There’s a convoluted conversation unraveling through the shadowy corridors of political conversation about the need to tone down hateful rhetoric as violence bleeds out of the twisted psyches of deeply tortured people with guns.
Which brings us first to Charlie Kirk, whose assassination by a young man conveniently labeled leftist has overshadowed the reality of Kirk’s own profoundly divisive message. Kirk was a brilliant organizer with a great gimmick – confront your adversaries up-front, face-to-face while promoting a white-Christian “God’s on my side,” agenda. His assassination was both a profound human tragedy and a reflection of how out of balance the collective American psyche has become. And contrary to the relentless messaging of the political and religious right, the violence we are witnessing in tragedy-after-tragedy is not emanating from the left, it’s coming from all over and at least as frequently from the right.
What prompts political violence? The answer is hopelessly complex, but consider Charlie Kirk’s own words.
“If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine? The Charlie Kirk Show, December 8, 2022.
“It’s happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” The Charlie Kirk Show, May 19, 2023.
“If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?” The Charlie Kirk Show, January 3, 2024.
“Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”
Discussing the engagement of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce on The Charlie Kirk Show, August 6, 2025.
“I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.” Comments at event produced by TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s Turning Point USA, April 5, 2023.
“America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.” The Charlie Kirk Show, August 22, 2025.
“There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.” The Charlie Kirk Show, July 6, 2022
“The American Democrat party hates this country. They want to see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white. The Charlie Kirk Show, March 20, 2024.
Do these authentic Charlie Kirk statements sound like hate speech to you?
The instant martyrdom of Charlie Kirk exponentially magnifies the reach of his words, but so does the off-the-shelf rhetoric of the MAGA right.
Donald Trump’s daily online rants constantly reduce governance to good versus evil. “The forces that hate our country don’t want a secure border or safe cities or high paying jobs,” he says in post after post on Truth Social. “The Radical Left Lunatics want to STOP MAGA, but we’re not going to let them NO MATTER WHAT.”
He interchangeably mixes “radical left” with “socialist” and sometimes “communist,” on his way across the line of reason and truth and into the dark fantasy in which anyone who opposes him or his policies is an enemy of the state. And that leads directly to declarations like this: “I have ordered the DOJ to fully investigate the liberal dark money organization Act Blue. For years, this organization has done the work of the deep state, lining their pockets with foreign donations, possibly election fraud, and worst of all, fighting to silence the voices of REAL AMERICANS.”
This week Trump stepped even farther across the line by releasing an AI– produced video showing House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (with a Pancho Villa moustache and sombrero) with Senator Chuck Schumer as Schumer is saying, “There’s no way to sugar coat it, no one likes Democrats anymore. We’ve got no voters left because of all our woke friends bullshit. . .. So we need new voters. And if we give all these illegal aliens some free health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us…”
It sounds authentic but it’s all fake, even mildly funny, but deeply troubling since many people who will see it won’t know it’s not real. And, invariably, it contributes to the dangerously adversarial politics that leads to violence.
Charlie professed to be “a Christian”. What does that mean? The answer is “different things to different people”. To many who call themselves Christians, it meant that he believed in certain ideas and in the veracity of certain claims regarding Scripture. To others it meant that he identified with a group of other people who also claimed to be Christians. To me, the word “Christian” can mean only one thing: one who imitates Jesus Christ as revealed in the Christian Scriptures.
If Charlie Kirk said the same things and did the same things that the Bible says Jesus said and did, then, by my definition, he was a Christian. If he didn’t, or if he said or did things that were out of character for Jesus, then he was not a Christian.
The things that Charlie said about women and about people of color were often diametrically opposed to Jesus’s message. He didn’t settle for simply not saying Christian things, he went the full monty to the contrary. The separation of church and state is in the First Amendment to the Constitution, implicitly if not explicitly. Moreover, pragmatically speaking, he supported a president who clearly wants to be served rather than to serve. Jesus said that he was last in his kingdom, not first; whoever wants to be great must become the servant of all others. Trump will never be great according to the standard that Jesus set.