“Let the hate flow through you!” – Emperor Palpatine

I usually don’t like writing about current events. Personally, it always feels cheap and pointless. A desperate dive into overly polluted waters, in hopes of cutting through the sludge of the hundreds of thousands of other opinions to catch a few more readers. But I hope I can offer an original, and substantiative take on the event, if nothing else.

This is not going to be about any conspiracy theories about his assassination. Neither will it be a tribute to the man we knew as Charlie Kirk. It will be more of a criticism of what Charlie and people like him do, both on the left and right, to deepen the cultural divides in our country. How they utilize the hatred in our society to gain wealth and positions of power. How they stoke the flames and intentionally provoke one side of an issue to ascend a pedestal on the other.

I recently watched a video on Itzhak Bentov. In it, there was a clip from an interview on the Danny Jones YouTube channel (never watched it), with “psyop expert” Charles Hughes. In the clip, he states: “If I can confuse your brain, your brain acts as though someone who is falling. So, if you can imagine when you’re falling, your limbs are flailing all over the place, and the first solid object that you come into contact with, [your brain] is going to grab around it. It doesn’t matter if it’s like a thorn bush or something. Anything that’s solid, in that moment of confusion, it’s going to get grabbed onto.” A more poignant analogy about our instinctual response to confusion, I can’t recall.

In the days since his passing, I’ve grown to respect Charlie. I don’t agree with most (if any) of his political views or his ideological tenets. But Charlie Kirk was not inflammatory for its own sake. He was genuine in his desire to defend the moral and political systems he saw as superior. He saw their potential for good as objective and their evils as either necessary or subjective. He knew the power of social media early on and reached prominence with nothing more than his philosophy, outside of the academic abattoir.

I had planned to outline a lot of his views and offer my criticisms to each. That idea seems kind of petty. Instead, I will offer a general critique of his overall philosophy through how I think the debate that commenced on that fateful day would have gone. Admittedly, I haven’t seen enough of Kirk’s content to extract a full picture of his views on the world. But, from seeing some clips on his various opinions on the major issues, I think I can hypothesize where the discussion was going.

Essentially, Kirk villainized the various “mainstream media” outlets, government institutions, and colleges, which he believed to be nefariously indoctrinating the youth with pro LGBTQ+, Marxist, and anti-Christian ideologies. He believed this eventually develops into a radical mindset that breeds most of the ills in our society. In that sense, he was your typical Christian conservative. To me, where his beliefs became more far-right, or “radical”, was his numerous assertions that most people who are depressed, insane, violent, or impoverished, are so because of some evil liberal agenda. The most radical part being that the agenda is uniquely left, or liberal.

In the movie “RUSH HOUR 2”, Detective James Carter introduces us to his main principle of detection. It’s called “follow the rich white man”. The premise: In every big crime, there’s always a rich white man behind the scenes, waiting for his cut. I believe that every major issue that divides this country, cannot be solved because of groups of rich men benefiting from that division. A great example is that debate Kirk was about to have before he was assassinated. The debater was trying to prove that most transexuals are less violent because they are statistically less likely to commit a mass shooting, which seems like an issue so trivial, to me, that it borders on the ridiculous. Not because I am skeptical that transexuals are being unjustly maligned, but because this issue affects such a miniscule number of people in our society.

The debater then asks Charlie if he knows the number of mass shootings that have happened this year. Charlie knows that the debater is about to assert that young, straight, white males are more of a danger to society than trans males. So, he pivots, and asks the debater “including, or not including gang violence?” Charlie knows that this kid is talking about the specific crime of a lone gunman, walking into a crowded area with an assault rifle and killing indiscriminately. What Charlie was about to assert was that no matter how dangerous young white men are to our society, they pale in comparison to the traditionally left leaning minorities of the inner cities. This is the Charlie Kirk special. His response was miles outside the vicinity of the original issue. The debater wanted to point out that Kirk’s villainizing of trans people, while ignoring the danger posed by young straight males, was simply due to homophobia. Kirk counters by trying to confuse the debater and taking the argument down a left turn (pun intended) by conflating the original issue of unjustified homophobia with party politics and overall gun violence – and making the whole discussion a convoluted mess. This was his signature move. Purposefully confuse the debater’s point and hopefully the debaters themselves, while making the point of his rebuttal obvious and conservative enough for his idolaters to grasp and respond to.

