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The Killing of Charlie Kirk: Violent Speech and a Violent End
Charlie Kirk expanded hatred, marketed the vile speech of old racisms in new wineskins, and further jeopardized the lives and security of others.
Sep 11, 2025
There are so many words and cliches condemning the killing of Charles James Kirk and none of the refrains are unique. "We need to dial back our discourse," "We need to be tolerant of different opinions," and "There is no room in American politics for political violence."
Are people blind to the realities that have been swirling all around us? The language has been violent. The discord has been great. There has been a consistent invitation to dine at the table of heated racist discussion posing as legitimate political speech. The killing of Charlie Kirk fits within this arena of speech that is racist and hate-filled but is designed to pose as rational and logical political speech.
In his rhetoric and so-called debate style this 31-year-old evangelical firebrand of the right has stated that Black pilots were incompetent, gays should be stoned, ironically he was opposed to gun control, abortion, LGBTQ rights, criticized the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Martin Luther King Jr., promoted Christian nationalism, advanced Covid-19 misinformation, made false claims of electoral fraud in 2020, and is a proponent of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. This Chicago-born suburbanite brought all of the racial innuendo to political speech and rhetorically violated the safety and security of Blacks, people of-color, the LGBTQIA community, perverted the history of race and racism in America, attempted to legitimize the nation as a white bastion of civilization and Christianity, and in general perfected the use of racial and hateful language and molded it into a form of acceptable and legitimate political debate and viewpoint.
But the legitimate debate aspect was far from legitimate historical benign speech, nor was it nonviolent in character. In fact, it touched all of the refrains of the vile language of the past that resulted far too many times in lynchings and other forms of racial violence and upheaval.
Trump talked about lowering the temperature of the political language that is used, but in the next breath criticized "the radical left" for castigating the hate language of Kirk.
Don't get me wrong, I am sorry for the death and killing of Charlie Kirk. I have stood over many coffins of people I did not agree with and said words of comfort to the families during my 40-plus years of ministry. In doing so I have looked at a person's life to find something to say about their character, worthiness, and contributions they have made in their lifetime. Sometimes the task is easier than at other times.
As I look at the life of Kirk, he was a husband, a father, and what else I do not know. He had friends, I am sure. He played a significant role in his connection with community that was personal and also collective. But the problem I would have in affirming this life at an end-of-life ceremony is that he evidently did not care in his living about the security and comfort of others. He did not show empathy. Whether he believed what he espoused, or it was simply a marketing ploy for influence and money I don't know, and no one will ever know for sure. But Charlie Kirk expanded hatred, marketed the vile speech of old racisms in new wineskins, and further jeopardized the lives and security of others.
The right wing is working hard to make a political martyr of him. US President Donald Trump has ordered flags to be flown at half-mast ahead of any remembrance of 9-11. Trump talked about lowering the temperature of the political language that is used, but in the next breath criticized "the radical left" for castigating the hate language of Kirk. If we are going to be truthful in this moment, the hate that Kirk put out came back on him, and the violent political language that continues to fly in this country will continue to manifest itself in ways where we will continually be praying for victims and their families.
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Totalitarian Rule Is Here: Project 2025 9 Months Along
MAGA is devotion to a single-party system, a charismatic leader, closed political culture, and war on civic society.
Sep 10, 2025
I had the opportunity to engage the author of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” Paul Dans, this Saturday on BBC World News Radio. The essential question was whether Project 2025 was a document of totalitarian rule. Dans, who was fired from the Heritage Foundation during the presidential campaign for linking Donald Trump to the fascist playbook, has returned in full force as a MAGA senate candidate in South Carolina. He is a conservative committed to attacking democratic institutions, although he would claim that Project 2025 centers on returning the federal government to the hands of the people.
According to various trackers, the Project 2025 agenda has been nearly 50% completed. The assault on the federal system is well in hand. But is this totalitarianism?
Yes, it is.
I have written earlier about totalitarianism in the science policy of the White House. The totalitarian model extends further, up and down from the White House to the reactionary Supreme Court and especially to MAGAlytes in Congress. MAGA is devotion to a single-party system, a charismatic leader, closed political culture, and war on civic society.
