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Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Charlie Kirk’s Murder, Response and Legacy

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As somebody who was born four floors above and four years after JFK’s murdered body was rushed into the ER in futility, who was immersed in knowledge of his assassination throughout childhood, and who has studied it extensively, along with the killings of RFK and MLK, I know a bit about political violence. We seem to be back into that sort of terrible era again with two attempts on Trump, a couple of state-legislator killings by a sicko in Minnesota, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk last month. [This occurred on my flight to Hawaii for Kilauea Episode 33…more on that later.]

Charlie leaves behind a lovely young widow, Erika, and their two little kids, all because some deranged radical didn’t like his ideals. Must it be this way?

Political violence is evil, absolutely intolerable, and has no place in civil society. Disagreements and grievances should be aired through rational debate and discussion, with logic, reason, facts, and the humility that comes with not having all the answers. That is a nonpartisan statement.

So far, I’ve seen posts from men, women, people of different faiths, nationalities, backgrounds and appearances, mourning the loss of Charlie Kirk. Let their voices ring truest—none I’ve read yet more well-written under intense personal grief than Dennis Prager’s (below), who knew Charlie as a brilliant mind, faithful servant of God, and also, husband and father to a young family.

As an American, as a Jew, and as Dennis, I am devastated at the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The truth is, as I write these words, I can’t believe I am writing them. I am in the denial stage of mourning. As an American, we have lost the most articulate spokesman for America and its unique value system—a country founded to be free, based on Jerusalem and Athens, the Judeo-Christian value system and the Greek emphasis on logic and reason. Charlie was a uniquely gifted individual who, in his teens, created the largest movement of young Americans committed to preserving and growing America and its ideals. He tirelessly went from campus to campus, from Oxford to Utah, dialoging with any student who wished to debate him. Using his vast reservoir of facts and his exceptionally speedy and articulate mind, he gave them what seemed to be unlimited amounts of time, and then calmly eviscerated all their anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Judeo-Christian positions. I watched an inordinate number of these exchanges and thanked God that Charlie Kirk was there to do this work. America’s youth in particular have lost a moral and intellectual leader, one who would, perhaps, have one day become their president. As a committed Jew, I thank God regularly that a non-Jew, a committed Christian, became one of the few great public spokesmen on behalf of Israel and the Jewish communities outside of Israel. Few Jews could match Charlie’s knowledge and eloquent arguments on behalf of those two entities.

As Dennis, I have lost a very close friend. Charlie repeatedly visited me in the various hospitals that I have been in since November 12 of last year, when I suffered a catastrophic fall which has left me paralyzed. When members of the nursing staff heard that Charlie Kirk was visiting me, my room became the most popular one in the hospital. Charlie brought me the manuscript of his forthcoming book arguing that everyone—Christians as well as Jews—should observe Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, just as he and his family had begun to do from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. It is a measure of our close relationship that he dedicated the book to me. His brilliant exposition of these arguments provide clear evidence for the non-necessity of a college education for most young Americans.

My heart breaks for his young widow, Erika, and for his two children, who have lost as great a man and a father as children can have. And for Charlie, who did not live to see them grow up. For one of the first times in my 20 years with my wife, Sue, I have seen her sob uncontrollably. The Prager home is in deep mourning, as are the homes of countless Americans. The loss to us personally and to the country generally is immeasurable.

Commentator Ivyonna Corrine had a brilliant post too, which I’ll also reproduce below, corrected for punctuation and grammar:

It’s wild to me how quick people are to slap labels on Charlie Kirk without actually knowing what he stands for. He’s been called racist…but where is the evidence? Go back through his years of speaking at college campuses, podcasts, interviews, debates, you won’t find him using racial slurs, degrading a race, or promoting hate. Not once. What you will find is him debating issues like immigration, education, the economy… and culture. Those are policy discussions, NOT racism.

Calling him racist because you don’t like his politics is lazy. It waters down the meaning of the word and takes away from the fight against actual racism. If someone truly believed he was racist they would be able to show proof. But they can’t, because it doesn’t exist. All they have is name calling.

He’s had thousands of open conversations on college campuses with people of every background, and guess what? The majority of those exchanges end with respect, even if they disagree. He’s been called sexist, but why? Because he’s pro life? Because he believes men and women are different? Having a conviction about protecting unborn children or recognizing biological differences doesn’t make you sexist. It means you are willing to stand for life and truth even when it’s unpopular.

He’s been called homophobic/transphobic, but again, where’s the proof? Saying “men can’t become women” is not hate on his part. It’s biology. Protecting kids from being pushed into irreversible decisions isn’t hate. It’s compassion. He has debated LGBTQ+ issues face to face without name calling, without hate, with facts.

