One year ago today, Charlie Kirk was publicly assassinated.

I remember exactly where I was. I was sitting in a booth at a restaurant. I had just finished lunch, doing a little bit of work while I sat there.

Things started popping up on social media. The first report said he had been shot, that he had been rushed to the hospital. I didn't really understand what had happened.

Then somebody got a hold of the most gruesome footage you can imagine and posted it. I was scrolling, and it started playing in the feed.

I would not encourage you to look at it. It was graphic and gruesome and horrific. He was struck in the neck, and he appeared to die immediately.

He left behind a widow and two children.

I want to talk about how we got here, my friends, because this is where hatred goes when nobody stops it. It produces death. It produces murder. It produces abject evil.

A lot of people in this country have simply never been taught how to think. They don't know how to analyze an argument. And they certainly don’t know how to make one.

Someone once said that one of the signs of becoming an adult is being able to entertain an idea without accepting it. I didn't come up with that, but it's spot-on.

Charlie Kirk could do that, and he did it consistently.

He invited people up to the microphone to debate him, to prove him wrong. He dealt with them gracefully. He let them talk. Sometimes he would say: you know what, I agree with you there. There's something to that.

At those campus events he would tell the crowd, if you disagree with me, get to the front of the line.

He didn't want to stand up there and listen to people echo back what he had just said. He wanted a substantive debate. That was his whole model. And it wasn’t the problem.

The problem lies with the people who could not answer him, and who felt justified in their hatred of him.

So these folks did what people do when they can't win an argument.

They went after Charlie Kirk, the man.

That's an ad hominem attack. It isn't a response to an idea. It's an attempt to discredit you personally, so as to avoid having a real, substantive conversation.

Go read the comments on our Facebook page sometime, and you'll see much of the same.

Candidly, I don't read the comments. We have a way to analyze what's in there, and if there are sincere, legitimate questions, I would love the chance to answer them.

But the idiotic, evil comments bother me exactly 0%. I'd say it bothered Charlie Kirk about the same.

When ridicule and intimidation fail, and they still can't win the argument, the unstable and the wicked escalate.

That's what happened one year ago today.

The alleged assassin did not answer Charlie Kirk with a retort or an argument.

He answered with a bullet.

Because that was the only way he thought he could win.

Fortunately, violence and ad hominem attacks are not the only pathetic ways people respond to arguments. They make other logical fallacies, too. Some think an appeal to authority is a legitimate argument to make, but it's not.

Yesterday, after we posted clips of the show where we had talked about the Lindsay Clancy case, a commenter announced that he was a psychologist who had studied psychology for six years.

Congratulations. Where can I send the box of cookies?

He also thought that, because of his studies, I should just uniformly accept any conclusion he draws.

Little does this guy know that's not at all how I think.

It’s not how any of us should think.

And that's not how any of this works.

Credentials are not an argument, my friends. That is an argument from authority. It means, “I have the credentials, I'm the expert, so you have to accept my conclusion.”

If you're a true expert, you ought to be able to put the cookies on the bottom shelf and explain the idea to somebody so they can actually understand it. The problem is, very few of these clowns can actually do that.

Data doesn't interpret itself either. Having data does not mean the people interpreting it do not have an axe to grind and a conclusion they want you to draw.

COVID woke a lot of folks up to that. What the experts told us to do turned out, in many cases, to be exactly the wrong thing.

Or take the food pyramid many of us were taught in elementary school. Six to eleven servings of grain a day, sitting right there at the base. It ended up being almost exactly upside down.

Now let me be fair for a moment, because there is strong disagreement, and I'd say some hatred, spread across the entire political spectrum. (Probably not proportionally, of course.)

A lot of the people we end up disagreeing with simply are ignorant. I don't mean that as an insult. Ignorant means without knowledge.

They simply don't know, because no one ever explained it to them — at least not in a way that it registered in their brains.

I became a follower of Jesus in the summer of 1993, at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes football camp in Marshall, Indiana.

At that time, I lived in a small town just outside of Mooresville, Indiana, where twenty-some-odd years ago — back when you counted these things in the Yellow Pages — there were 63 churches with a Mooresville address, if memory serves me correctly.

Churches were metaphorically on every corner. And I still came home from that camp thinking, my goodness, this is the greatest story ever told. Why hadn't anyone ever told me?

The truth is, people probably did tell me. In fact, I’m confident I heard a little bit about the gospel when I would go to church with my grandmother outside Bloomington.

I undoubtedly heard some of these stories as a kid at vacation Bible school, or when I attended weekday religious education during my formative years.

The truth is, I just didn't understand it. I was ignorant about the meaning of the story, about the conclusion of it, what it meant, and how it all fit together.

