In yesterday’s Brew we ran down the highlights of the amazing 10-hour revival meeting that Charlie Kirk’s memorial service turned out to be. It was a powerful moment for the Church in America, which is very good news for the country — since our Republic can only stay free if its people practice the virtues, as each of our Founding Fathers warned.
A vice-ridden populace can only be controlled by a bureaucratic tyranny, and nobody can practice even the natural virtues (prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude) for long without God’s grace. That comes through the Church. So the Church’s future and freedom’s survival aren’t just intertwining issues. They’re a stark yes-or-no question, as Scripture told us thousands of years ago:
I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live. (Deuteronomy 30:19)
Kirk understood the stakes of our answer. That’s why his organization, Turning Point USA, became more explicitly Christian every year — even as too many churches lurched into silence or sold out to our “rainbow” elites. That’s why last year he collaborated with Eric Metaxas to make a film based on Metaxas’s book Letter to the American Church, which is about our duty to baptize and claim for Christ every square inch of our lives, including our politics.
Who Are These Crazy Right-Wingers?
The Left is openly panicking at the sight of the U.S. president and his entire cabinet joining in a day-long altar call, as if this were something alien to America. It isn’t.
We fought our revolution with local militias who’d trained each week at their churches, hearing patriotic sermons before going out to practice. Our Second Amendment was drawn from the English Bill of Rights, which explicitly linked gun rights to religious liberty. Our greatest national debates over issues such as slavery, temperance, and Civil Rights were argued back and forth in explicitly Christian terms. (For documentary proof, read scholar Mark David Hall’s definitive book Did America Have a Christian Founding?)
But for my entire lifetime, our elites have tried to hijack, pervert, and recast America as the heir of the French or Russian revolutions — which were atheist uprisings aimed at hacking away the natural, organic roots that nourish both Church and State. They issued dishonest court rulings banning prayer from public schools and legalizing abortion, then consecrating same-sex “marriage” at the expense of religious liberty and the best interests of children. The Biden regime infiltrated Latin Mass Catholic parishes, raided pro-lifers’ homes, and labeled PTA moms as “domestic extremists.”
We saw in stark terms the outcome of aggressive secularization in the chaos of 2020, when COVID activists locked our churches and penned us up in our homes and rioters filled the streets to honor a career criminal who died while resisting arrest. Millions of Americans stumbled toward learned helplessness as our institutions forced untested gene therapies on us, our churches stayed silent, and our top institutions conspired to steal a presidential election — then persecute those who protested.
Kirk Was Just One More Kulak They Were Willing to Kill
Jake Gardner
Kirk’s memorial Sunday was more than a response to the political murder of an admirable young man. It was a collective revolt against the suffocating horror imposed on America starting in 2020, allegedly in the name of “public health” and antiracism. People who never watched Turning Point videos and were barely aware of Charlie Kirk and his work reacted to his death as if it were personal to them.
That’s because it was. Kirk was a proxy target, a stand-in, for the millions of faith-filled patriotic Americans whose lives don’t matter to the Left. They scoffed when Kirk died, and they’d shrug if the rest of us did. We know that, and that makes it personal. In that sense each of us can honestly say, “I’m Charlie Kirk.”
A young man twisted by pornography and gender ideology murdering Kirk, and the media falsely portraying Kirk as a “hatemonger” who basically had it coming — all that of that is straight out of the 2020 playbook. It’s the kind of thing our godless elites have been grooming young people to do. When other killers deranged by transgender ideology killed other Christians (most of them children), our elites mocked our “thoughts and prayers” and pretended that the deaths were part of the “gun violence pandemic.”
The List of Victims Keeps Growing
Also out of the Anarcho-Tyranny playbook was the death of decorated U.S. combat veteran Jake Gardner. He was falsely charged with a hate crime for defending himself and his elderly dad from a George Floyd looter, then kicked off GoFundMe so he couldn’t afford an attorney, and finally hounded to suicide … after which a Democratic state legislator went online to gloat about his death.
Ashli Babbitt
From the same playbook: The killing of peaceful January 6 protestor and Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt by an incompetent, dishonest Capitol Police officer, and the Air Force’s decision to deny her military honors at her funeral.
Add in the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a harmless war refugee who recently was just trying to ride the train in Charlotte, North Carolina — which is actually more dangerous than her native Ukraine, despite the war there. She was stabbed to death by a schizophrenic turned loose on the public by an unqualified DEI-appointee judge. Her killer stalked off boasting that he’d “killed that white woman” while the black passengers around Zarutska shrugged and did nothing to help her.
Iryna Zarutska
This is the kind of chaos the Left explicitly favors and does everything to enable — from defunding police to decriminalizing shoplifting via George Soros-controlled district attorneys and “progressive” mayors. Each incident like these is meant to terrorize and demoralize ordinary bourgeois citizens and assure radicals they can run rampant without consequences. That’s one way to recruit plenty of aimless young men: give them carte blanche for violence so long as they serve your cause. That’s how the literal, historical Nazis took over the most highly educated country in human history, and it’s the playbook the Left has taken to heart and decided to use on us.
How do we respond? Kirk’s memorial showed the world: with steadfastness, solemn resolve, and the courage that comes from faith in the Savior who already conquered death.
Charlie Kirk deserved all the honor that was offered him on Sunday. I’m sure he’s happy to share it with Jake, Ashli, and Iryna, who fell at the hands of the same set of villains.
Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls and all the souls of the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.
