The day before the murder of Charlie Kirk, I received the book Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds by John Fugelsang. His attacks are misplaced. The actual haters are on the Left, with too many examples to list here. For Fugelsang, “hate” is disagreeing with Leftist ideology and a supposed misuse of the Bible. His next book should be about how the Left puts its hatred into violent action. Has there been violence on the Right? Yes, there are examples, and for the most part, they have been condemned. Who on the Right embraced Timothy McVeigh? There was Paul Hill, who murdered abortion doctor David Gunn. Many Christians I know repeatedly told him that killing an abortion doctor was not the right thing to do. I was one of them. He was executed for his crime.
I’ll be reviewing Separating Church and Hate in a future podcast.
Charlie Kirk was assassinated because of his words. He engaged people to present their views in public forums. He encouraged dialogue, not violence. He appealed to young people, and they were listening. He would go into the belly of the beast, college campuses, and engage his dissenters. This made him a threat to the status quo.
• Far-left LGBTQ magazine, The Advocate, bashed Charlie Kirk as a “far-right” activist known for “attacking queer rights, targeting transgender people, and framing equality as a threat to American values” hours after he was assassinated.
• Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU)’s Assistant Dean of Students Laura Sosh-Lightsy stunned Facebook users when she declared she has “ZERO sympathy” after the historic assassination of Charlie Kirk. “Looks like ol’ Charlie spoke his fate into existence,” the radical academic stated. “Hate begets hate. ZERO sympathy.” It remains unclear whether alumni donors will boycott funding the institution.
Thinking Straight in a Crooked World
The nursery rhyme "There Was a Crooked Man" is an appropriate description of how sin affects us and our world. We live in a crooked world of ideas evaluated by crooked people. Left to our crooked nature, we can never fully understand what God has planned for us and His world. God has not left us without a corrective solution. He has given us a reliable reference point in the Bible so we can identify the crookedness and straighten it.
Buy Now• After Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Republicans tried to have an extra moment of prayer on the House floor, but Democrats objected. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna declared, “You were too busy doping up kids, cutting off their genitals, inciting racial violence by supporting org[anization]s that exploit minorities, protecting criminals, and stirring hate. YOU ARE THE HATE you claim to fight.”
Let’s be clear here, the murder of Charlie Kirk is not an aberration, no more than the near murder of President Trump was. Violence is not an aberration, it’s at the heart of what the Left is. The Left is a terrorist movement. Period.
• A Pennsylvania public school “emotional support teacher” shared a post calling slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk a bigoted “white nationalist mouthpiece” who normalized “Trumpism” and does not deserve “empathy” shortly after he was assassinated. Amanda Dodson, a teacher at the School District of Lancaster (@SDoLancaster) in PA, made a post online accusing Charlie Kirk of “inciting hate” and demanding that he receive no empathy.
• MSNBC has fired political analyst Matthew Dowd for suggesting “hateful” rhetoric from Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk led to his own assassination, two sources familiar with the matter told Fox News Digital. The network previously denounced Dowd’s comments on social media. “During our breaking news coverage of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Matthew Dowd made comments that were inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable,” MSNBC President Rebecca Kutler said in a statement. “We apologize for his statements, as has he. There is no place for violence in America, political or otherwise.”
• The shooting came less than five months after the Southern Poverty Law Center—which became famous for suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy in the 1980s—put Turning Point USA on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.
Conservatives have faced many kinds of hostility, including 96 attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers and 356 attacks on Catholic churches since the leak of the Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022.
• In 2012, Floyd Lee Corkins II opened fire at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the conservative Christian think tank the Family Research Council. He carried a semiautomatic pistol and a bag of Chick-fil-A chicken sandwiches. He later told the FBI he targeted the Family Research Council because he found it on the SPLC “hate map.” He said he intended to shoot everyone in the building and smear a Chick-fil-A sandwich in their faces. At the time, liberals had criticized Chick-fil-A for funding socially conservative groups like the Family Research Council.
• In June 2017, 66-year-old James T. Hodgkinson opened fire at a Republican practice for the Congressional Baseball Game. He shot and wounded four people: then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La.; U.S. Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner, congressional aide Zack Barth, and lobbyist Matt Mika. Hodgkinson specifically targeted Republicans in the shooting. He had volunteered for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016 and “liked” the SPLC on Facebook. The SPLC had repeatedly attacked Scalise.
• Also in 2017, then-59-year-old Rene Boucher, a neighbor, physically attacked Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., from behind while the senator was mowing his lawn. Paul suffered multiple fractured ribs and later contracted pneumonia, which required medical attention. Boucher admitted the assault but denied it was politically motivated, NBC News reported.
• On July 13, 2024, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks shot then-former President Donald Trump in the ear in Butler, Pennsylvania. Crooks also shot dead 50-year-old Corey Comperatore, a former volunteer fire chief.
• In September 2024, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh aimed a rifle at Trump at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. Secret Service arrested Routh, who is standing trial in Fort Pierce this week.