He’s been called a fascist/Nazi, which is honestly laughable. Fascism silences speech. Charlie has spent his entire career defending free speech. Nazis took away rights, and Charlie advocates every day for the protection of rights in the Constitution. The comparison doesn’t even make sense.

He’s been called a bigot or accused of spreading hate, but what is hateful about encouraging young people to think critically, question government, and protect their freedoms? If you actually listen, he debates respectfully, and even when people scream at him he holds himself fully. That’s not hate, that’s self control.

And he’s been accused of spreading misinformation, but here’s the thing: every time people try to “fact check” him, the debates usually end with the person walking away because they can’t answer his questions. He brings data, statistics and constitutional backing. That’s not misinformation, that’s inconvenient truth.

At the end of the day, Charlie Kirk was not racist. He was not sexist. He was not hateful. He was bold. He was outspoken. And he was unafraid to say the things that needed to be said in a world where people get canceled for speaking how WE FEEL and the truth. He’s allowed his thoughts, just as in America you are too. So if you’re going to label him at least label him correctly: unapologetically American.

Let voices like these drown out those demonic cackles of celebration sprinkled over social media. The overtly diabolical celebrators are obvious. Block and move on if it helps, but do pray for the expulsion of their demons.

Perhaps more insidious are the passive-aggressive folks—some even labeling themselves as fellow Christians—who assigned Charlie such wholly unfounded labels as Ivyonna covered, based on weak and out-of-context interpretations and assumptions, but not actual hard evidence, who haven’t read his literature nor seen multiples of his videos, who talk often about tolerance, love, kindness and empathy without showing those qualities toward Christian conservatives, and who are showing two faces.

When people reveal themselves from behind the mask of virtue signaling and faux tolerance and “empathy”, pay attention. Observe, be watchful, and pray for them. A mask of kindness and empathy, hiding a mindset of the very opposite, reveals itself in such times as these. Charlie wasn’t perfect. None of us are free of sin. That includes me. I certainly recognize sin when I see it, and I see a lot of stones being cast Charlie’s way from behind those “kindness and empathy” facades.

To all fellow conservatives/libertarians who are infuriated, feeling helpless in the face of this and other recent violence, tempted to lash out: I get it. This enrages me as well. But remember who Charlie followed: Jesus. And remember how Charlie both followed and set a great example in taking obvious risk to go into hostile atmospheres to engage through dialog and ideas. Never resort to true hate (not the same as the false equivalency of hate and disapproval continually posited by the left), destruction or retaliation in kind. Be better than those psychopathic ghouls and mouth-foaming zealots of the left who readily could be found celebrating or rationalizing evil, across social media in the days following the killing. They need urgent psychological treatment, and most of all, they need to find the Lord, who ultimately will be the final judge of all events and people.

Finally, for 50 years, I’ve read and watched great speeches by political figures from antiquity through the men on Mount Rushmore, to Churchill, Reagan and beyond. This, from Utah Governor Spencer Cox, has come out of nowhere to take its place among the very best, not only for the transcribable text, but for the raw and unvarnished sincerity plainly apparent behind the wise words. For context in posterity, I linked not just to the video, but a local news story containing it.

We all could do well to heed. As I’ve stated in some recent comment: Freedom of speech under threat of violence is not freedom at all.

Rest in Heaven, Charlie. We can honor his legacy, and that of other nonviolent agents of change like MLK and Jesus, by fighting bad ideas not with violence and destruction, but with better ideas.

The Fallacy of “Compromise” with Gaslighting Forces of Tyranny

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Compromise is great for business deals, arbitration, professional workplace disagreements, property-line disputes, and the like. At lawmaking governance levels, it’s often needed to get something done (say, to get enough legislators of the opposition party aboard to pass a budget).

However, compromise is, like most concepts involving social interaction, prone to abuse.

Stay alert to ways you can be compromised adversely, manipulated and taken advantage of, and resist those — whether at personal levels by abusive “friends” and “lovers”, or on larger scales, by government and media. Yes, you can be on the hurt side of an abusive relationship with a governing authority. History is chock full of examples.

A large-scale, abusive use of the concept of compromise is when high authorities wish to restrict the liberty of the people. That’s called tyranny. Genocides under Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot are famous large-scale examples just in the last 100 years. Without quite as much overt killing (yet still a lot, per the Uighurs), is the ongoing, worsening, Orwellian techno-control dictatorship in mainland China.

Less extreme, but just as insidious, are slow-drip, incremental tactics here and anywhere else in the so-called Free World, acclimatizing people to each seemingly minuscule sacrifice of freedom, until one day, you are in a de facto prison. How does that occur? Convince you to give up your own liberty, and it’s rather easy.

