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We Need More Charlie Kirks Charlie Kirk’s assassination is a chilling attack on free speech, but his legacy will inspire new generations to defend faith, freedom, and America First values. By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on September 12th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/12/we-need-more-charlie-kirks/

I didn’t realize how good I had it when I was a conservative undergraduate student in the 1980s. Although liberals dominated my campus, the professors generally tolerated the free exchange of ideas. I helped co-found a College Republican club at my undergraduate school, Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, without worrying that this would harm my academic standing. I also learned to avoid the few far-left professors who abused their classes to indoctrinate students in socialist and anti-American ideologies.

I was a political science major at St. Joe’s. Fortunately, most of the political science professors were either conservatives or classic liberals who admired U.S. politicians like John F. Kennedy, Scoop Jackson, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. They loved their country and encouraged open debate in their classes. I was gratified in the early 1980s when the St. Joe’s Political Science Department fired a new professor who was using his international relations classes to teach Marxism and penalize conservative students.

Sadly, things changed for the worse in the decades following my graduation. Conservative and classic liberal political science professors retired and were replaced by far-left radicals who implemented classes in globalization, anti-capitalism, “anti-fascism,” anti-Israel and antisemitic ideologies, radical societal change, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), gender politics, and intersectionality. This far-left ideology spread across every college discipline, even the sciences.

Colleges and universities became radical left and extremely hostile to conservatives. Conservative students could not risk revealing their political views on campus because they feared this would hurt their grades and lead to harassment from fellow students.

Charlie Kirk believed this was unacceptable. This is why, in 2012, at the age of 18, he co-founded Turning Point USA to counter liberal politics and intolerance in U.S. high schools and colleges. Turning Point became a powerful national grassroots movement dedicated to identifying, organizing, and empowering young people to promote the principles of America First, free markets, and limited government.

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Horror in Queens By Dan McLaughlin

Posted By on September 12th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/horror-in-queens/

As if this week has not been horrible enough, a particularly dreadful crime in Bellerose, Queens, had the whole area of eastern Queens and central Nassau County in a panic the past 48 hours until the perpetrator was, mercifully, captured in Times Square late yesterday afternoon. Jamel McGriff, a 42-year-old out on parole with a long, violent rap sheet (including being required to register as a sex offender), went from door to door in leafy Bellerose in broad daylight at 10 a.m. knocking on doors until he found a target of opportunity — a couple in their late seventies whom he tormented and killed before setting their house on fire:

The suspect had earlier knocked on other doors in the neighborhood asking to charge his cell phone but was turned away before Frank Olton was seen on surveillance footage apparently allowing him in his backyard around 10:18 a.m., authorities said. The footage showed the owner apparently letting his killer in the rear door, according to cops. When the maniac left hours later, he was carrying a paper bag and one dark color bag, cops said…Once the fire was under control, police and firefighters made a grisly discovery. Frank Olton was found bound with a bungee cord in the basement and stabbed multiple times, while his wife’s body had been set on fire.

As Joe Marino, Georgett Roberts, and Jorge Fitz-Gibbon of the New York Post reported, McGriff “was still on parole after being released from a 17-year state prison sentence in 2023, had been arrested for a sex attack of a worker at knifepoint inside a store in 2005 and other violent crimes. He had a criminal history dating back 30 years, including multiple robberies. The fiend had failed to register as a sex offender in November 2024 and he was wanted by the NYPD as a suspect in two recent robberies. Yet, he was not slapped with a parole violation, according to officials.” On Wednesday, the NYPD issued an alarmed warning: NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that McGriff was “armed and dangerous” and “The suspect’s MO is to go door to door, asking for some kind of assistance until he can gain entry.” The local police departments around Nassau were on heavy alert. The closest one could find to a motive for this brutality was robbery: McGriff was apprehended after “he used his victim’s charge cards at Macy’s and then to see a movie at the Regal Cinema in Times Square on Wednesday afternoon after he had pawned off two cell phones in the Bronx a day earlier.”

We have a serious under-incarceration problem when it comes to this sort of nihilistic predator. At least with his capture, multiple neighborhoods could go back to answering their doors and working in their yards.

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Charlie Kirk was a better anti-fascist than most of the left His rage against Hamas and its barbarous Jewphobia was moral clarity in action. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on September 12th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/11/charlie-kirk-was-a-better-anti-fascist-than-most-of-the-left/

There was a clip doing the rounds a few months ago from Charlie Kirk’s clash with students at the Cambridge Union. It featured Kirk going head to head with a fidgeting posh oddball whose ginger bouffant defied gravity. Anyone who’s ever visited Cambridge will be familiar with this kind of kid: woke, pompous, his arrogance entirely out of proportion to his intellect. Tell me this, said Kirk: ‘In the conflict of Israel vs Hamas, who’s the good guy?’ His diminutive adversary twitched and stuttered, then finally spoke. ‘Both Hamas and the Israeli government are evil’, he said, giving perfect voice to that bourgeois pusillanimity that falsely calls itself ‘activism’.

