the Cycle Of History edition

​Nine FACTS, One LIE
Issue #26

Nine FACTS, One LIE
the Cycle Of History edition
Issue #26

1. The only legitimate response to gun violence is to denounce it. The only legitimate continuation of such denunciations is to work to enact social and political change in order to reduce the likelihood of it happening again. Anyone actively celebrating murder, let alone a public execution, is very much due for a silent monastic retreat in the hopes of reconnecting with their humanity.

2. Killing Charlie Kirk was a deeply cowardly act, as is supporting or leveraging that killing for political ends, especially through the skinless abstraction that is social media, with any purpose other than to recognize the madness of the ways we continue to invent to end life.

3. Political Murder cannot be processed as having later justification. From Julius Caesar (how did that work out for the Roman Senate?) to William McKinley (how did that work out for the Anarchists?) to Fred Hampton (how did that work out for J. Edgar Hoover?), political murder is anti-democratic regardless of the accretion of anti-democratic views the person is seen to have held, or regularly disseminated. In the end, the indecency of heartlessness is apolitical, and there are no sentences that can be typed to cleverly analogize the fact that a man was shot in public with a high-powered rifle.

4. Even so, it is exactly the horror of that violence that demands we speak clearly and rationally about the context in which it happens, without apology or amelioration.

5. Charlie Kirk’s murder is not the random tragedy it has been repeatedly cast as in the last forty-eight hours, being neither random nor a tragedy in the sense that it was unforeseeable. Charlie Kirk’s killing was an unfortunate (for every single one of us) but cruelly mathematical outcome of a system of clickbait rhetoric and deliberate agitation that Charlie Kirk himself cynically manipulated.

6. That system, which Donald J. Trump has improbably turned into his only successful business venture ever, is Formulaic Divisiveness as Corporate Strategy with a heavily diversified portfolio of Hate for Profit. Charlie Kirk was salaried upper management, with a generous bonus structure of unearned notoriety that came as a direct result of consequence-free incitement.

7. The grim irony of Charlie Kirk’s statements about his willingness to accept (smirkily dismiss) “A few deaths” as an acceptable cost in exchange for the retention of his Second Amendment rights (which, incidentally, are not now and have never been in peril) does not warrant the glee it has inspired in his enemies, but remains the imbecilic utterance of a provocateur who, like all provocateurs throughout history, assumed that fame would keep them safe from those provoked by their words.

8. Cheering the ugly death of someone you disagree with politically is not the same thing as experiencing a certain Schadenfreude that, during this second endless presidency, there has just been a very public consequence to the many unforgivable actions of Donald J. Trump and the string of performative lackeys his words have given rise to. It’s only human. That doesn’t mean it’s good. And it also means, as usual, it is a Trump marionette who pays the price for The Man Who Pays For Nothing.

9. Charlie Kirk, a devout Christian, chose to overlook all the painfully evident failings of his leader - pedophile, rapist, thief, grifter, pathological liar and possibly The Least Christian Man To Ever Walk The Earth (and that includes Buddha, Pontius Pilate, and Charles Manson), in order to coattail unto power, and even worse, use his (highly successful) organization, Turning Point USA, to entice students with angry cheese beneath the spring of that irresolvable contradiction. This behavior, in places like Florida and Texas, is often called “grooming”. Charlie Kirk, it must be said, for ego and profit, was a political groomer of children.

10. You can make a lot of money in 2025 America by turning resentment into Dogecoin, but resentments do not simply fade away as the next profitable outrage presents itself, they burrow in like ticks, usually beneath the hide of the conspiratorial and imbalanced.

11. Articulating MAGA comes with a potential cost, namely that someone will take you at your word. Free Speech is not the constitutional right to angrily flail in public without retribution. MAGA, in the end, is an assertion by 33% of the American public of their right to have unsupported, plainly false, and demonstrably moronic opinions without acknowledging the legitimacy of others (elites, experts, Left Coasters, those who read and consider, the CDC, those who traffic in nuance, scientists, those aware of recent and past history) to contradict those opinions. Particularly with facts. Unthinking acceptance is MAGA scripture, and Charlie Kirk is an object lesson in the notion that every American has the ability, but not the bestowed right, to be incoherent in public.
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12. MAGA, when distilled down to its oleaginous base, is about creating a Post-Responsibility America. Which is okay, sort of, while you’re in power. But it is also why (claims of rigged elections, Jan. 6th, bald gerrymandering, voter restrictions, deportation, military occupations of cities, Hang Mike Pence, running for a third term) once having taken those steps, you can never relinquish power.