There are a lot of people who are ignorant on matters of truth right now — on what conservatism actually is, on what this nation was founded to be, on who Jesus is and what the Bible teaches.

They need somebody to explain it to them. They don't need someone to call them stupid and scream at them.

This, by the way, is what I mean when I say conservative, not bitter.

I don't hate people because they disagree with me. And I don’t think screaming at them or publicly “showing them up” is going to make any positive change at all.

Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ilhan Omar — I profoundly disagree with all of them. But I don't hate a single one of them.

What I hate are the ideas leading people to dangerous conclusions and leading this nation down a perilous path. I hate destructive ideologies. I hate sin and wickedness and evil.

There's a fundamental difference between hating those things and hating someone because he votes differently than you.

There's also a difference between disagreement and coercion. Disagreement addresses the root of the issue.

Coercion is designed to force someone to say they agree with you, even if they don't — often by belittling, intimidating, and threatening.

I got my first legitimate death threat recently. Somebody on social media saying that I was going to go to hell, and that he was going to be the one to put me there.

Good luck.

Someone may be able to take my life through violence, but they cannot send me to hell. Jesus has already secured my residence with Him in Heaven.

This evil and wickedness is all around us, but it is still not worth throwing up our hands and calling this great American experiment a lost cause.

Make no mistake, we have a real fight before us, and we have real work to do. But I still believe America can be restored, and that truth can regain its footing in this nation. If I didn't, I wouldn't be here every day.

After all, with God, all things are possible.

Conservative, not bitter.
Todd

FactCheck.org — Both of the claims I went through on the air, run down side by side: the slur he never said and the stoning he never called for.

Mediaite — The contemporaneous 2018 write-up of the Politicon exchange, with what he actually shouted: "Come on, Cenk, let's go."

Fox News — Stephen King repeated the stoning claim, then deleted the post and apologized for it.

AAP FactCheck — The "message from beyond the grave" video is real footage spliced with an AI-generated voice.

NPR — Where the case stands: the accused was bound over for trial on all seven counts last week and pleaded not guilty.

WRAL — A run at the five conspiracy theories that have grown up around the assassination in the last year.

Deseret News — There is a remembrance tonight at Utah Valley University, a few minutes from where he was killed.

I regularly share my thoughts about America's cold civil war — the great chasm between the right and the left in this country — and the art of persuasion. I want to know what you think.

Right after the assassination, the novelist Stephen King posted on X that Charlie Kirk "advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin'."

Here is what Charlie Kirk actually said, on his podcast back in June of 2024.

Ms. Rachel, the children's entertainer, had put out a Pride Month video quoting scripture about loving your neighbor, and she cited Leviticus 19.

Charlie pointed out that the chapter right before it, Leviticus 18, outlines the sexual prohibitions Ms. Rachel was openly endorsing. His argument, which he made over and over, was that you love somebody by telling them the truth, not by affirming their sin.

He was not calling for anyone to be stoned. He was saying she was self-selecting the parts of the Bible she wanted to believe — and ignoring the parts she didn’t like.

To his credit, King eventually came around to understanding that. He deleted the post and wrote: "I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages." He added, "I was wrong, and I apologize."

This is how this is supposed to work, my friends. Somebody states something that isn't true, learns it was false, and takes it back.

The problem is, this is incredibly rare in today's society.

There is also a video circulating on social media that claims to be Charlie recording a message before he died. "If you're seeing this, I recorded it knowing this day might come."

But the problem is, he never recorded it. It is real footage from his last post spliced together with a voice generated by artificial intelligence, and the lips don't match the audio in the opening seconds.

Think about that for a moment. A innocent young man was assassinated, and somebody sat down at a computer and manufactured his voice to put words in his mouth.

That's not missing context. That's something absolutely fabricated and designed to mislead people about a man who could no longer speak for himself.

While it's true that many of the allegations made against Charlie Kirk and his positions and ideas are absolutely false and fabricated, there are still things that he said that upset people.

In fact, I don't consider that a criticism. When I leave this earth, I hope somebody will say the same thing about me.

Because sometimes people really need to hear the things they don't want to hear.

If somebody wants to argue with Charlie Kirk over his genuine positions, that's fair game. Have at it.

But if you do that, go read the whole quote in context and make the case against his actual argument, not some straw man created in your imagination.

After all, that is all he ever asked anybody to do.

Here's the clip from today's show. One year ago, Charlie Kirk was assassinated — and the hatred that killed him is still, unfortunately, alive and well in America. In fact, it's still fueling much of what's happening in places like Lindsay Clancy supporter circles.

Watch the clip below — and share it with someone you think needs to hear it.

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