Will Freedom Fall to Political Violence?
Charlie Kirk is dead and the nation is still reeling. Not since the 1960s, when the Kennedys and Martin Luther King were gunned down, has America been so rocked. Those heroes were confronting entrenched powers and were making front page news. But Charlie Kirk was not leading an uprising. He didn’t have a militia or marching zealots at his command. He was armed only with words – biblical convictions, reasoned arguments, and the courage to confront leftist ideology head-on. And for that, he was cut down. He was killed, not because he was vicious or violent, but because he spoke with clarity and conviction and was changing people’s minds.
The shocking thing is that many have accepted this grim tragedy as if expected and even justified. You might ask how this could happen in America. One answer is the news media whose poison we consume daily. They no longer report fairly; they choose sides, demonize opponents, and cloak propaganda as news. Their favorite way of distorting the message is to take statements out of context and then reinterpret them according to their preferred narrative. Countless reporters on the left have said that Charlie Kirk was a hater. Many people spouting off on social media were convinced. According to statements from the killer’s family, he had “become more political in recent years” and viewed Kirk as someone spreading hate.
Fanning the Flames
Networks and other media outlets have consistently characterized public figures as a dangerous menace to society. This climate has already fueled multiple assassination attempts. Some were thwarted, but others, like the one that claimed Kirk’s life, were tragically successful. Their favorite tactic is to take statements out of context and then reinterpret them as ignorant, hateful, or dangerous. The left-leaning media did this constantly with Charlie. When he was supporting traditional marriage, he was accused of advocating for the stoning of gay people (by bestselling author Stephen King). When criticizing DEI initiatives and the sloppy lawmaking that allowed them to fester, he was accused of being a racist and against civil rights (by Politico and the New York Times). When he made a wry comment that certain prominent women who promoted Affirmative Action because it benefitted them were not qualified to be in the positions that it afforded them, he was accused of slamming all black women as being mentally inferior (by Yahoo News and others). While many of these were later retracted or debunked by other news agencies, the damage was done. The killer, Tyler Robinson, was not the only one who had been convinced that Charlie Kirk was a dangerous hater. USA Today reported that over 100 people have been fired or faced other repercussions for making negative comments about the assassination, many of them teachers and professors. People who have never listened to a full video clip of Charlie Kirk in context have been convinced that he is a despicable menace. And the news and digital media outlets are largely to blame.
Can We Really Point the Finger?
But we are to blame as well. We have abdicated our responsibility to be an informed citizenry. If we continue to allow our opinions to be swayed by TV and social media, without any objectivity or critical analysis, we will become slaves to whoever is paying the fees to access our eyeballs. As Thomas Jefferson said:
“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”
and
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
Taking Back our Freedom
We should be the most informed people in history. There are 26,000 times more bytes of data on the Internet than there are grains of sand on the whole planet. We should be able to find out what’s really going on. But to do so, we must fight the algorithms and our own confirmation bias. Be willing to challenge emotional narratives instead of blindly accepting them just because they conform to your preconceived notions. When you hear a negative report about a public person from one of their critics, don’t just accept it. Google it. Investigate. Remember Hosea 4:6, where the Lord says “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”. As we drift into a world dominated by AI deep fakes, we must resist the temptation to get pulled into tribal enmities, allowing our freedoms to be eroded. Otherwise, more voices will be silenced, more lives cut short, and in the end it will not only be men like Charlie Kirk who fall, but the very freedom that sustains us as a nation.
Tags: American Politics,
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Conservative Voices,
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Charlie Kirk – A Warning for Our Times
Will Freedom Fall to Political Violence?
Charlie Kirk is dead and the nation is still reeling. Not since the 1960s, when the Kennedys and Martin Luther King were gunned down, has America been so rocked. Those heroes were confronting entrenched powers and were making front page news. But Charlie Kirk was not leading an uprising. He didn’t have a militia or marching zealots at his command. He was armed only with words – biblical convictions, reasoned arguments, and the courage to confront leftist ideology head-on. And for that, he was cut down. He was killed, not because he was vicious or violent, but because he spoke with clarity and conviction and was changing people’s minds.
The shocking thing is that many have accepted this grim tragedy as if expected and even justified. You might ask how this could happen in America. One answer is the news media whose poison we consume daily. They no longer report fairly; they choose sides, demonize opponents, and cloak propaganda as news. Their favorite way of distorting the message is to take statements out of context and then reinterpret them according to their preferred narrative. Countless reporters on the left have said that Charlie Kirk was a hater. Many people spouting off on social media were convinced. According to statements from the killer’s family, he had “become more political in recent years” and viewed Kirk as someone spreading hate.
Fanning the Flames
Networks and other media outlets have consistently characterized public figures as a dangerous menace to society. This climate has already fueled multiple assassination attempts. Some were thwarted, but others, like the one that claimed Kirk’s life, were tragically successful. Their favorite tactic is to take statements out of context and then reinterpret them as ignorant, hateful, or dangerous. The left-leaning media did this constantly with Charlie. When he was supporting traditional marriage, he was accused of advocating for the stoning of gay people (by bestselling author Stephen King). When criticizing DEI initiatives and the sloppy lawmaking that allowed them to fester, he was accused of being a racist and against civil rights (by Politico and the New York Times). When he made a wry comment that certain prominent women who promoted Affirmative Action because it benefitted them were not qualified to be in the positions that it afforded them, he was accused of slamming all black women as being mentally inferior (by Yahoo News and others). While many of these were later retracted or debunked by other news agencies, the damage was done. The killer, Tyler Robinson, was not the only one who had been convinced that Charlie Kirk was a dangerous hater. USA Today reported that over 100 people have been fired or faced other repercussions for making negative comments about the assassination, many of them teachers and professors. People who have never listened to a full video clip of Charlie Kirk in context have been convinced that he is a despicable menace. And the news and digital media outlets are largely to blame.
Can We Really Point the Finger?
But we are to blame as well. We have abdicated our responsibility to be an informed citizenry. If we continue to allow our opinions to be swayed by TV and social media, without any objectivity or critical analysis, we will become slaves to whoever is paying the fees to access our eyeballs. As Thomas Jefferson said:
“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”
and
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
Taking Back our Freedom
We should be the most informed people in history. There are 26,000 times more bytes of data on the Internet than there are grains of sand on the whole planet. We should be able to find out what’s really going on. But to do so, we must fight the algorithms and our own confirmation bias. Be willing to challenge emotional narratives instead of blindly accepting them just because they conform to your preconceived notions. When you hear a negative report about a public person from one of their critics, don’t just accept it. Google it. Investigate. Remember Hosea 4:6, where the Lord says “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”. As we drift into a world dominated by AI deep fakes, we must resist the temptation to get pulled into tribal enmities, allowing our freedoms to be eroded. Otherwise, more voices will be silenced, more lives cut short, and in the end it will not only be men like Charlie Kirk who fall, but the very freedom that sustains us as a nation.
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