I believe the question was childish and nonsensical, mainly because it was too broad and steeped in subjectivity. In fact, I believe the argument of gun control itself is a politically regressive wedge issue. Part of becoming an adult is accepting the parts of yourself that you cannot change. And for America to grow up, it must accept that guns are going nowhere and the process for acquiring them cannot become any more restricting without infringing on our freedoms. Guns are a part of America. They are here to stay. They have all the regulations deemed sensible in a free society. Kierkegaard once said that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”. The faster we accept that guns are not going anywhere, and that there are damaged people in our society that can find weapons and kill a room full of people. The quicker we will find a solution outside of the argument.

It’s easy to illustrate that there are more pressing issues than gun control, and yet every year millions of Americans devote their time and energy to arguing about it. For example, in 2023, 919,032 Americans died of cardiovascular disease. In the same year, 46,728 died of gun deaths. And yet, no one is fighting to weigh people at the Mcdonald’s drive thru. Or force them to get a license that says you’ve been examined by a doctor and deemed healthy enough to eat there. It’s an old and silly argument but I think it illustrates the fact that the upheaval about guns is not because it truly is the most pressing issue our country is currently facing. The hoopla is based on the shock of the act, the coverage in the media, and the fact that every time one of these events happen, the argument becomes fashionable again.

I’m not trying to downplay gun violence. I’m simply suggesting that in a democracy that is this fatally wounded. We’re fighting about the best way to bandage the leg, while we bleed out from the neck. Sorry, too soon.

This brings me back to Detective Carter’s principals of detection, specifically principle #1: Follow the rich guy. I don’t really have a hill to die on with the whole gun issue. When I say that, most people think it’s bullshit. But I believe there are some subconscious and sinister safeguards that are in place to prevent Americans from suddenly turning our country into a no-gun country. The reason for this is good old fashion mullah. There is a colossal river of money in the manufacturing, regulating, and selling of arms and ammunition with a bunch of rich guys at the end of it. That money then flows down to support a percentage of the population.

The reason why the debate continues to garner so much attention is because the media uses the horrible events to get our attention. I’m not saying that our sweet virgin eyes and ears shouldn’t hear of such events. I am saying that we don’t need full day coverage or four-hour blocks, which conveniently translates to more ratings and advertising revenue. Ironically, another byproduct of all this attention is the message to any messed up, lonely kid that feels invisible and insignificant, that there is a surefire way to be remembered. At least until the next mass shooting. And now that social media has come into play, it makes the act even more appealing because they’ve seen how these stories spread like wildfire in their own town.

This principle can be applied to every issue in our political and ideological atmospheres. Because most issues are supporting an ecosystem of organizations, pundits, headlines, authors, etc. on either side of the irreconcilable divide. For example, one can argue that there are some of the same incentives for why the religious right keeps making homosexuality and abortion an issue. The leaders of the various churches make enormous amounts of money nowadays by reviving this debate on YouTube and social media. Giving their followers an external source for all their fears, anger, and confusion. Outer enemies that serve as an outlet for all their inner subconscious frustrations. The frustrations that are constantly building up because of this rapidly mutating world. But you can’t walk around angry at the world. So, these people offer you answers by pointing out the enemy.

Social media has taught us that hate is as much a financial benefit as love. Even American Eagle used this technique to become relevant again. Knowing that they would get more attention, not by trying to make some generic commercial that would appeal to everyone, but by making a commercial that would purposely garner hate from one group, so the opposition comes to defend them with large sums of money.

This was the tool, whether knowingly or not, that Charlie Kirk used to rise from a political activist to a right-wing celebrity. The reason why I began this article with a quote from Star Wars was because in researching Kirk, I watched a video where kirk said he thought the original was the best of the series. In it there was a douche bag who claimed that Episode III was the best of the franchise and had some asinine comparison between the story of Anakin Skywalker and the temptation of Christ. Anakin’s story is more like Charlie’s. Anakin chose to follow the path of the dark side, to use his hatred to get what he wanted because it was the quicker route. Chalie Kirk was a very intelligent person. He had to know that his power not only came from the love he received from those who followed him. But that a major part of the power and love he received came from the fact that he was so despised from the other side.

In what seems to be the final days of our civilization, it seems that hate runs the bingo. It is the one mobilizing force that compels others to love and to listen. But it also destroys.