A few days ago I was on the phone with an old friend, talking about roommates and relatives, health problems and, eventually, politics. We got around to Charlie Kirk, whom neither of us had heard of before he was shot, and whose views we disliked, to say the least. Suddenly our private conversation was interrupted by taped announcement: “This call is being recorded.”

What the hell is this? We were both on private cell phones, not calling corporations. We puzzled over the matter for perhaps 40 seconds, and then the taped voice said, “This call is no longer being recorded.” Needless to say, we were freaked out and hung up.

I immediately went to my wife, who was just as shocked as we were. She speculated that the vast government spying apparatus, which I partially described in a recent post uses computers to listen in on all our phone calls. It doesn’t need to record everything, but is triggered by key words or phrases.

A few days later, I told the story to friends at the park where we all exercise our dogs. One of them said, “The same thing happened to me!”

This morning another friend emailed me and clarified the matter. There’s a feature on an iPhone which allows you to record a call. You press the little vertical zigzag in the upper left hand corner, and it announces that the call is being recorded. My friend had been holding her phone between her shoulder and chin and inadvertently pressed that squiggle. That doesn’t mean the government isn’t listening in–only that they don’t announce it when they are doing so.

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Before making that call, I was well aware that all of us are supposed to say we are “horrified” (that’s the word used over and over) by Kirk’s murder. People who made negative comments about him—or were falsely accused of making such comments—have been fired from their jobs, expelled from school, doxxed, and threatened with violence.

So why are we forbidden to say anything negative about Charlie Kirk? Re-reading 1984 might give us a clue, especially the passage where Winston, the main character, is tortured into agreeing that 2 + 2 = 5.

Here are just a few of the appalling opinions that Kirk expressed.

KIRK ON RACE: From Wired:  “MLK was awful. He’s not a good person.”

“We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”

From the Guardian: “If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.”

ON WOMEN: Again from the Guardian: “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband… You’re not in charge.” In response to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape he replied, “…the baby would be delivered.”

Per Freethought Now!, at a conference in Dallas this past June, Kirk called upon women to abandon careers and education, “submit to a godly man” and raise “more children than you can afford.”

ON RELIGION: From the New York Times: “The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.” He accuses Jews of controlling “not just the colleges — it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”

From the Guardian: “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”

Mr. Kirk appears to have adhered to a far-right group called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), which calls for “modern-day apostles and prophets to lead conservative Christians in turning the US into a dominion of Christ on Earth.”

The NAR goes on to say, “There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.”

Really? Although the exact phrase separation of church and state isn’t used, the First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

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Here is what the GOP says we must believe about Kirk:

“Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced legislation this week that would require every public university in the state to construct ‘a Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza’, with a statue of the assassinated Republican activist and a sign calling him a ‘modern civil rights leader’, or pay monthly fines.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called Kirk a “national hero” and martyr who was assassinated by a leftist terrorist “connected to the radical transgender movement…because of Kirk’s bold support for truth, love of country, and unshakable faith.”

Per the New York Times, many right-wing Christian groups also hailed Kirk as a martyr. Intercessors for America, for example, which has ties to the Trump administration, called him “a modern day MLK.”

The Trump administration ordered flags at half staff for him. The House passed a Republican resolution eulogizing his life with a sweeping 310-58 majority. 95 Democrats supported it.

Not everyone is afraid to speak out. Prof. Saida Grundy of Boston U., who is Black, wrote that she felt no sorrow, no mourning after seeing all the displays lionizing Kirk, who “ruled over an online fiefdom peddling his signature brand of rage-baiting racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and misogynistic commentary… The lionizing is…an insult to millions of the most marginalized Americans who lived every day in the crosshairs of his rhetoric…[and] a brazen proclamation that his consistently hostile white nationalist, homophobic and misogynistic convictions represent the federal government’s interests.”

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On the matter of guns, Kirk famously said, “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Some gun deaths? In 2023, the most recent year for which we have complete data, there were 46,728 total gun deaths in this country. Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens—4,455 in that same year.

Twice as many are wounded but survive. I haven’t seen statistics on the number and variety of injuries, but no doubt they range from a flesh wound to complete paralysis.

Surely when Mr. Kirk said all those deaths were worth it, he didn’t expect to pay the price with his own life. He was willing to sacrifice thousands of children—other people’s children, of course—for the right to own an object whose only purpose is killing humans.

These days the internet is full of images of Kirk embracing and being embraced by Jesus. Apparently neither the deceased nor those so-called Christians who celebrate him ever read Matthew 26:52: “Jesus said unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”