First, recall that Project 2025 is a 900-page cornucopia of conservative delights. It calls for the replacement of merit-based federal civil service workers with people loyal to Trump and for taking partisan control of such critical law-enforcement agencies as the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It promotes the closing of the Department of Education and the restructuring of museums, foundations, and even private universities to challenge fact-based institutions in their primary missions. In the economy, Project 2025 institutionalizes trickle-down economics: It reduces taxes on corporations, cuts social welfare and medical programs, draws financial and communications firms into the totalitarian fold, and rewards wealthy collaborators and industrialists as Hitler did in Nazi Germany with access to the halls of power. It promotes anti-LGBT discrimination; it ends Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. In fact, Project 2025 does not rein in the administrative state, its major stated goal, but gives additional tools to weaponize the corrupt Trump presidency.
Hence, Project 2025 reflects totalitarian political culture, in particular the persistence of a one-party system with an authoritarian leader who uses extra-legislative means to achieve his goals. For example, Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to root out “inefficiency” in government, but he in fact directed the faux department to emasculate agencies he and Project 2025 adherents disliked. In subservience to the president, MAGA republicans in Congress allowed DOGE to usurp their oversight. Further, while railing against executive orders (EO) of past presidents, Trump has used them in fact to replace policy making. Trump averaged 55 EO annually his first term; by mid-2025 he was averaging 330 per year with the goal to drown the courts and Congress in executive branch power.
Like in Hitler or Stalin who created a cult of personality, Trump has bullied MAGA to ensure allegiance to him as the all-powerful leader. This leader is the promoter of disorder, the arbitrator of conflict, the omniscient problem solver, the stager of domestic military sweeps and other Epstein flyovers to distract the populace, the organizer of state dinners and cabinet meetings in which his magalytes sickeningly faun for him. He is the Department of War lobbyist for the Nobel Peace Prize and the UFC organizer for a wrestling event on the White House Lawn. One senses he is jealous that Russian President Vladimir Putin miraculously scored eight goals in a charity hockey exhibition game (no one checked him, strangely). He is certainly angry that Kim Jong-Il shot a 38 will 11 holes-in-one, while the president must cheat at his golf game at his courses to win trophies.
Totalitarian states claim to give individual rights priority, but they seek control over private morality.
Totalitarian governments bathe the public sphere with propaganda; the Soviets were masters at misinformation. Putin has reestablished state control of all media. For his totalitarian push, Trump promotes branded presidential newspeak on his own channel, Truth Social. Such loyal media outlets as Fox help him spread false claims. Indeed, totalitarians want to control the medium and the message, not educate the public; destroy expert independence in government agencies, not encourage it; and in general to sully data, not analyze them. The complete weaponization of government comes in the selective assault of academic and intellectual freedom in the Trump administration attack on universities, law firms, and other private businesses.
The totalitarian state embraces the veneer of legality, but engages extrajudicial confiscation of power. Like the Stalin Constitution of 1936 or Nazi laws of the 1930s, magalytes treat the US Constitution as vaguely important when its language fits their plans. Otherwise, they rely on executive branch overreach and on specious interpretation of congressional laws (the Enemy Aliens Act 1798; Posse Comitatus Act of 1878) to end due process and deploy military troops in blue states. Partnering with such mega-maga-communications magnates as Peter Thiel, they deploy AI to create a surveillance state. DOGE sought personal information of US citizens to build a surveillance regime.
A signal action of totalitarian regimes is the identification of external and internal enemies, heavily colored with homophobia and xenophobia. AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Patel are aggressively prosecuting people who crossed the president: former adviser John Bolton, prosecutors, judges, and even congresspeople. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other unidentified government police, their faces covered, their uniforms obscured, their racism barely concealed, resemble Stalin’s NKVD in their black overcoats as they round up, subdue, and cart enemies away to secret facilities. The major enemies are undocumented immigrants, which SCOPUS has now okayed to arrest on the basis of skin color alone. Recall that so fearful are the Trumpisti of immigrants that they have separated children from their parents to secret them out of the country; Putin, another authoritarian ruler, approves the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.
Project 2025 harps on the fear of internal enemies over alleged supposed additional rights given to individuals based on gender and color (“DEI”). In fact, like the Nazi prosecution of homosexuals or the Putinite illegalization of LGBTQ public existence, so the Trump administration has set forth a litany of enemies to be deprived of rights. They include Venezuelan gangs, lesbians, gays, people of color, Democrats, and trans individuals, the last who may be denied the Second Amendment right to bear arms by a finding that they are insane (“mentally ill”).
