young people that life is nothing but power and oppression, that truth is a lie, that responsibility is slavery, that freedom is domination. And then they act surprised when the mob, intoxicated with that creed, takes a knife or a bullet to the throat of those who dared resist it.

The only proper response to their “sympathy” is anger. The only proper reaction is rage. They do not deserve credit for lamenting the blood they themselves helped spill.

Charlie’s assassin was not alone. He had accomplices in every newsroom, in every faculty lounge, in every campaign office that mocked truth and exalted envy. He had accomplices in every pundit who sneered at responsibility and called it oppression. He had accomplices in every politician who excused chaos as “justice.”

This is the reality: Charlie was murdered by an ideology. And those now issuing statements of “condemnation” are the very apostles of that ideology.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/13/charlie-kirk-iryna-zarutska-and-the-death-of-society/

EXCERPT

For more than a decade now, I have been telling friends, readers, clients—anyone who’d listen, really—that it is now and will become increasingly important in the future to be strong and resilient: physically strong, emotionally resilient, spiritually active, financially tough and flexible, and able to handle oneself in a variety of potentially fraught situations. A big part of this is preparation, doing the planning, training, and homework to be “antifragile” (as Nassim Taleb puts it). Another part of it is attitude, having the confidence to handle what you can and the humility to ask for help when necessary. But even all of this is sometimes not enough.

As we have all learned over the past couple of weeks, and as Robert Burns warned us 240 years ago, sometimes even “the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.” There is nothing Charlie Kirk could have done to prevent Tyler Robinson from killing him. It didn’t matter how strong Kirk was or how prepared, or even that he was an extremely and openly religious man. Even if he were a cross between Hafthor Bjornsson and Imi Lichtenfeld himself, Kirk could not have stopped his assassin’s bullet.

The same is true of Iryna Zarutska. The horrifying picture of her that has been all over the internet this week tells her story. As she looks up at her murderer, shocked and horror-struck that someone is standing above her, her fate is already sealed. She was dead before she likely even understood what had happened, much less recognized that her attacker had a knife. There was nothing she—or anyone else—could have done to stop him. Even if she had been a cross between Hafthor Bjornsson and Imi Lichtenfeld, she still would have died.

As I said, if someone wants you dead badly enough….

Thus has it always been for man, dating back at least to the time of the man, the woman, the snake, and the apple. Indeed, that man and that woman had two sons, one of whom brutally murdered the other out of petty jealousy. This is man’s nature as a fallen creature. It is who he is—who we are.

https://jonathanturley.org/2025/09/11/prove-me-wrong-charlie-kirks-final-challenge-on-free-speech/

Yesterday, the United States entered a new and chilling stage of what I have called the “age of rage.” After two attempted assassinations of President Donald Trump, leading conservative leader Charlie Kirk, father of two, was gunned down at a campus event at Utah Valley University. I learned the news while I was in Prague to speak on my book,“The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” and the growing attacks on free speech around the world. I never imagined that I would be speaking about Charlie’s murder and what it represents for free speech.

I cannot claim to have been a close friend of Charlie Kirk, but I knew him and respected him. In his relatively short life, Charlie energized a generation of conservative college students at a time of intense liberal orthodoxy and intolerance.

Kirk came up with the brilliant idea of challenging liberals to simply debate issues from abortion to immigration.  His group would go to campuses and invite debate with signs reading “prove me wrong” and encourage liberals to engage in dialogue rather than violence.

The left had particular reason to hate Kirk.  Campuses have long been the bastions of the left, reinforced by faculties which now have few, if any, conservatives or Republicans. Higher education has long been an incubator for intolerance; shaping a generation of speech phobics who shout down or attack those with opposing views.

Kirk struck at the heart of that power base. Polls show that most students do not feel comfortable speaking about their values in our universities and many conservatives hide their views to avoid retaliation from faculty and students.

Kirk was changing that but showing students that they could be open and bold about their views. He told them that they did not have to yield to orthodoxy and the groupthink. Now he’s dead.

What is most chilling about the murder of Charlie Kirk is that it was not in the least surprising. Not anymore.

The response to TPUSA was all too often rage and violence. Liberals and anti-free speech groups like Antifa would trash their tables and threaten the students. Recently, at UC Davis, police simply watched as a TPUSA tent was torn apart and the tent carried off.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/12/we-need-more-charlie-kirks/

I didn’t realize how good I had it when I was a conservative undergraduate student in the 1980s. Although liberals dominated my campus, the professors generally tolerated the free exchange of ideas. I helped co-found a College Republican club at my undergraduate school, Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, without worrying that this would harm my academic standing. I also learned to avoid the few far-left professors who abused their classes to indoctrinate students in socialist and anti-American ideologies.

