Why Should I Care?

Professional right-wing troll Charlie Kirk, on stage at a live Utah Valley University event, seconds before he was murdered.  If you're the type who would witness him dying in uncensored horror, scroll down.  I have the clip and will place it all the way at the bottom of this post. 

 

So a guy named Charlie Kirk bit the dust yesterday, in spectacular fashion, during an event that he was hosting at a large, primarily conservative college, in the primarily conservative state of Utah.

Thee Optimist was no fan of Charlie Kirk.  He also didn't hate Charlie Kirk.  

He was aware of the name (and probably the face), though he kind of thought Charlie was older, maybe mid-40s, and not the tender age of 31.

Right.  Maybe Thee Optimist had him confused with someone else.

Charlie Kirk often wore MAGA caps in public.  They probably shouldn't kill you for this.  But to be fair, one time two guys in New England physically attacked Thee Optimist for wearing a Yankees cap.  That didn't go too far.  Due to his rough and tumble beginnings, Thee Optimist is pretty quick with his hands.

Blues For Mr. Charlie

Anyway, to the extent Thee Optimist did know who Charlie Kirk was, he just figured Cap'n Kirk was another in a long, mad parade of grifters and conmen, making money off the (real and imagined) grievances of angry, disenfranchised, conspiracy-minded people all across this great land of ours.

In fact, a little bit of post-mortem research reveals that's exactly what Charlie Kirk was.  

He was a right-wing grifter, so he made his money by pushing loopy ideas such as the following:

- black people shouldn't be airline pilots.  

Thee Optimist has a slightly different take on this - he thinks young people shouldn't be airline pilots.  He longs for the days when every commercial airline pilot was a crusty old dude who had flown in the Vietnam War;

- black people go out prowling around at night, specifically looking to find and hurt white people (I dunno.  Black people, help me out here - is that what you do?);

- we should hold Nuremburg-style trials to convict (and I suppose execute) doctors who perform sex-change operations;

- Taylor Swift, the multi-zillionaire pop star, should be submissive and obedient to her husband (that one's kind of fun to imagine, actually);

- immigrants should be hunted down and deported (including, I assume, the people who keep the food supply going);

- Jews are secretly bringing immigrants to the United States, to undermine the pure white race - the only race of MEN who can stand up to the secretive, backstabbing Hebrews (the so-called Great Replacement Theory).

This one, of course, assumes that Jews, the vast majority of whom hail from Central and Eastern Europe, are not themselves white people - so that's also fun in a nutty, conspiracy kind of way;

- the United States was founded as a Christian nation.  

This one is patently false, and easily debunkable by anyone.  The US was founded by rich, well-educated white men who were primarily students of the Enlightenment, and the liberal ideals of John Locke.  

Some of the Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, were Deists, who strictly speaking, rejected the idea of Christ.  And others, like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, combined Deism with Christianity.  

All of them believed in the separation of church and state, and they made that clear in the First Amendment, which was adopted in December of 1791.  

Honestly, it's hard to know if Charlie even believed what he was saying, or if he just got so caught up in trolling the libtards, he would say anything.

Here's the coup-de-grace, which I will quote word-for-word, because the irony is too good to pass up:

"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."

- Charlie Kirk, April 5, 2023

In the end, Charlie was just a gun death this year, which protected our other God-given rights.

It was a pretty good deal, yeah?

Prudent, you might say.

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All right, if you came this far, we all know why we're here.

I DO NOT recommend you watch the following video.  It is a short, graphic clip of a gunshot victim bleeding out from what appears to be the carotid artery.

I post it in the interest of free speech, and public, eh... what have you.  Education.  Whatever.  

We're killing each other out there, it's ramping up to a fever pitch, and this is what it actually looks like.

You're grown.  You watch this at your own risk - once seen, you will not be able to unsee it.

We don't have to succumb to primal, chimp-like rage.  Yes, the country is in its sunset phase.  It will likely fall apart into separate factions - possibly entire separate countries - sometime in the coming years.  

That's okay.  It happens to everybody, sooner or later.

We can choose to reach for the better angels of our nature, and do this collapse thing in a chillaxed kind of way.

Or we can do what we see above.

Words of Wisdom

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

- Charlie Kirk

Not bad, Charlie - all words are made-up, and the word "empathy" is thought to have been coined in 1908, by an English-speaking psychologist, looking to translate the German concept Einfühlung into English.