Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
I’m not sure I know anyone who thought the late Charlie Kirk made important contributions to the national conversation. I don’t know anyone — I hope — who thought he deserved a bullet in the throat. If you expressed or even experienced satisfaction at the murder of a law-abiding young man with a wife and kids, you’ve left part of your humanity behind you somewhere. But the seismic upheaval that followed Kirk’s assassination — journalists and teachers fired, major media celebrities punished for the sin of insensitive response — probably caught most of us by surprise. When the post-homicidal dust had settled, it revealed a nation so adrift and divided that no one seems to know how to proceed.
Charlie Kirk — RIP. Everyone seems to concede that he could be persuasive and charming. His brief life was twisted out of shape and ended prematurely, tragically, because he was seduced and misguided by some truly terrible ideas — none more ironic, as it turns out, than his embrace of the Second Amendment as Holy Writ. He was a devoted member of the hard-right gun cult, one whose response to gun violence was “more guns in the hands of more Americans.”
A recent quote on guns from Mr. Kirk: “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.” We’re at a time in our political history, it seems, when pure attitude wins more public support than logic and perception. None of Kirk’s core beliefs, including an ugly racist streak (Martin Luther King was an “awful” person, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was “a mistake”?), will survive much critical examination. A subtle thinker he was not. Would the poor man have been amazed to find himself celebrated posthumously as the most sympathetic martyr since John the Baptist or Joan of Arc? (A state legislator has drafted a bill that would mandate statues of Kirk on the campus of every public university in Oklahoma.) Would he have been surprised to hear that his death has inspired thousands of requests, from high schools and colleges, for new chapters of his Turning Point USA?
I think so. But Kirk, whatever we think of his ideas, was only exercising his constitutional right to free speech. There were other free speakers whose response to his tragedy diminished and disgraced themselves, and I don’t mean Jimmy Kimmel. The president of the United States, who narrowly escaped Kirk’s fate last summer, surprised no one when his remarks made no mention of the American gun cult that keeps every potential assassin legally armed and loaded. He opted instead for scoring political points, inanely echoing the Fox News warning that the “radical left” was to blame, and its rhetoric “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.” He said this while his administration moves to ban funding for research on gun violence.
Even worse was the mega-billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, whose shotgun marriage with America’s Ultra-Right is an international embarrassment. “The left is the party of murder,” Musk posted on X. “If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die.” I have no idea what this man is talking about, but it sounds as if he’s promoting open civil war in his adopted country. If there’s one immigrant who really needs to be deported, back to South Africa before the bloodshed begins, maybe it’s Elon Musk.
The lethal poison that infects a frightening share of the American electorate is seeping down from above, from the Oval Office and the dismal nest of flunkies (and flunkettes) who operate there. Charlie Kirk was a martyr not to free speech but to their sick ideology, one that enshrines and perpetuates a nation’s addiction to firearms. There’s no other civilized country that allows civilians to carry assault rifles, and of course no other country where mass shootings, many of them in schools and churches, are an everyday event. The same day that Kirk was shot, another maniac opened fire on schoolchildren in Evergreen, Colorado. I tried to pretend that all those flags at half mast were really for all the kids who died exercising their constitutional right to go to class.
There have been 47 school shootings so far in 2025. Gun violence kills 40,000 Americans annually; 327 citizens are shot every day, and 117 die. Firearms account for 74 suicides daily. Guns are the leading cause of death for all Americans under 25. And of course every time there’s a murder as public and ghastly as Charlie Kirk’s, a clear majority of voters tries to believe that legislators will be mobilized, out of shame, to put new laws in place. Assault-weapon bans and universal background checks, at the very least? And every time this majority is disappointed. The National Rifle Association, the most powerful special interest group this side of Trump’s Billionaire Club, has the White House and Congress in a stranglehold no one can break. Since the last federal ban on assault weapons expired in 2004, the death toll from gun violence has increased 347%.
