My Informed Nuanced Unapologetic Takes Everyday

-THE TAKE-

When Charlie Kirk was killed a year ago, I watched people from every walk of life show their butts. I'm not a cussing man, but in my head I was cussing folks out for a solid week straight. And understand something before we go any further — I wasn't some die-hard Kirk guy. I'd caught snippets of his campus debates, appreciated what he was doing, and mostly left it there. What I've always had a soft spot for is a real debate — two people actually trying to move each other, on the record, in public. I hope I always will. There’s a certain beauty in that. A certain maturity - almost a noble feeling to know that your mind is sharp enough to stand on your ideas and verbalize them without resorting to violence or being overly emotional. The problem is that generally the people who CAN reach that benchmark often run a greater risk of being harmed or worse, by those who cannot. So my problem the day he died was never that I'd lost a hero. My problem was how many people told on themselves the moment a man they disliked stopped breathing.

Let me be plain about what I mean by showing their butts. I watched people I'd file under the rabid left openly celebrate the man's death — cheering, laughing, posting like he was a serial killer finally brought to justice. He was none of that. He was a dude TALKING. Debating, mostly with college kids, about the quiet indoctrination those same kids are absorbing at institutions that function, whether they'll admit it or not, as factories for Liberalism. That work matters, and it matters for reasons bigger than politics. It's good for a society when not everyone simply goes along to get along with Liberalism — the reigning secular faith the elites would love to install as our official national religion. And it's necessary for Christians — which is what Kirk said he was — to understand that a Christian worldview is supposed to touch everything: politics, education, medicine, money, all of it. What we've actually watched over the last twenty years is the reverse of how it's supposed to work. Liberalism, absorbed later in life, has done more to shape people's worldview than the faith they were raised in ever did to guard them against Liberalism. The thing that was supposed to be the foundation got overwritten by the thing that came after it — and hardly anyone noticed the swap. Kirk was one of the few willing to say that to a hostile crowd's face.

I saw the insanity of it early, and I mostly just watched. Listened. Shook my head. Prayed some — still don't pray enough, if I'm honest — but there were nights I genuinely cried out over how far we've slid, how toxic certain mindsets have gotten, especially among people who call themselves Christians. Being at peace with a murder because you didn't like what a man said out loud is, in a single word, CRAZY. That's the long and short of it. And the people who were fine with it a year ago? A lot of them have only hardened since. Some are marking the anniversary this week with what they're actually calling parties. So no, I don't think time healed this. I think it exposed it further.

So let me lay out why this sat so heavy on me, and why I'm convinced it points at something much larger than one killing on one campus.

1. Grown adults should be able to stand up for free speech — real free speech, not the counterfeit we keep getting handed. There's a difference between speech that threatens and speech that merely offends, and we have deliberately blurred it. Antagonists chanting "death to America" in the street — that's a threat. Charlie Kirk saying he didn't believe in abortion is not, no matter how many times it got dressed up as one. I literally listened to people argue that if you oppose abortion, you must secretly want women harmed or dead. That's not an argument, that's indoctrination. And a shocking number of otherwise smart people can no longer tell the two apart. The trick that made this possible was slow, and it was intentional. For years now, Liberalism has been redefining harm downward — quietly moving the line until disagreement itself gets filed under violence. Once you've trained a person to hear "I disagree with abortion" as "I want you dead," you have handed that person a permission slip. If words are violence, then answering words with actual violence starts to feel, in their conditioned mind, like self-defense. That is the exact logic running underneath so much of the cheering. The people celebrating didn't think they were applauding a murder — they'd been taught that Kirk had been committing violence with his mouth for years, so in their eyes somebody finally stood up for the vulnerable. It's insane. But it's not random. It's the predictable end of teaching a generation that being offended and being endangered are the same thing. Free speech cannot survive in a country where half the population has been conditioned to experience disagreement as an assault.

2. Too many Christians in this country have been so thoroughly propagandized they can't defend their own faith — and worse, they don't even know why they'd ever need to. It's one thing to be unequipped. It is another thing entirely to have been convinced that defending what you believe is itself the sin — that standing your ground is arrogant, that drawing a moral line is intolerant, that telling someone they're wrong is "unloving." That conditioning did not come from the church. It came from Liberalism, which figured out a long time ago that the most effective way to disarm Christians wasn't to argue them out of the faith — it was to convince them that arguing at all was beneath a real Christian. So you get millions of believers who will affirm anything, challenge nothing, and call that spiritual maturity. They've mistaken silence for grace and surrender for love. And this is precisely why Kirk unsettled people the way he did. Whatever you make of him, he was a professing Christian who did the one thing most Christians have been trained out of doing — he took the worldview out in public and defended it out loud, to people who hated him, without flinching. That is rarer than it should be, and his visibility exposed how quiet the rest of us have gotten. A faith that can only be practiced privately, that goes mute the second it meets resistance, isn't being protected. It's being retired one polite believer at a time. Plenty of Christians handed theirs over so gradually they never registered the moment it left their hands — and some of them, I'd wager, were among the ones who couldn't manage a clean word of condemnation when a fellow believer was shot dead for the crime of talking.

