Alan Zendell, September 11, 2025

What do two high school students in Evergreen Colorado and right-wing extremist Charlie Kirk have in common? They were all shot on Wednesday, September 9, 2025. Kirk was killed, one of the students is still on the critical list, and the other is recovering. The first thing that struck me about these incidents was the level of attention they received – from every source.

Kirk’s assassination has knocked Gaza, Ukraine, Russia’s incursions into Poland’s airspace, and Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein out of out the public’s eye for three days. The attempted murder of two innocent high school kids was barely mentioned. Our divisive President, who thrives on chaos and discord declared Kirk’s murder to be an act of war, unsubtly encouraging his own supporters to fight back, as he is always prone to doing. Of the two kids lying in hospitals in Colorado, Trump said not a word.

I cannot and will not approach this with politically correct euphemisms and pep talks about American values. Governor Spencer Cox of Utah, where Kirk was assassinated, gave one of those beautifully uplifting speeches politicians always resort to when they have nothing constructive to say. But words like love and unity, in that context, are utterly meaningless.

We’re not supposed to say things like this in the face of insane gun violence, but Charlie Kirk did not stand for love, unity, or inclusion. He was dedicated to the hateful, divisive, exclusionary, rhetoric of Project 2025, which Donald Trump is allowing to drive his presidency. Kirk, who advised his cult-like followers to accept gun violence in schools as a necessary consquence of our “God-given Second Amendment,” succumbed to his own false logic.

Kirk blamed the America’s problem with race relations on Martin Luther King. He decried the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as destructive to our White Christian nation, worried, publicly about flying on airplanes with black pilots, and referred to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor as an incompetent affirmative action hire. He advocated public execution for transgender Americans. His views on anti-Semitism were simply weird. While on one hand, he believed there was a cabal of Jews engaged in a conspiracy to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants, he was an Islamophobe who praised Israel’s genocidal treatment of Gaza.

I would put a question to everyone who reads this. Who would you rather stand in support of, an extremist with the same despicable views as Stephen Miller whose entire career has been about espousing views that two-thirds of America disavowed or two kids whose only crimes were showing up for school on Wednesday? Would you prefer Charlie Kirk’s view that the best form of gun control is to arm every American, or the view that sensible gun control laws are essential to our survival?

As much as I despise everything Charlie Kirk stood for, and I believe the cult-like Turning Point he founded is toxic for our national discourse, I despise wanton gun violence more. And if it’s not yet clear, I despise all the attention Kirk’s assassination continues to receive, while no one is lowering their flags to honor the children who were shot.

Let us not get caught up in typical MAGA nonsense over this. I’m guessing that the suspect in custody in Utah, who King Donald has already pronounced guilty of Kirk’s murder, will turn out to be a nut case, like the mentally challenged individual who took a shot at Trump last year. I find it fascinating that when some lunatic shoots up a school, every MAGA politician is quick to blame mental illness – after all, guns aren’t inherently evil, the problem is all the crazy people who own them. But when equally crazy people shoot at Trump and Kirk, they represent sinister forces of the radical left and the deep state.

Like everything else about the MAGA movement, the issues of guns and political violence have been distorted beyond recognition to suit the ideologues who are only in it for the power and wealth it brings them. I support the Second Amendment and its original purpose: to be able to raise a popular militia for defense and to enable individuals to defend their families against tyranny. Is it beyond ironic, that the very president who craves autocratic power and those who support him unconditionally also agree with Charlie Kirk that every American should be armed, when both the assassination attempt on Trump and the successful murder of Kirk could only have been accomplished with high end sniper rifles?

I will mourn and sympathize with the families of every child who has been shot in school and all those lost in mass shootings like the one that took nearly sixty lives in Las Vegas, but I refuse to mourn the loss of Charlie Kirk and the hateful things he preached.