Those on the Left, and this includes congressional Democrats, seem to believe that “divisiveness” is a reason to murder someone you disagree with. If that’s the standard to justify murder, then we are in big trouble. The Left has a history of violence in the name of some claimed justified cause. Tom Hayden, a former SDS organizer and strategist, member of the California General Assembly (1982-1992), and one-time husband of Jane Fonda, intoned the following in 1967: “Perhaps the only forms of action appropriate to the angry people are violent. Perhaps a small minority, by setting ablaze New York and Washington, could damage this country forever in the court of world opinion. Urban guerrillas are the only realistic alternative at this time to electoral politics or mass armed resistance.” [1]
Some campus radicals in the 1960s believed “that violence may be necessary.” A student from the University of California, Berkeley, stated that she understood why certain groups riot. “I feel the same frustrations in myself, the same urge to violence.” [2] The campus at Berkeley led the way. In 1967, the national secretary of SDS declared himself to be a disciple of Che Guevara: “Che’s message is applicable to urban America as far as the psychology of guerrilla action goes. … Che sure lives in our hearts.”
Restoring the Foundation of Civilization
There are many Christians who will not participate in civilization-building efforts that include economics, journalism, politics, education, and science because they believe (or have been taught to believe) these areas of thought are outside the realm of what constitutes a Christian worldview. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Buy NowOn the cover of the book Revolution for the Hell of It, Abbie Hoffman, [3] is pictured with a rifle in his hand, leaping for joy. Hoffman envisioned and encouraged today’s sexual revolution and the general disembowelment of morality. Hoffman went further by supplying information that he hoped would lead to the violent overthrow of “the system.”
To enter the twenty-first century, to have revolution in our lifetime, male supremacy must be smashed…. A militant Gay Liberation Front has taught us that our stereotypes of masculinity were molded by the same enemies of life that drove us out of Lincoln Park. The words “chick” and “fag” and the deep-rooted attitudes they imply must be purged from the New Nation. Cultural Revolution means a disavowal of the values; all values held by our parents who inhabit and sustain the decaying institutions of a dying Pig Empire. [4]
Hoffman’s rhetoric about revolution was just a warm-up. In Steal This Book, he gave instructions on how to build stink bombs, smoke bombs, Sterno bombs, aerosol bombs, pipe bombs, and Molotov Cocktails. Hoffman’s updated version of the Molotov Cocktail consisted of a glass bottle filled with a mixture of gasoline and Styrofoam, turning the slushy blend into a poor man’s version of napalm. The flaming gasoline-soaked Styrofoam was designed to stick to policemen when it exploded. [5] Helpful drawings on how to make the incendiary devices are included.
Bernardine Dohrn, a Weatherman member who made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, told an SDS convention just before she went underground:
“Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson.” [6]
For a time, Manson was the darling of anti-war protester Jerry Rubin. Rubin wrote of Manson in We Are Everywhere: “His words and courage inspired us…. Manson’s soul is easy to touch because it lays quite bare on the surface.” [7] Rubin later admitted that he was angered by Manson’s “incredible male chauvinism.” High praises for ritualistic political murder but indignation for male chauvinism. Typical. A reporter for the Los Angeles Free Press expressed similar sentiments when he found out that Manson was “both anti-Jewish and anti-black.” [8]
Why did some on the radical left see Manson as a hero? Perhaps because Manson articulated the same rhetoric of violence that spewed forth from the SDS and Weathermen and put it into action as a way to bring down “the system.” Manson believed that the Tate-LaBianca murders he orchestrated would start a race war.
That Manson foresaw a war between the blacks and the whites was not fantastic. Many people believe that such a war may someday occur. What was fantastic was that he was convinced he could personally start that war himself—that by making it look as if blacks had murdered the seven Caucasian victims he could turn the white community against the black community. [9]
Manson had acted upon the radical revolutionary tactics that Tom Hayden, Huey Newton, and Bernardine Dohrn had been suggesting for some time. Dohrn and her husband, Bill Ayers, also a member of the radical Weather Underground, were tied to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. [10]
[1] Quoted in Eugene H. Methvin, The Rise of Radicalism: The Social Psychology of Messianic Extremism (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973), 505.
[2] Lewis S. Feuer, The Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student Movements (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 478.
[3] Hoffman was found dead in his apartment in April 1989. “A Flower in a Clenched Fist,” Time (April 24, 1989), 23.
[4] Free (Abbie Hoffman), Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Pocket Books, [1968] 1970), 3.
[5] Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book (New York: Pirate Editions, 1971), 170-79.
[6] Vincent Bugliosi, with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1974), 222. Rothman and Lichter tell it a little differently in Roots of Radicalism: “Dig it: First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!” (42).
[7] Jerry Rubin, We Are Everywhere (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Quoted in Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 221–222.
[8] Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 222.
[9] Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 222. Manson and his “family” killed thirty-five to forty people (489).
[10] Bernie Quigley, “Obama and Bill Ayers: Together from the Beginning, The Hill (September 24, 2008): https://bit.ly/3Olvxui