Gaslighting occurs not just in personal relationships, but by Big Bureaucracy. Situational types:
“Confused? We’re the experts at telling you what’s real, all else is disinformation.”
“Here, this pain I’m doling out is for your own good.”

We’re conditioned early to these vulnerabilities by having to accept needed pain as kids, at the behest of parents — such as by enduring awful-tasting medicines, painful shots, or stinging antiseptics applied to scrapes, that truly were for our own good. This conditioning renders us vulnerable to systemic, governance-level gaslighting as adults, via the same persuasive tactics. Furthermore, the process can be sudden, or creep along in tiny steps spanning years, or even generations. Generations!

Don’t we owe it to our children, and theirs, to ensure their liberties are greater than ours, not less?

At societal scales, freedom almost never returns after being sacrificed for what command-and-control figures plea is the “common good”. Who are they to define it? Who are they to make my decisions for me regarding anything I do that doesn’t directly and provably (in a legal, beyond-reasonable doubt sense) harm another individual?

Better it is to leave “common good” decisions to local scales, where groups of neighbors can better contextualize solutions to local needs. Neighborhoods and towns, perhaps even cities if not too large and diverse, work best. Above that, the bigger the scale of government, the greater the fallacy of “common good” when it comes to anything affecting freedom. Why? Simple: one size doesn’t fit all. In a physically and culturally vast nation like ours, the people and their situations are too diverse (by the true meaning of diversity) for that.

To wit, water restrictions in Las Vegas are rather inappropriate for Upper Michigan, on whose shores wash the three biggest Great Lakes. Fuel taxes hurt the Kansas wheat farmer or the poverty-level working single mom in Bakersfield more than the Boston loft dweller with no car. The same federal and state red tape involving business books and taxes burdens the margin-straddling machine shop in Minnetonka proportionately harder than the Minnesota Vikings, whose owner hires legions of accountants at the snap of a finger. Even within one city, zoning must vary, because development, drainage and land-use needs are nonuniform. More examples abound, by the millions, in countless situations.

Big bureaucracy commonly imposes, after gaslighting us into accepting they’re for our own benefit, or the benefit of others, one-size “solutions” justified off “the common good”. Again one size does not fit all.

Beware simple tactics of propaganda, such as the use of the words “compassion” or “empathy” in the political context; those are quite often little tools of psychological manipulation to soften resistance against top-down theft of freedoms. Bureaucracy cannot have “compassion” nor “empathy”. Only individuals and God can.

Freedom is God-given, per the concept of free will. As the Founders rightly recognized and wrote, our rights come not from the government, but are bestowed by the Creator on the governed. Liberty is a divinely inspired ideal! We should treat it as no less important than that.

Give the agents of tyranny an inch, and they’ll take a mile. Therefore, those who value life and liberty should not yield even an inch to those who wish to take it. “Compromise” with tyranny only incrementalizes its takeover.

Sonia Sotomayor’s Bigotry

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Hard as it may be, and as much as it (should) matter, let’s set aside whatever attributes or flaws that liberals and conservatives may find in the judicial record of the newest nominee for the Supreme Court.


    I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

        From the lecture, “A Latina Judge’s Voice” by Sonia Sotomayor, U. California-Berkeley, 2001

Let’s use the very same logic for a moment and reword the quote.


I would hope that a wise white man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latin female who hasn’t lived that life.

      From the hypothetical lecture, “A White Male Judge’s Voice” by Bubba B. Justice, U. Mississippi, 1959

What’s the difference? Don’t over-think this one, because it’s not difficult.

Guess what…there is no difference!

Racial and gender bigotry go both ways. And in neither case should the person spouting forth racist or sexist viewpoints, pandered before a friendly audience of those who look much like her/him, be allowed to skate by uncontested. In this case, she’ll be challenged, but those challengers are sure to be outvoted.

Do you think hypothetical Judge Bubba’s candidacy could survive the Supreme Court vetting and nomination process today? If so, what on Earth would lead you to believe such foolishness? If not, then neither should Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination. Both the real and fictional figures’ statements represent precisely matching levels of racial and gender bias. It’s a form of equality we don’t need.

This example teaches our kids that skin color and the shape of the organs hidden beneath our underwear — tangible physical traits unrelated to judicial expertise — matter more than qualifications, credentials and, yes, “empathy”. How is either racism or sexism empathetic, much less both at once? How are we going to get over racial and gender inequity when nominees for the Supreme Court go on record with their bigotry?

So much for “empathy”, President Obama. Shame on you. You should know better than this, but given the present makeup of Congress, it is a disingenuous political maneuver; and as such, you probably will get away with it.

I’ll sign off for tonight with one more quote.


    I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

        Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 2008

Now, how firm is that conviction, really? How does nominating a racial and gender bigot further that wonderful ideal?