Instead of an emergency reassessment of the Second Amendment, the president and the rightwing media launched a pathetic pseudo-investigation to prove the assassin was an agent of the semi-imaginary militia of the Left known as “antifa.” President Trump, as his social media posts grew more outrageous and delusional, even suggested that George Soros, one of the few billionaires who actively resist the grotesque, mob-style protection racket that Trump calls an administration, belongs “in jail.” The assassin, a deranged young Jack Mormon with no coherent political history, offered the raging Right nothing to encourage their conspiracy theories, yet the trolls raged on as if regiments of “woke” terrorists were stalking the Heartland.
The left-wing terrorist alert failed to play — every study of America’s assassins shows that shooters with right-wing connections outnumber liberal gunmen by at least 6-to-1. And so, with a quick switch that revealed new depths of mendacity and hypocrisy, the White House targeted public figures, and even private ones, who had failed to demonstrate appropriate grief and reverence when Kirk was murdered. This led to the brief but shocking suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel and some real harm to lesser offenders, including the Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah. She was fired, she claims, for one common-sense social media post predicting that “White America is not going to do what it needs to do to get rid of guns in their country.”
Attiah was fired, obviously, with the approval of Post owner Jeff Bezos, one of the subservient billionaires Trump has bent to his will. Bezos’ surrender is more proof of another sad fact about American capitalism—-that greed nearly always outweighs integrity and patriotism. MAGA and its captive converts, including publishers and broadcasters, champion poor Charlie Kirk as a martyr to free speech while they suppress free speech in every other direction. Even novelist Stephen King, who serves as a kind of liberal conscience for the state of Maine, was compelled to apologize for his social media post noting Kirk’s homophobia. But not before Sen. Ted Cruz had counter-posted that King was “a horrible, evil, twisted liar.”
The senator’s cruel words bring me back, inevitably, to the president Kirk’s wife claims he loved dearly, the man his current vice president once called “an idiot” who might turn into “America’s Hitler.” Did Donald Trump actually say “I can do anything I want to do. I’m president of the United States of America.” If he did, as The New York Times claimed, that was the point where the National Guard should have marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to take him away. Because he’s getting worse every day. The Times also pointed out that all his recent speeches — to his assembled generals, to the king of England, to the United Nations, at Kirk’s memorial service — were not only irrelevant and nearly incoherent but almost exactly the same. He revisits Joe Biden and his autopen, the 2020 election, the media, the Nobel Peace prize he’s pursuing. He told the United Nations that climate change is a “scam” and a “con job” and scolded the world’s nations for inaction while he himself had ended “seven wars.”
“The Speech” has become an hour-long ramble of nonsense and grievance that makes Joe Biden’s most senior moments seem like oratorical triumphs. This is not so much a man speaking now, but an audiotape on an endless loop. People may disagree about where America is headed, as free speech allows, but there’s no question that its president is in the Twilight Zone. Presented with evidence that Portland, Oregon, is not a blazing war zone, Trump was astonished, and it turned out that one of his evil elves had fooled him with riot videos that were five years old. A nation where a demented president’s impulses and grudges are the law of the land is what we call a failed state. It’s certainly no democracy.
We’re all struggling to find a silver lining in this noxious cloud, but in my least hopeful moments I replay the telecast of the recent Ryder Cup golf matches on Long Island, where a European team narrowly defeated the Americans. A rabid partisan crowd showered Europe’s star, the Irishman Rory McIlroy, with gross obscenities and personal insults unknown at golf events in any country. They even threw a beer at his wife. It was appalling. And off in a section by himself, in a huge, appropriate cage of double-thick bulletproof glass, was the glowering President of the United States.
I had never felt so embarrassed to be an American. Guns and all, will this become one of those countries, like Sudan or Haiti, no sane traveler will ever visit?
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose latest essay collection, “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners” (Blair, 2018) won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Press Awards, as well as the gold medal for essays at the Foreword Review Awards. A winner of the Baltimore Sun’s H.L, Mencken Writing Award, he is the author of “An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken” (Iowa, 2015) and four previous collections of essays, with a fifth collection of essays, “Bible Belt Blues,” to be published in November.
Email delennis1@gmail.com.
