As I write this, the earthly remains of our friend Charlie Kirk are still warm. Charlie was gunned down with a high-powered sniper rifle from a distant rooftop, just as the left attempted to do to our president in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Charlie was not quite 32 years old. He left behind a beautiful young wife and two beautiful toddlers. And if you listen to him argue with the campus liberals in his YouTube videos, you realize he doesn’t have a mean-spirited bone in his body.
Didn’t.
I’ve previously written about my redneck friends in our distant northwest Chicago suburb. The nearest decent-sized town north of here is Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. We’re that far out from the Big City.
The Northwest Suburbs have a lot of conservatives. Illinois generally gets a bad rap, because the Chicago machine controls the entire state. In town, you see sidewalks painted in rainbow colors, and all the mental health counselors’ offices have Pride flags flying year round. But when you get away from our suburb’s downtown area, there are Trump banners on farmers’ fences and Trump flags flying on flagpoles everywhere.
Northwest Suburbs conservatives loved Charlie Kirk. He grew up in Arlington Heights and Prospect Heights, two towns that are just down U.S. Route 14, the aptly named Northwest Highway, from my house.
Charlie was a son of the Northwest Suburbs. We felt a special kinship with him, like a bright neighborhood kid who grew up to be a totally amazing young man.
His education trajectory paralleled mine for a while, about three decades after mine. I went to a community college, got a degree in statistical analysis, worked full-time for about a decade, then went to a four-year university and got a degree in political science.
I was fortunate, because left-wing lunacy wasn’t yet in complete control of Illinois college campuses. Charlie realized that staying in school would subject him to years of intensive indoctrination into left-wing orthodoxy that would make what I faced seem weak. He didn’t finish community college. In effect, he was just a high school graduate.
When he engaged in “Change My Mind” debates with sophomores wearing blue hair, majoring in gender studies or anthropology or “journalism,” Charlie was decent and respectful. The blue-haired sophomores insulted him by pointing out that he was a “junior college dropout,” but he never returned those insults.
Lunatics from the left-wing fringe are realizing, one by one, that they’re on the 20% end of every 80/20 issue, like transgender nonsense and climate change nonsense. The science they’ve told us to believe without question is revealing that they’re all totally wrong — that their entire ideology is wrong — that the sacraments and holy symbols of what has replaced religion in their lives are all wrong.
So now, one by one, they’re going totally bat-guano crazy.
They’re boiling over with loathing, contempt, and fury. In the days to come, we will probably see more and more incidents like this. Just the other day, a transgender shot up a school in Minneapolis, deliberately targeting Christian children.
We need to stop pretending we’re still one nation. The lunatics of the left-wing fringe are seceding from America inside their demented skulls. And I say, “Let them go.”
They can move to Canada, or create hateful little enclaves at Starbucks or echo chambers in student newspaper offices, the university student union, and the Progressive Students’ Alliance. The rest of us can move on with our lives.
Also, you don’t hate the so-called “news media” enough. The Daily Wire studied the intensely biased and disrespectful live coverage of the assassination aftermath on MSNBC, the lame non-apology on a seldom-viewed MSNBC secondary account on X/Twitter, and the firestorm that followed from conservatives on social media.
Chuck Ross of the Washington Free Beacon had the best take on it: “A decent news organization (so, not MSNBC) would fire Matthew Dowd for this, and probably Katy Tur, too.”
Image: Charlie Kirk. Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.