Totalitarian states claim to give individual rights priority, but they seek control over private morality. Women’s rights are anathema to the conservatives of Project 2025 who mention abortion over 200 times in the 900-page document. They claim to be pro-life and pro-family, but they pursue regressive natalism and forced pregnancy such as that imposed on women in socialist Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu. More and more gerrymandered states are following the examples of Texas and Florida to criminalize women and their personal physicians for not carrying fetuses full term—no matter the circumstances (rape, insist, mortal risk to the mother).
It's all there in Program 2025. And it’s all there in the White House.
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'We Will Fight': Denver Schools Defy Trump's Attacks on Trans Students Despite Threats to Federal Funds
"The district has made clear it will not fold quietly, signaling that some institutions still have the resolve to stand against a federal campaign of erasure," wrote one LGBTQ+ rights journalist.
Sep 03, 2025
As educational institutions around the country capitulate, Denver's public school system said Tuesday that it would defy demands from the Trump administration to discriminate against transgender students even if it means losing federal funds.
Alex Marrero, the superintendent of Denver Public Schools (DPS), said the school "will protect all of their students from this hostile administration," by refusing to implement a ban on gender-neutral bathrooms mandated by Trump's Department of Education.
On Thursday, the department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) sent Denver Public Schools an email demanding that the school remove a multi-stall, gender-neutral restroom at one of its high schools, which it claimed violated Title IX of the Civil Rights Act.
As Erin Reed, an independent journalist who covers LGBTQ+ rights, notes, the facility built by DPS and other schools is "similar to facilities in major airports, European cities, and increasingly across the United States." The school, meanwhile, has said that the facility was requested by students themselves and has 12-foot high partitions to protect their privacy.
The OCR went further. To be compliant with Title IX, it said, the school also had to "adopt biology-based definitions for the words 'male' and 'female'," meaning they needed to classify transgender students by their biological sex at birth rather than their preferred identities, including banning them from restrooms that do not correspond to their biological sex.
The Trump administration also called on the school to eliminate components of its "LGBTQ+ Toolkit," which includes guidance on how students and faculty can create a welcoming environment for their trans peers. Among other things, the document encourages members of the school community to step in to stop bullying of LGBTQ+ students, respect the preferred pronouns of all students, and for faculty to enforce dress codes in a gender-neutral way.
As Reed put it, the department was effectively "claiming that Title IX actually mandates discrimination against transgender students."
If DPS refused to comply within 10 days, the department threatened to strip the district of federal funding, which makes up 7% of the school's annual budget, according to Chalkbeat. A large portion of that federal money goes toward low-cost school lunches for poor children.
In a statement issued Tuesday, DPS's school board and administration put out a statement "disagreeing unequivocally" with the government's interpretation of the law.
"Title IX permits schools to provide sex-separate restrooms. It does not require that to be the only option," DPS argued. "The interpretation put forward by OCR would undercut our equity commitments, contradict our mission, harm the very students we are entrusted to support, and would have a devastating impact on East High School and the broader LGBTQ+ community. What matters most is that students are safe, have privacy, and can learn without fear."
"The decision to implement gender-neutral restrooms at East followed direct feedback from LGBTQ+ students who reported they did not feel safe," the statement continued. "For these students, access to a restroom where they feel secure is not symbolic. It is about dignity, health, and the ability to learn. When students speak, we listen and we act."
Superintendent Marrero, meanwhile, put out a short video on Instagram expressing his support for the district's LGBTQ+ students.
"As you might have seen in the news, the federal government has decided to take a firm stance and have us roll back our support to the LGBTQ+ community, and of course, we're not having it," Marrero said. "We will continue to stand in solidarity, and as you engage this weekend and beyond, I just wanted to let you know that we got you, and everything is going to be ok."
In a statement published alongside the video, Marrero wrote: "We will fight. In the courts, if we must. In the public square, when necessary. Always in partnership with those who believe that every student deserves to show up to school ready to learn, free from fear."
With this pledge to stand by its LGBTQ+ students, DPS joined five school districts in Virginia that last month responded with similar defiance when the Trump administration ordered them to stop allowing trans students to use bathrooms matching their gender. Those districts—which include Loudoun, Arlington, and Fairfax Counties—have launched a lawsuit against the Trump administration to keep their federal funding.
"Elite institutions like Brown, Columbia, and Penn—as well as multiple hospitals serving transgender youth—have already capitulated, signing away protections through bathroom and sports bans or cutting off medical care entirely," Reed wrote. "Denver Public Schools, by contrast, has drawn a line. With the Department of Education's deadline looming next Monday, the district has made clear it will not fold quietly, signaling that some institutions still have the resolve to stand against a federal campaign of erasure."
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