{"id":57828,"date":"2025-09-11T18:14:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T18:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/57828\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T18:14:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T18:14:10","slug":"charlie-kirk-was-the-good-cop-the-alternative-is-grim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/57828\/","title":{"rendered":"Charlie Kirk was the good cop – the alternative is grim"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day, I was playing a game of hide-and-seek with my toddler, where I was hiding behind the couch. When he came looking for me, as a joke, my wife told him \u201cI think Daddy\u2019s gone! He\u2019s disappeared!\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

But rather than finding this game fun, my son immediately got very upset and emotional, and started asking \u201cWhere\u2019s Daddy? Where\u2019s Daddy?\u201d, saying he loved me and asking me to \u201ccome back\u201d. Realising he was in distress, I immediately emerged from my hiding spot, at which point he was overjoyed to see me, squealing with delight, running over as fast as his little legs would carry him, and giving me hugs and kisses.<\/p>\n

For the foreseeable future, Charlie Kirk\u2019s young children, aged 3 and 1, will be wondering that same question: \u201cWhere\u2019s Daddy?\u201d Except in their case, Daddy isn\u2019t going to emerge from behind the couch. He\u2019s not going to walk through the door at the end of the day. They\u2019re not going to go upstairs, and walk into his home office six months from now, and find that silly Dada was just hiding up there the whole time.<\/p>\n

Daddy is never coming home. When those children are 65-years-old with grandchildren of their own, they\u2019ll still be dealing with the emotional fallout of their Daddy not coming home.<\/p>\n

All because a sick, twisted lunatic couldn\u2019t stand to hear an argument they disagreed with.<\/p>\n

In a way, Kirk\u2019s murder feels more significant than the shooting of Trump \u2013 and not just because one man died and the other lived. Even if Kirk had pulled through and survived, this whole incident would still feel qualitatively different.<\/p>\n

While a President getting shot is extremely serious and grotesque, it\u2019s happened before, and, to a certain extent, it\u2019s kind of an expected risk that comes with the job. Powerful people throughout history like Presidents, Prime Ministers, Emperors and Kings get assassinated \u2013 it\u2019s horrible, but it happens when you\u2019re dealing with political power struggles for the future of the world\u2019s strongest nation. The President has access to nuclear codes, and State secrets, and other things that you can imagine people being willing to kill over.<\/p>\n

Trump is an abrasive billionaire who is a direct threat to the Left\u2019s power. He\u2019s made enemies of China, Iran, Islamic terrorists like ISIS, Latin American drug cartels who cut people\u2019s heads off, Leftwing Antifa terrorists\u2026the list goes on. There\u2019s any number of people who\u2019d want him dead. That someone would try to blow his head off at a political rally is awful, but not shocking.<\/p>\n

The same applies to other populist outsider political figures that have been targeted in recent years. Rightwing leader Jair Bolsonaro, while on the campaign trail to become President of Brazil, was stabbed in 2018 in an attempted assassination.<\/p>\n

Last year Populist Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot 3 times and barely survived. The shooter said he was motivated to carry out the shooting by Fico\u2019s opposition to sending military assistance to Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Also last year, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a former vice-president of the European parliament and co-founder of Spain\u2019s Rightwing Vox party, was shot in the head in Madrid. Again, he barely survived.<\/p>\n

A Leftist lunatic tried to assassinate far-right commentator Nick Fuentes last year after the would-be assassin had already killed 3 other people. The assailant was shot dead by police before he could carry out the assassination.<\/p>\n

But once again, these are all figures who sick people deemed to be radicals or political threats, rightly or wrongly. None of it is remotely justified, but one can begin to comprehend how a warped psyche might resolve to do something drastic like that.<\/p>\n

Kirk, by contrast, was obviously not a direct threat to anybody. He was literally just a man who wanted to have conversations with students.<\/p>\n

He wasn\u2019t a politician with hard power, nor was he an extremist. If anything, during his life, if many people had a critique of him, it was that his views were so tame it was almost a bit too meek for some people\u2019s liking \u2013 he wasn\u2019t saying anything new or particularly outside-the-box. Charlie Kirk did not hold any belief that was not already also held by tens of millions of other Americans.<\/p>\n

And for daring to speak bland, bogstandard conservative talking points in public, he was gunned down like an animal. All he wanted to do was calmly talk out political disagreements on college campuses, and he was left slumped back in his chair with blood gushing from his throat in front of his horrified wife and children, who likely didn\u2019t even understand what they were witnessing.<\/p>\n

Clearly nothing about this situation is remotely funny, but it\u2019s almost like a dark joke that he was shot dead under a banner that said \u201cPROVE ME WRONG\u201d. He put forward an argument, asked \u201cWhat\u2019s your rebuttal?\u201d, and the only retort his opponents could muster was a bullet. There\u2019s a kind of depraved poetry in that.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To those Leftist inhuman ghouls who are celebrating this, the question must be asked: where do you actually think this leads? Where do you think this all ends up?<\/p>\n

Every political movement has its moderates and its radical fringe. People like Charlie Kirk are most certainly the moderates.<\/p>\n

The Charlie Kirks of this world want to have debates, organise student societies on campus, and run for elections so they can pass laws and propose amendments. They\u2019re the kind of people who\u2019ll post memes and slag off the Left, but will still have Leftwing acquaintances and will make it clear they\u2019re only teasing in good fun. They\u2019ll get a pint with you after the debate, and you can co-exist with them \u2013 they\u2019re good neighbours who\u2019ll come to your summer BBQ and put political differences aside for the sake of friendship.<\/p>\n

But what happens when you kill the good cop publicly for the world to see? What happens when you convince a generation of young rightwingers that even if they do things the peaceful, democratic, right way, there\u2019s still a very real chance that they could die choking on their own blood?<\/p>\n

Do you think that nice, happy-go-lucky \u201colive branch\u201d instinct will persist for much longer? Or will you be facing a much uglier, nastier, meaner calibre of opponents going forward?<\/p>\n

If people like Kirk get murdered for trying to do things the right way, how long until people start doing things the wrong way?<\/p>\n

I pray to God I\u2019m wrong, but it feels like politics is going something very dark, and like we\u2019re facing into a future that nobody is going to like, including those who are celebrating and laughing about this now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The other day, I was playing a game of hide-and-seek with my toddler, where I was hiding behind…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57829,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[4391,9,10,41120,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,35843,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-57828","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-ben-scallan","9":"tag-breaking-news","10":"tag-breakingnews","11":"tag-charlie-kirk","12":"tag-featured-news","13":"tag-featurednews","14":"tag-headlines","15":"tag-latest-news","16":"tag-latestnews","17":"tag-main-news","18":"tag-mainnews","19":"tag-news","20":"tag-political-violence","21":"tag-top-stories","22":"tag-topstories","23":"tag-world","24":"tag-world-news","25":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}