09/11/2025
Charlie Kirk stood as a pillar of unyielding conservatism—booming, unshakeable, forever convinced of his own righteousness. He railed against a woman’s right to choose, scoffed at the hard-fought strides toward LGBTQ+ equality, waved away the deep scars of systemic racism as mere illusions. His patriotism, draped in stars and stripes, often struck me as a cramped, exclusionary creed, one that divided more than it united. Every fiber of his being screamed convictions I found profoundly misguided, even dangerous. Yet, I have no doubt he believed them with the fire of absolute truth. That was his America, his lens on the world.
But to s***f out a voice with lead and fury? That is the true abomination, a stain on the soul of humanity. The 20th century lies buried under the weight of such graves—Martin Luther King Jr., dreaming of justice from the mountaintop; Bobby Kennedy, igniting hope in the shadows of despair; Malcolm X, forging a path through fire and defiance; John Lennon, weaving anthems of peace and imagination; Harvey Milk, championing love in the face of hate. Flawed heroes, all of them—not icons carved from marble, but flesh-and-blood souls who dared to challenge the status quo. Lennon, gunned down on his doorstep by a shadow of a man, for the crime of envisioning a world without walls. Why? For the hollow echo of nothing.
You do not murder a man because his words scorch your ears or shatter your illusions. You do not erase him because his truth clashes with yours. That is savagery, the death knell of civilization itself. A nation’s strength is forged not in the silence of its foes, but in the roar of debate—in the protests that shake the streets, the arguments that echo through halls of power, the unyielding refusal to let darkness claim the final word. We confront our adversaries with ideas, not iron; we build bridges of understanding, not barriers of blood. In this fractured world, where division festers like an open wound, let us remember: True victory lies in outlasting hate, not outgunning it. For if we surrender to the bullet, we lose not just a life, but the very essence of what makes us free.
-Antonio Saillant
