The Second Commandment

We are who we worship.

Charlie Kirk was speaking at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025 when he was shot in the neck and killed.

One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
– Steve Jobs

It’s a fine insight, as quoted in Walter Isaacson’s biography of the consumer-tech pioneer.

Your personal pantheon of heroes, after all, reflects your humility, your values and your highest aspirations. Mine are Raul Wallenberg, Rosa Parks, Alexander Fleming and Ray Suggs, inventor of realistic latex novelty vomit, which puts cheap vinyl vomit to shame.

But if you really want to know what makes someone tick, what ideologies he subscribes to, what dreams and hatreds he harbors, find out first who his martyrs are. From whom, among all the dead, does he draw inspiration? Whom does he venerate? Whom does he sanctify?

For U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa), America’s spiritual North Star is the slain rightwing provocateur Charlie Kirk.

“He was always seeking the higher road … Ultimately, he was killed for it; killed for spreading his message like someone else we love and cherish, and that is, in fact, Jesus Christ.” Holy Christ. Quite the comparison.

For the Sunday NFL game against New York, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones displayed Kirk’s image on the gigantic Texas Stadium Jumbotron for a moment of silence to honor what in Jones’ worldview Kirk represented: “One nation. Under God. Indivisible. With liberty and justice for all.” OK, Jerry, have it your way. But I would have said, to Kirk’s way of thinking, “As divisible as fuck.”

MAGA queen Marjorie Taylor Greene watched the Utah video and saw the murder of Thomas Becket: “Charlie Kirk,” she declared, “is a Christian martyr for Jesus Christ.” And Donald Trump, who ordered American flags to be displayed at half staff, paid the ultimate tribute: “He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me.”

These self-proclaimed “patriots” were by no means outliers. In red states coast to coast — Iowa, Arizona, Ohio, Florida, Nebraska and beyond — prayer vigils attracted crowds to memorialize their fallen prophet. And, of course, another was held in the U.S. Capitol, where Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson praised Kirk as the embodiment of all that is good and just.

“Scripture reminds us that we should not be overcome by evil, but we should overcome evil with good. That is the legacy of Charlie Kirk,” Johnson preached. “I think the best way to honor the memory of Charlie Kirk is to live as he lived.” So far, so good, Mr. Speaker. You’re doing him proud.

So what, exactly, has so touched these powerful people? What charitable, humane Christian doctrine did Kirk espouse? I will let you work that puzzle out not with the encomiums of the devout, but with the late influencer’s own spoken words:

There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.

Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor [Swift]. You’re not in charge.

The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.

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. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.

If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?

If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.

I can’t stand the word “empathy,” actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage.

Democrat women want to die alone without children.

We don’t have enough people in prison in America. We need a lot more prisoners.

Death penalties should be public, should be quick, it should be televised. I think at a certain age, it's an initiation … What age should you start to see public executions?

I’d say never-years-old, but that’s just me. Kirk was on a different wavelength. The man officially mourned by the kneeling American flag was also the man whose godly image of America was a white, Christian, nativist utopia, a place “not to have my kid be taught the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school. While also, not having them have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.”

Kirk’s disciples long for the good old days of Jim Crow and school prayer and restricted country clubs and homosexuality dead-bolted in the closet. But even in our worst times bigots mainly hid their hatreds under hoods and cloaks, understanding that public expression of their values would bring opprobrium and shame. In 1967, when the founder of the American Nazi Party was assassinated, there was no football-stadium memorial or Capitol prayer vigil for George Lincoln Rockwell.

This is the sick, and sickening, nation we have become. With unwitting confederates in the most surprising places. Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates posed a question not about the rabid deplorables, but the supposedly cooler heads of the intelligentsia who found it a mark of virtue in their commentary to distinguish the unalloyed cruelty of this man’s ravings from his ghastly fate.

“What of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits” Coates posed, “who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don't know.”

I do. It is not ignorance. It is intimidation, with the perverse consequence of political correctness turning on itself. As I’ve said so many times before, the bigots, the deplorables, the fanatics, the depraved Bible-thumpers, the red-hatted mouth breathers have won the culture wars. And as the week’s events have tragically demonstrated, democracy, decency and simple humanity are buried in the landslide.