13. Frequently overlooked in the analysis of Charlie Kirk’s comments about the acceptability of gun violence in exchange for 2nd Amendment rights is that, at the end of that oft-edited sentence, he refers to those rights as “God-given”. The fact that Charlie Kirk may have been under the impression that there exists an interactive deity holding an identifiable position on access to the tools that most effectively end the lives of those it created in its own image, makes me think that Charlie Kirk was, in fact, completely insane.

14. Charlie Kirk was racist in the way of Donald J. Trump - confidently, effortlessly, continuously. He was also a purveyor of the Great Replacement Strategy conspiracy, along with Steves Bannon and Miller and other race-mongers justifying their own fears and impotence. This is worth mentioning in the context of flags being at half-mast this morning, and what the man stood for, and who exactly some of the nation is mourning.

15. Which is to say a smug advocate for an America that is no longer a Grand Experiment, but a casual list of grievances.

16. As the widely misunderstood and mistakenly fetishized left-hero Ché Guevara proved, you cannot line up and shoot enough peasants against a fence to change the course of cultural or political events to your liking. Only courage and truth and an unstinting rejection of hypocrisy can do that. Coincidentally three things that exist in an apposite dimension to the one Donald J. Trump occupies.

17. Apparently a twenty-two-year-old Utah man shot Charlie Kirk, at first glance seeming ripe for exactly the sort of influence that Turning Point USA peddled. His family had a dedicated Youth Pastor, and was turned in by his father. Does it need to be said that this man is no one’s hero, martyr, deep state operative, or tool of furtive political ends? He was almost certainly, as all assassins turn out to be, a contradiction, easily swayed and unhappy, who has learned well, from repeated Second Amendment examples, the one sure way to appear on Wikipedia forever.

18. Will Donald J. Trump now send the National Guard into Salt Lake City? Will he begin deporting Mormons to Samoa? The one thing we can be sure of is that he will suck as much personal benefit out of this death as he can, and milk the memory of Charlie Kirk for all he was worth, which in terms of functional government or healthy culture wasn’t much, but he will use Charlie Kirk like he uses everyone and everything he touches, as just another opportunity to capitalize upon.

19. Charlie Kirk made himself famous by being famously divisive, and also made a lot of money by taking stances that drove clicks and hatred in equal measure. For someone who purportedly loved Jesus, he did everything possible to contradict the central messages of Jesus as I understand them. He did not participate in civil debate, but worked extremely hard to paint himself that way. He essentially ran anti-intellectual hits on people who disagreed with him using a social media doxxing mob and anonymous threats. He was a calculating propagandist who, however unintentionally, ended up pouring the concrete of his own demise. The one thing we can all learn from the violent death of Charlie Kirk is that it’s a stark object lesson on why not to act like Charlie Kirk.

20. All that being said, Charlie Kirk’s family and friends no doubt loved him, and he might have been okay to grab coffee with if he winkingly turned off the schtick and was willing to simply discuss a few things. I would have liked to have done so. Was he as capable of listening as orating? Would he surprise and even amuse me? Would I learn far more than I imagined possible from him? Would he convince me that I was the one who needed a Point to be Turned?

21. Probably not, but in the end, if anything in this fractured, collapsing empire is ever going to change for the better, people need to acknowledge the person Charlie Kirk purported to be as well as the person who eventually walked off stage, while also remembering that he, like all of us, was theoretically capable of evolving.

He didn’t deserve, at the tip of a bullet, not to have the chance to.
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*As I finished typing this, it seems the shooter was a Far Right Nick Fuentes fan and gun enthusiast who killed Kirk because he wasn't racist/conservative enough. Go figure. I imagine right now a lot of people are deleting their retribution posts, for instance old pal Elon Musk, who yesterday called the democrats "The Party Of Murder