I was a political science major at St. Joe’s. Fortunately, most of the political science professors were either conservatives or classic liberals who admired U.S. politicians like John F. Kennedy, Scoop Jackson, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. They loved their country and encouraged open debate in their classes. I was gratified in the early 1980s when the St. Joe’s Political Science Department fired a new professor who was using his international relations classes to teach Marxism and penalize conservative students.

Sadly, things changed for the worse in the decades following my graduation. Conservative and classic liberal political science professors retired and were replaced by far-left radicals who implemented classes in globalization, anti-capitalism, “anti-fascism,” anti-Israel and antisemitic ideologies, radical societal change, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), gender politics, and intersectionality. This far-left ideology spread across every college discipline, even the sciences.

Colleges and universities became radical left and extremely hostile to conservatives. Conservative students could not risk revealing their political views on campus because they feared this would hurt their grades and lead to harassment from fellow students.

Charlie Kirk believed this was unacceptable. This is why, in 2012, at the age of 18, he co-founded Turning Point USA to counter liberal politics and intolerance in U.S. high schools and colleges. Turning Point became a powerful national grassroots movement dedicated to identifying, organizing, and empowering young people to promote the principles of America First, free markets, and limited government.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/09/11/the-left-celebrating-charlie-kirks-killing/

Political killings are among the vilest acts in a democracy, and among the most disruptive. The stable world of citizens – the essential backdrop of any constitutional democracy – is upended, its foundations shaken. After all, the heart of that democracy is free speech, free and peaceful assembly, and an orderly means of choosing leaders. Political assassinations strike at those foundations.

The impact is multiplied when several killings (or narrow escapes) happen within a few years. In that perilous moment, the nation looks beyond each act and asks, “Has something gone badly wrong in our country? Will the latest violence lead to still more?”

Those are the questions Americans are asking right now. They are especially urgent as the hunt for Charlie Kirk’s killer continues and as the nation remembers the most catastrophic and consequential act of political killing in recent history, the terrorist attacks of Sept 11 2001.

Charlie Kirk was a charismatic conservative activist, only 31 years old, but with years in the public eye and very close ties to President Trump and the Maga movement. At a time when that movement is flooded with articulate spokesmen, he was unique. Starting when he was only 18, he began building a following, a political movement, and an organisation, Turning Point USA. The result was impressive. It complements Trump’s Maga base but with a much younger following. As one friend wrote me, “There are thousands out there inspired by Kirk. Shock and heartbreak will give way to righteous determination to see our country aspire to Greatness again. Kirk inspired a generation. That generation is NOT going to be silent.”

Polling reinforces the point. Even before this tragic event, opinion polls have shown younger voters shifting sharply away from the Democratic Party and toward Republican and Independent affiliation. They are also voting with their feet, leaving progressive “Blue” states by the millions for conservative “Red” ones. They are flocking South for college, too, having watched the suppression of alternative views in the Ivy League and beyond.

How did Charlie Kirk inspire his followers? Not with vitriol or name-calling, but with engagement.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/is-america-heading-toward-a-new-civil-war/

Is America heading toward a civil war? The assassination of Charlie Kirk shows yet again that the chasm between patriotic Americans and the left is certainly growing all the time and shows no signs of healing. One telling indication that the nation might be heading toward a new civil conflict is the fact that political tensions have not been this high since the run-up to secession and the attack on Fort Sumter, and that numerous leftists are increasingly open about their lust for violence, cheering.on Kirk’s death with unalloyed joy.

The murder of Charlie Kirk didn’t happen in a vacuum. Leftist leaders have been calling for violence, and now their calls have been heeded.

“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption — but I am now,” said far-left Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker back in April. “These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.” That was after Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Victimhood) said in February: “This will be a congressional fight, a constitutional fight, a legal fight, and on days like this a street fight, yes we will stand.” And that was not long after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-Hey, I’m a Victim Too) said this of the “extreme MAGA Republican agenda”: “We are going to fight it legislatively. We are going to fight it in the courts. We’re going to fight it in the streets.”

Before them, it was Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Kamala Harris inciting leftist violence. And let’s not forget Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-Grillmaster) saying in 2020, when condemning the pro-life leanings of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.”

Leftists outside of politics joined in the fun as well: remember, to take just a few of many available examples, Kathy Griffin holding Trump’s bloody severed head, or Madonna saying she wanted to blow up the White House, or Robert DeNiro bellowing that he wanted to punch Trump in the face.