JFK, MLK, RFK and now CJK – Charles James Kirk

September 22, 2025

OPINION by ANDY CALDWELL

Although I was a child when President John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, I vividly remember my own grief for their families and our country. What I don’t remember is anyone openly celebrating the deaths of these three great Americans. Especially since they were shot in cold blood by assassins.

These murders shook our nation to its core and rightly so.

Today, there is no doubt that too many Americans have lost their soul, their humanity, and their decency in that they rejoiced to see Charlie Kirk gunned down in front of his own family and for what?

Charlie Kirk, armed with only faith and facts along with a genius IQ, respectively allowed all comers to challenge his faith, knowledge, and patriotism in an open forum. And because he was extremely successful in the battle for hearts and minds on college campuses across America, he became the enemy of the left in America. An enemy whose death was worth celebrating by too many people.

Do any of these people still believe these words from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?”

Is it no longer a self-evident truth that murdering somebody speaking in the public square is evil? Apparently not.

The people who are celebrating Charlie’s murder obviously no longer believe in free speech, the right to peacefully assemble, the freedom of religion, nor the unalienable right to life and liberty.

That begs the question, what do these wicked people believe in? Certainly not the God who gave us our divine rights along with such commandments as do not kill.

Thomas Jefferson rightly warned us that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants, as he emphasized that freedom is never free in our ongoing struggle against tyranny. And that is exactly what the left in America has become, tyrants. They don’t recognize anyone’s right to oppose their wicked ideology.

Regardless, Charlie Kirk’s mission has now gone viral. So, where do we go from here?

I, for one, plan to continue to call out the godless and unamerican people who celebrated the assassination of a man who simply wanted to have a civil conversation to preserve our civilization. A man who believed from the bottom of his heart, and by way of the history of our great traditions, that talking with one another is our only chance to avoid division, and worse, violence.

Ironically, his murder was celebrated by some of the same political ideologues who believe words constitute violence, and who also rally against gun violence at schools! Go figure.

Regardless, in their opinion, Charlie’s murder was justifiable homicide because of his words. So, while calling Charlie a fascist and a wanna-be tyrant, the real fascists and tyrants are those who called for and condoned his assassination.

The group of people who need to be confronted, the very people Charlie Kirk was talking to, would include the bulk of American college students who Charlie gave his life to reach.

As Daniel Greenfield pointed out in a recent column in Front Page Magazine, a very large survey of some 68,000 students at 257 universities by FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s) revealed that one in three students believed that using violence and/or aggression to stop a speaker they disagreed with on campus was acceptable at least in some way, shape or form!

Unfortunately, however, a lot of Americans are done with talking. As one pundit on social media stated, “No, we don’t need to have a conversation! You killed the guy willing to do that.”

Andy Caldwell is the executive director of COLAB in Santa Barbara County and host of The Andy Caldwell Radio Show, weekdays from 3-5 p.m. on  FM 98.5, FM 99.5, AM 1240, AM 1290 and FM 96.9.