I was reminded of that clip today as lowlifes online branded Kirk a ‘Nazi’ in the wake of his brutal slaying in Utah. In the sewer of the internet, the seventh circle of woke, they’ve openly celebrated the savage killing of this young father of two. The more mainstream left, and the ‘liberal’ press, have played it safer, merely hinting that Kirk was ‘hard right’ and not averse to stirring up animosity himself. The Oxford Student – another university he visited on his trip to the UK – called him a ‘far-right influencer’ following his death. It’s a shameful piece that could have been headlined: ‘A fascist dies.’

Here’s what is so galling about the tarring of Kirk as a crypto-Nazi: he was a better anti-fascist than most of the left. It would have been absurd at any time to call him ‘far right’. You don’t have to share his views – he was anti-abortion, pro-gun rights, sceptical about climate change, worried about mass immigration and dubious that you can have a dick and be a woman – to recognise that they all fall within the realm of legitimate opinion. Millions of Americans think this way. But for the left to call him ‘far right’ now, in the post-7 October moment, after they’ve spent two years making excuses for the fascistic murder of Jews while Kirk raged against it, is risible. It is a sinister inversion of truth.

Kirk was enraged by the pogrom of 7 October. In that clash at Cambridge, with the student so well trained in the moral relativism of the modern campus that he couldn’t even draw a moral distinction between a neo-fascist army and the democratic state it attacked, he reminded his overeducated jeerers of what happened that day.

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Steven Malanga The 9-11 Lessons We Have Forgotten Twenty-four years later, the consequences that result from ignorance, naivete, and bad ideas remain clear.

Posted By on September 12th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/9-11-lessons-terrorism-immigration

One of the reasons George Santayana’s famous line about forgetting the past resonates is because humans can be so bad at remembering. That’s especially true about the past 25 years of liberal Western democracy. The twenty-first century brand of progressivism that’s corrupted so much Western thinking is all about moving on from a past inevitably deemed regressive. To someone like me, who lived through 9-11 in Manhattan and spent years writing about what we learned from it, the extent to which we have forgotten the lessons of that day and discarded so many of the principles we developed to defend ourselves is shocking.

Just perusing what City Journal published in the weeks after 9-11 is a reminder of how dangerously we as a culture have moved on. One notable story from that time warned about our “leaky borders,” which subsequent investigations would show played a crucial role in enabling the massive conspiracy that culminated in hijacking of four planes. Another piece from 2001 chronicled the rise of something called “militant Islam,” a term derided by some as racist and which prompted President George W. Bush to insist, in response, “Islam is peace.” A third story, the most chilling to read today, though it’s not principally about the U.S., described the rise of an Islamic “fifth column” in the U.K. that was radicalizing British youth. To think that I once worried that that term—fifth column—might be too extreme!

Those three stories represent how clearly we saw the threats back in 2001, and how thoroughly we’ve ignored them since then.

The irony of 9-11 is that it was successful because the bad guys learned their lessons from the past. Many people forget that the 2001 terrorists undertook the second attack on the World Trade Center. The first, eight years earlier, failed to cause widespread damage because the Muslim perpetrators underestimated how many explosives they would need to destroy the foundation of the North Tower. “Only” six people died that day. But what lived on was the idea among terrorists that the World Trade Center represented something fundamental about the West that they hated and wanted to destroy. They just needed to find a more effective way to accomplish their murderous ends.

One of the many differences between Western liberals’ thinking and that of Islamists is that they, as fundamentalists, cherish the past and absorb its lessons. We had our chance to do the same after the 1993 bombing and failed. The weeks and months after that attack were filled with executive orders, presidential directives, new legislation, and promises of international cooperations against terrorism. The Anti-Terrorism Act and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 barred terrorists from entering the country, facilitated the deportation of those here, and authorized funds to expand anti-terrorism units within law enforcement. Some of that money was supposed to go to assist coordination and communication among federal and local law enforcement.

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Charles Lipson The Left is celebrating Charlie Kirk’s killing. Democracy’s foundations are crumbling America faces a grim future of violence and counter-violence unless both sides understand the fundamental common ground of the US system

Posted By on September 12th, 2025

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/09/11/the-left-celebrating-charlie-kirks-killing/

Political killings are among the vilest acts in a democracy, and among the most disruptive. The stable world of citizens – the essential backdrop of any constitutional democracy – is upended, its foundations shaken. After all, the heart of that democracy is free speech, free and peaceful assembly, and an orderly means of choosing leaders. Political assassinations strike at those foundations.

The impact is multiplied when several killings (or narrow escapes) happen within a few years. In that perilous moment, the nation looks beyond each act and asks, “Has something gone badly wrong in our country? Will the latest violence lead to still more?”

