Half-Mast for a Demagogue

Charlie Kirk is mourned as a martyr, while the children shot at Evergreen High School are forgotten — the true cost of his “prudent deal.”

The Flag at Half-Mast: On Charlie Kirk, Dead Children, and a Grotesque Inversion

Sad this is at a school

Charlie Kirk is dead. The news called it an assassination. The president lowered the flag to half-mast. Commentators lined up to praise him as “a good debater” and “a fair man.” His followers mourned the loss of their standard-bearer.

And yet, on the same day, two students at Evergreen High School outside Denver were shot and injured. Their names barely flickered across the headlines, before vanishing into the noise of the week. No flag was lowered for them. No solemn language of “assassination” was summoned to dignify their wounds. They were, like so many before them, collateral.

This grotesque inversion — the elevation of a demagogue to martyr while the suffering of children is treated as background static — is the America Charlie Kirk helped create.

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The Theology of the Bullet

Kirk himself was never shy about the bargain. In his own words:

“I think it’s worth 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.”

There it is, bald and unrepentant: a theology of the bullet. Some must die, so others may fondle their firearms. Some children must be sacrificed so that Kirk and his ilk can keep their idols intact. To him, the coffins were rational. The funerals, prudent.

That bargain did not only come for the children of Evergreen High School. It came for Kirk himself. He signed the contract in public, and fate collected on the terms.

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On Grief and Honesty

It is not wrong to feel sorrow at his death. His children have lost a father. His wife has lost a husband. The sudden absence of a loved one is a cruelty no family deserves. We can mourn with them, as fellow humans, even as we resist the temptation to sanctify the man himself.

For let us be clear: Charlie Kirk was not assassinated in the sense of Kennedy or King. He was not a statesman cut down in his prime, leaving a republic diminished. He was a demagogue whose absence diminishes nothing but the outrage economy he profited from. To elevate him into the pantheon of the martyred is not respect — it is dishonesty.

And here, let me pause. This is my opinion. For many, it will make you furious. But this is my America. This is my view. And the truth — that Charlie Kirk was a mountebank, a common confidence trickster in a well-tailored suit — stings most for those without the erudition to see it.

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The Fraud of “Debate”

The famous Oxford Debate Hall - where Charlie Kirk showed a true education - beats a demoagog

Even in death, his defenders seek to polish him. “A good debater,” they say. “Fair.” This is nonsense. Kirk was a misogynist and a provocateur, not a debater. At Oxford, when confronted with opponents who had actually read books and learned to think, he was dismantled. His arguments crumbled, his bluster exposed as hollow. The audience watched a man humiliated by the very institution he claimed was worthless.

For his supporters, it was devastating: proof that their champion of “common sense” could not hold his own against proper education. Kirk’s line that “college is a waste” was true only in his case — because he never went there to learn.

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Half-Mast for Whom?

And so we return to the flag. Lowered for Kirk, not for the children. Trump honored his sycophant, but not the wounded teenagers who may carry scars for life. This is the true obscenity: a republic that sanctifies the death of a man who dismissed child sacrifice as “rational,” while consigning actual children to anonymity.

We can feel sorrow for his family, yes. But let us not lie about what he was. He was divisive. He was dangerous. And his legacy is an abomination — a creed in which children die so that adults may cling to their guns, a creed he defended to his last day.

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