3. When a society starts accepting violence against the people it disagrees with, the threads holding it together are already coming loose. It's only a matter of time before the bill comes due for everybody. And when it does, the question won't be complicated: are we going to keep nodding along with whatever evil floats past that week, or are we finally going to draw a hard line somewhere? Are we going to keep pretending some of these folks aren't genuinely out of control? Are we going to keep letting the word "radicalized" get aimed, on reflex, at some far-right boogeyman while the actual pattern sits in plain sight? Because I'll stand flat-footed here: the political violence and the radicalization defining this moment are, overwhelmingly, a problem coming from the left. I know that's the sentence I'm supposed to whisper, if I say it at all. I'm going to say it at full volume. Watch which direction the celebration ran the day Kirk was killed — not from the fringe of the fringe, but from teachers, nurses, professionals, people with letters after their names. Watch which direction the "extremist" label gets pointed the instant news breaks, before a single fact is confirmed. And look at who has spent a decade being told by the culture Liberalism built that their opponents aren't merely wrong but evil, illegitimate, a standing threat to democracy that has to be stopped by any means necessary. You cannot marinate people in that language for years and then act shocked when a handful of them take it to its logical conclusion — and act even more shocked when thousands more show up to cheer. This is a debate I'll have with anyone, anytime, in full. The evidence isn't hiding. What's hiding is the willingness to name it, because naming it costs you something socially, and most people would rather keep the peace than tell the truth. I'll trade the peace.

4. And this is the one that will not let me rest — black folks, and black Christians especially, are being quietly walked into the exact racism the faith we claim explicitly forbids. I'll say exactly what I mean here, because I'm a black Christian man and I watch this happen up close. The gospel deals with the individual. It weighs the heart, the conduct, the person standing in front of you — never the group he happened to be born into. That isn't a minor feature of the faith. It sits near the center of it: every man accountable for his own sin, every man offered the same grace, no bloodline advantaged and none condemned. So any ideology that walks up to a Christian and starts assigning virtue and guilt by skin color is, on its face, at war with what we say we believe. And yet that is precisely the ideology being marketed hardest to black Christians right now — the same Liberalism, just speaking in its racial dialect. It reintroduces guilt by category and grievance by category, hands out moral credit and moral debt based on ancestry, calls the whole arrangement "justice," and dares you to say a word against it. A worldview genuinely formed by Scripture should reject that the instant it shows up, the same way it should have rejected the older, uglier version of race-thinking the first time around. Same error. New coat of paint. New set of approved victims and villains. But because it arrives wrapped in the language of compassion and stamped with the church's own vocabulary, too many believers swallow it whole and mistake it for conviction — never once noticing it was installed in them rather than chosen by them. That's the Default setting doing its quiet work. That's a person handed a ready-made way of seeing other human beings who never stopped to ask whether it squares with the God he claims to serve. And it doesn't. It trains a black Christian to look at a white brother and register a category first and a soul second, which is the precise inversion of everything the cross was supposed to have settled. We escaped being judged by our color once, at a cost most of us can't fully imagine. Now we're being coaxed into picking the same weapon back up, pointing it the other way, and calling it righteousness. I refuse. And I suspect a lot of people in these pews already feel something is off and just haven't found the words yet. Consider this me handing them a few.

Pull all four of those together and you'll see they were never four separate problems. Speech redefined as violence. Christians disarmed into silence. Violence excused whenever it's aimed the "right" direction (pun intended). Race smuggled back in under the church's own banner. Four symptoms, one cause — a single religion, Liberalism, that has quietly become the actual operating faith of this country, sitting in the seat a Christian worldview used to hold. Kirk's murder, and the applause that chased it, wasn't a glitch in an otherwise healthy system. It was that religion showing you, out loud and on camera, exactly what it produces once it's had a full generation to work.

Now — I don't want you closing this out thinking it's all rot and no repair, because it isn't. And the honest hope is better than anything a press release could give you: go see it for yourself. Get on Instagram, get on TikTok, and look up the people chronicling their own walk off the left. The WalkAway movement is the one I point folks to constantly, and I mean it — some of the best testimonials I've ever heard come from people describing the exact moment they realized how much of what they believed was installed in them, not chosen. And a striking number of them point straight at this: at Kirk's death and the ugliness of the reaction to it, as the thing that finally broke the spell. Watching people cheer a man's murder was the catalyst. The mask slipped far enough that they couldn't unsee it, and they turned around and walked. That's real, it's happening right now, and it's happening in public on the very same platforms where the cheering went down.

I'll give the grudging cases their due too, but only so much. Some of the outlets that issued their careful little retractions the week Kirk died didn't do it because a light came on — they did it because a struggling brand couldn't survive one more scandal. I don't respect that and I won't pretend to. But even a forced confession is a confession that the first reaction was indefensible, and I'll take the cheap version as proof of where the floor really is. The WalkAway folks are the opposite of cheap. Nobody made them do it; they had every social reason to stay quiet and stay put, and they turned anyway. So I hold the whole picture at once and refuse to drop any of it: the first reaction was rotten, some of the walk-backs were cowardly, and some people genuinely woke up and are out here telling the truth about it now. People are not beyond reach. That last group is the living proof — and it's the only reason worth opening my mouth at all instead of writing everybody off and going home.

So that's where I land, a year out. A man is dead for the offense of talking in public, and too many people still can't produce the one sentence that should have been pure reflex for every last one of us, no carve-out for the guy we couldn't stand: you don't celebrate a murder. That's the floor. Underneath every other disagreement we've got, that's the floor. A country that can't stand on it was never as civilized as it kept telling itself it was. I can be patient with people finding their way back down to it, because I've seen enough of them make the trip to know it's still possible. What I won't do is pretend the clock isn't running while we wait — or go quiet to make the wait more comfortable for the folks who still owe that sentence and haven't said it.

-THE CLOSE-

That's the minute. You paused, you looked closer — that's the whole point. If this made you think, do two things: forward it to one person who needs to slow down too, and if somebody sent you here, get on the list so you don't miss the next one. See clearly. Think deeply. Respond wisely. — WAYTAMINUTE