Hey all, been a while. Before I get started, I just wanted to mention that I celebrated my birthday 2 days ago, and that largely, September has been an awesome month for me. I’m crushing my assignments, my most anticipated game of all time in Hollow Knight: Silksong came out and was thankfully awesome, and I’ve also managed to stay relatively healthy. I was going to make a post last week on Silksong and what the wait for it felt like, but after Wednesday, I decided to scrap that in favor of this. Why am I commenting on this now instead of then? Because I was upset. I figured if I did this in the moment, I was likely going to say a lot of things I either didn’t mean or would really regret later on. So, I took some time, got my thoughts in order, and am now going to share my thoughts on the killing which has, for a lack of a better term, shocked the world. Of course, I’m talking about Charlie Kirk’s assassination in Utah last Wednesday.

A quick preamble before I get into that: the night before, I was at my Tuesday night Bible study with my close friends, and when I got into my buddy’s car at the end, we started talking about old music and some of our favorite guitar riffs. I brought up Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones, which is a fantastic song if you haven’t heard it. It tackles the social unrest of the 60’s, and the chaos that the world was experiencing in that time. And believe me, even though I wasn’t there to see it, I know it must’ve been wild. JFK and RFK, MLK Jr. and Malcolm X, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the civil rights movement, Vietnam… yeah, not an enviable time to be alive. In the car, I mentioned how that song can also fit into today’s social landscape, given the uncertain times we live in, and I also highlighted one lyric in particular:

“It’s just a shot away.”

A very true statement. Sometimes, to enact a terrible war like Vietnam, or both World Wars, or even the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, all it takes is a single shot for things to spiral. People die, people are raped, and a crisis is in full swing. One shot in a certain part of the world can cause everyone to stop, drop what they’re doing, and stare. It’s honestly crazy how effective something as simple as that is.

And obviously, as many of us saw last Wednesday, there was a shot just like that. And while it didn’t cause a military war, it did spark a very heated war of information, words and angst. People are being fired en masse across the US in teaching institutions, hospitals and major corporations for claiming that Charlie Kirk deserved to die in front of his audience at Utah Valley University like that. People are getting into screaming matches over political violence, and whether it’s justified or not. Jimmy Kimmel has even been taken off the air indefinitely for comments he made about the situation, which I’ll quickly touch on now. In my opinion, regardless of what he really said about the shooting or whether or not this was the right thing to do, I personally have no issue with him being off television because I find him to be incredibly unfunny. He’s one of many late night talk show hosts who have become so obsessed with Trump and Trump-related humor that they’ve really just become unlistenable, and this is coming from someone who isn’t exactly a big fan of Donald right now either. Now, I think silencing him like this does set a bad precedent for similar incidents in the future, but since we haven’t seen a similar incident yet, I’m going to move on to the rest of what I have to say.

I suppose I should address what I think about Charlie Kirk now, although in a way I feel like I really shouldn’t have to. I think most rational and sane people can agree that even though he was a controversial figure and he did say some rather dumb things over the years, he was largely innocent in comparison to the President he so fervently supported, as well as many of those in the House and Senate who are at least 2 to 5 times more extreme than he was. Was he a right-wing Christian nationalist? Yes. Was he a deep man of faith? I think so, after watching a lot of his videos in the wake of his death. Was he a big supporter of Israel? Yes, he was. Did he ruffle people’s feathers? Oh yeah, of course he did. Did he deserve to die in the way he did?

NO! Of course not! What are we doing here, people? You know, there was a time when people of all shapes, sizes and ideologies could meet and discuss politics and the world in a civil, upright manner. They may have deeply disagreed on almost anything, but in the end, they kept it cordial and respectful. Many of Charlie’s opponents have even came out and said similar things to what I’m saying now, because they realize where we’re at as well. The world is not a cordial and respectful place anymore. The United States of America most certainly isn’t either, and if you weren’t convinced of that before, then I hope this incident finally opened your eyes. You can totally disagree with his politics or what he stands for, that’s fine. He welcomed that. He allowed it and even encouraged it to hold dialogue. But wishing him dead? Celebrating it too? Calling him a “Nazi” or “Hitler”? All very, very wrong.

Charlie Kirk was a family man with two very young children. On that day, a wife lost her husband and their children, one of them a literal infant, lost their dad. Yes, some will say Stalin had a family, or that Hitler had Eva Braun and relatives, but here’s the thing: Charlie Kirk was NOT Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler. Charlie Kirk was an evangelical conservative activist who openly debated those on the Left over the LGBT movement, mass immigration, and economics, not the leader of a fascist country who preached racial segregation of whom they deemed to be lesser people and had them imprisoned in camps. Charlie Kirk did not murder or genocide anyone, he had good faith arguments with those who ideologically opposed him in every way. Charlie Kirk, for all intents and purposes, was a decent man who a lot of people really disagreed with. He was not a Nazi, or a terrorist, or a man of violence. The people who these crazies compare him to were, and that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of both who Kirk was, as well as basic history. You can only swing the word Nazi and the name Hitler around so many times, before it eventually loses its meaning and severity altogether.

I feel like I should end this here before I get really annoyed again, so I will. But before I do, let me say something quickly. To anyone reading this who may have disagreed with Kirk but think he shouldn’t have been killed, thank you. You’re a rational human being, and I respect you for being rational. And to those who may be Christian reading this, I suggest that you do what I’ve been doing and continue to pray. Not just for Charlie’s family or for the state of the US, but for the shooter as well. While there have been many things said about Tyler Robinson so far, some of which are still unproven, the fact is that he was still brought into this world by the Lord, and that he has a soul. I have prayed multiple times over the last few days that not only will he fully realize the weight of his sins, but that he will also come to Christ in what is surely to be fewer days ahead for him than many of us outside of a jail cell. Right now, we need to trust in the Lord and not lean on our own understanding of this event. God felt that Charlie Kirk’s work on this earth was done, and so he called him home. And in doing so, his voice and his movement have become larger than ever before, and it seems to have also woken up many across the world to something greater. I pray that this continues and that good things come from this awful tragedy, and that Charlie’s kids can still grow up loved, cherished, and in the faith.

God bless, and I’ll see y’all later. And hopefully, I’ll have something much less grim to talk about.