Tag Archives: Charlie Kirk

The Aftermath of Our Bloodbath

“Hey Fascist, Catch”
has lit the match
and opened up the door
his hateful speech
had a long reach
see Charlie hit the floor

Kirk had a right
to spit his spite
and stir the grievance pot
but in the land of guns
for everyone
Tyler took his shot

Kirk was no saint
he lacked restraint
always punching down
crass and loud
he played the crowd
and hyped the orange clown

“Hey Fascist, Catch”
has lit the match
America is burning
In the aftermath
of our bloodbath
is anybody learning?

Now a nation mourns
with hate and scorn
temperatures are rising
no call for calm for the five-alarm
fire on our horizon

We ought to run
from martyrdom
not pin it to our chest
not canonize
the hateful guys
who scream
that they know best

With much at stake
it’s time we wake
and embrace our better angels
not reach for guns
and act like Huns
or rage like a deranged bull

“Hey Fascist, Catch”
has lit the match
America is burning
In the aftermath
of our bloodbath
is anybody learning?

Charlie Kirk, Apathetic Farmer

Through his organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA), Charlie Kirk became a significant force in conservative youth politics by tapping into a feeling of cultural displacement among young white men—especially those outside elite institutions—by validating their frustrations and offering a political identity that felt empowering.

He successfully rebranded conservatism for youth by leaning into cultural grievances, opposing progressive ideas (like DEI, CRT, gender fluidity), which resonated with young men who felt blamed or sidelined in mainstream discourse.

In many ways, Charlie Kirk’s meteoric rise embodies the quintessential American success story, where money, power, and fame are all that matter and where kindness, empathy, and service to others are for suckers.

On the surface, some of what Charlie Kirk did and achieved seems almost noble. He reached out to a segment of society that felt politically voiceless and culturally alienated, and he gave them a voice. He recognized the underrepresentation and an utter lack of organized advocacy for non-college-educated white males in America and championed their needs.

The problem was how Charlie Kirk framed their economic disenfranchisement.

Kirk sold young white non-college-educated males on the simplistic notion that the source of their economic disenfranchisement were immigrants, women, minorities, and wokeism, when in reality, their alienation from mainstream American society and its institutions and their feeling of lost purpose and status stems from economic and social shifts that have eroded the traditional path of a stable, middle-class life for those without a bachelor’s degree. 

When a large segment of the population feels economically useless and politically invisible, it creates fertile ground for resentment, polarization, and instability. Discontentment is low-hanging fruit for the opportunistic and power-hungry, and Trump and Kirk cultivated and harvested that low-hanging fruit with great success, while continuing to spread the seeds of grievance, misinformation, and lies across the fertile minds of disaffected American youth for fame, fortune, and power.

Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump are emblematic of the deep rot in America’s political system, where politicians and influencers exploit the disaffected for their own personal gain, indoctrinating followers with cultural hot-button issues and identity politics to the point where the cultivated group doesn’t even care that they’re not being helped.

Like Trump, Kirk was never interested in helping his followers; he was only interested in exploiting them. To Charlie Kirk, America’s disaffected youth were a cash crop.

Genuine solutions to political disempowerment and economic disenfranchisement are complicated, expensive, and require systemic intervention from empathetic, pragmatic, and intelligent leaders who are genuinely interested in helping others. Amplifying polarization, promoting misinformation, and framing politics as a zero-sum cultural war are not solutions; those actions ensure the status quo.

We must connect the disaffected to hope and aspiration, rather than hatred and anger. It’s one thing to say, I feel your pain, quite another to do the hard work of alleviating the pain – and as we see with Trump and saw with Charlie Kirk, it’s a lot easier and more lucrative to point a finger and say, “them, they, those people, they’re the reason you are not flourishing.“

Doing the hard work to bring the disaffected back into the fold means investing in government-sponsored programs, training, and empathy, and those things are a tough sell in today’s political environment.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my book, My Paper, My Words: Rantings from a Progressive Boomer and Peeved Parent, from Amazon. And if you feel moved to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

My Paper, My Words is a collection of essays, stories, and poems that reflect the challenges of a middle-class husband and father trying to navigate a rapidly changing political, religious, and technological landscape of post-911 America.