Those are the questions Americans are asking right now. They are especially urgent as the hunt for Charlie Kirk’s killer continues and as the nation remembers the most catastrophic and consequential act of political killing in recent history, the terrorist attacks of Sept 11 2001.

Charlie Kirk was a charismatic conservative activist, only 31 years old, but with years in the public eye and very close ties to President Trump and the Maga movement. At a time when that movement is flooded with articulate spokesmen, he was unique. Starting when he was only 18, he began building a following, a political movement, and an organisation, Turning Point USA. The result was impressive. It complements Trump’s Maga base but with a much younger following. As one friend wrote me, “There are thousands out there inspired by Kirk. Shock and heartbreak will give way to righteous determination to see our country aspire to Greatness again. Kirk inspired a generation. That generation is NOT going to be silent.”

Polling reinforces the point. Even before this tragic event, opinion polls have shown younger voters shifting sharply away from the Democratic Party and toward Republican and Independent affiliation. They are also voting with their feet, leaving progressive “Blue” states by the millions for conservative “Red” ones. They are flocking South for college, too, having watched the suppression of alternative views in the Ivy League and beyond.

How did Charlie Kirk inspire his followers? Not with vitriol or name-calling, but with engagement.

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Is America Heading Toward a New Civil War? The Left’s love for violence suggests that it is. by Robert Spencer 1 Co

Posted By on September 12th, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/is-america-heading-toward-a-new-civil-war/

Is America heading toward a civil war? The assassination of Charlie Kirk shows yet again that the chasm between patriotic Americans and the left is certainly growing all the time and shows no signs of healing. One telling indication that the nation might be heading toward a new civil conflict is the fact that political tensions have not been this high since the run-up to secession and the attack on Fort Sumter, and that numerous leftists are increasingly open about their lust for violence, cheering.on Kirk’s death with unalloyed joy.

The murder of Charlie Kirk didn’t happen in a vacuum. Leftist leaders have been calling for violence, and now their calls have been heeded.

“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption — but I am now,” said far-left Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker back in April. “These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.” That was after Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Victimhood) said in February: “This will be a congressional fight, a constitutional fight, a legal fight, and on days like this a street fight, yes we will stand.” And that was not long after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-Hey, I’m a Victim Too) said this of the “extreme MAGA Republican agenda”: “We are going to fight it legislatively. We are going to fight it in the courts. We’re going to fight it in the streets.”

Before them, it was Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Kamala Harris inciting leftist violence. And let’s not forget Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-Grillmaster) saying in 2020, when condemning the pro-life leanings of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.”

Leftists outside of politics joined in the fun as well: remember, to take just a few of many available examples, Kathy Griffin holding Trump’s bloody severed head, or Madonna saying she wanted to blow up the White House, or Robert DeNiro bellowing that he wanted to punch Trump in the face.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How the EU Pays Mainstream Media to Promote Its Narratives by Robert Williams

Posted By on September 11th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21870/eu-pays-media

The report also shows that the EU runs a highly sophisticated “EU media complex” through which it gets to shape media narratives about itself and its agendas.

The European Commission has, it seems, has literally paid off almost everything and everyone in the media world — meaning that everyone, from news agencies to media outlets, public broadcasters and other media organizations, sits in the pocket of the European Commission to greater or smaller degrees.

These abundant examples of media and news organizations are just those within the EU. The EU, however, is also operating a large-scale influence operation outside of the EU….

There is nothing transparent about any of this funding. According to the report, it is opaque and difficult to uncover.

“The EU’s ever-expanding system of media financing…creates financial dependencies, incentivises narrative conformity and fosters an ecosystem in which dissenting voices are marginalised – all under the virtuous banners of ‘fighting disinformation’, ‘promoting European values’ and ‘building a European public sphere'” — Thomas Fazi, “Brussels’s media machine: European media funding and the shaping of public discourse,” June 2025.

The EU sadly appears to be a deeply corrupt and undemocratic regime, which desperately clings to power through influence-peddling and the imposition of heavy-handed censorship. Hundreds of millions of Europeans continue to put up with these tactics. When will they please wake up?

The unelected leadership of the evidently corrupt European Union (EU) is now paying mainstream media to promote the agendas of its EU “elites.” The EU appears to have spent as much as 1 billion euros during the past decade alone in the process, according to a recent report, “Brussels’s media machine: European media funding and the shaping of public discourse,” by Thomas Fazi, from the European think tank MCC Brussels.

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The Four Horsemen of the Western Apocalypse Europe faces four self-inflicted crises—radical green mandates, collapsing families, unchecked immigration, and rising tribalism—that now threaten Western civilization itself. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 11th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/09/11/the-four-horsemen-of-the-western-apocalypse/

Europe is plagued by a number of existential crises. Yet they are all self-inflicted—and by a dominant, therapeutic culture that embraced utopian but lethal bromides.

These suicidal wounds are now nearing the end-stage. Indeed, they are destroying the very civilization that was soon envisioned to be heaven on earth.

The global warming hysterics could not just entertain gradual transformations away from dependencies on traditional fuels and power generation.

Instead, elites have demanded catastrophic and near-instant “net zero” mandates. That radicalism entailed transitioning to unreliable and costly solar and wind energy. Fuel and electricity prices then soared.

The green socialist elite cared little that shutdowns of nuclear, coal, natural gas, and oil power generation would cripple industry, reduce living standards, and impoverish Europe.

Germany, the once economic powerhouse of Europe, became a shell of its former self. The same efforts accelerated under the Obama and Biden administrations in the U.S.

Both administrations sought to slash new fossil fuel production and use, without regard to the costs, dangers to the economy, or deleterious effects on the middle class and poor.

Second, for the last half-century, affluent Westerners embraced the idea that there were no normative lifestyles. Often, they claimed nuclear families with 2-3 children were parochial and passé.

Children supposedly inhibited the lifestyles and aspirations of women. Larger families, we were told, unfairly burdened upscale professionals with unneeded costs and offered biased and injurious models to gays, the transgendered, and single, childless men and women.

The result is that the fertility rate plummeted in the West, particularly in Europe (1.4) and the United States (1.6), to unsustainable levels.

Academia, the media, government, and foundations promoted these ideas of “empowerment”—despite the historical evidence that societies that cannot reproduce themselves age, ossify, and finally implode.

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Up-Close Killers, Then and Now by Rafael Medoff

Posted By on September 11th, 2025

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/383639/up-close-killers-then-and-now/

    What kind of human being is capable of walking up to another person—an innocent, defenseless, unarmed civilian—and, at close range, shooting him or her?

    That question must be on the minds of many who are reading about the Palestinian Arab terrorist attack on bus passengers in Jerusalem this week. The killers were within a few feet of their victims.

    Prof. Daniel Goldhagen considered this question in his famous book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. There are those who dislike comparisons between contemporary terrorists and the Nazis. Let’s take a closer look at Goldhagen’s analysis and consider whether it’s valid to compare up-close killers, then and now.

    Goldhagen focused on a particular German police unit, Reserve Police Battalion 101, which carried out up-close shootings. That segment of the genocide, which historians today call “the Holocaust by bullets,” took place before gas chambers became the Germans’ primary means of mass murder.

    In June 1942, five hundred battalion members were assigned to the town of Jozefow, in German-­occupied southern Poland. They were instructed to force local Jews out of their homes, take them to a nearby forest, and shoot them point-­blank.

    When a truck unloaded its Jewish prisoners at the edge of the Józefów forest, each of the waiting policemen selected a victim. The two then walked together to the nearby execution site. Many of the captives were children. The walk “afforded each perpetrator an opportunity for reflection,” Goldhagen noted. “It is highly likely that, back in Germany, these men had previously walked through woods with their own children by their sides. . . . In these moments, each killer had a personalized, face-­to-face relationship to his victims.”

    Goldhagen wondered if the typical killer ever “asked himself why he was about to kill this little, delicate human being who, if seen as a little girl by him, would normally have received his compassion, protection, and nurturing.” Or perhaps it was that the killer could only “see a Jew, a young one, but a Jew nonetheless,” and therefore accepted “the reasonableness of the order, the necessity of nipping the believed-­in Jewish blight in the bud.”

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The Trump Trap If you make everything about Donald Trump, as the press has for ten years, the simplest headlines quickly become tortured Matt Taibbi

Posted By on September 11th, 2025

https://www.racket.news/p/the-trump-trap

A brief note on headlines inspired by the Charlotte murder of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska: “A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right” by the New York Times, and “How the lives of a Ukrainian refugee and a Charlotte man with a criminal history converged in a fatal stabbing,” by CNN:

When you cover everything in the world through the lens of Donald Trump, and Trump must not only always be wrong but the avatar of ultimate evil, outlets like the Times and CNN are forced forever to find opposing angles to anything he criticizes. A horrific murder can’t just be that, but an “accelerant for conservative arguments about the perceived failings of Democratic policies.” CNN’s account was like the screenplay to Crash, about how “the paths of two people fatally converged,” culminating in an act “decried by the Trump administration and conservative politicians as an example of the violent crime they say plagues many Democrat-led cities.”

Forget about attacker Decarlos Brown’s mental health, these stories (and others, like the Axios report “Stabbing Fuels MAGA’s crime message” and Brian Stelter’s bizarre outburst about the reaction being “baldly racist”) show the press is in the grip of severe monomania and madness. Nothing exists outside of Trump, the subject of every line of every story. Incredible, and unsettling, to watch.