.

Charlie Kirk, who was murdered a short time ago, became one of the internet’s most posted altered memes. The only other one that comes to my mind that I have seen with such repeated frequency is the replaced subtitling of Hitler losing his temper from the fantastic piece of cinema that is Downfall, but nearly as common is the image of Charlie Kirk, mug in hand, sitting behind a portable table with a sign that reads “Change My Mind.” I really have no idea what he was challenging people to change his mind about in the original, but the endless alterations can be quite humorous.

Setting aside the funny memes of a Gorn challenging people to change its mind about Cetus III being an invasion, there’s something more important in the phrase “change my mind.” It is a challenge, not a debate. It is a statement from a person who already holds a committed position, not one from an open mind seeking honest inquiry. It is an Objectivist challenging you to prove that selfishness is not a virtue, a Scientologist challenging you to question the authority of L. Ron Hubbard’s vision, or a born-again Christian challenging you to change his mind on the existence of God.

None of this was actually about whether Charlie Kirk’s brand of conservatism yielded better governance than a more liberal philosophy—it was performance art. Kirk, it seemed to me, was like a stand-up comedian, but with all the stand-up stripped away so that all that remained was the comedian and the hecklers, and he was very good at dealing with the “hecklers.”

Dealing with hecklers is performance, not philosophy. Nothing justifies the man’s murder, and his surviving spouse’s call for forgiveness is an astounding act in the true Christian faith, but the man, like any talented liberal Hollywood actor, was a performer and not a political thinker.

.

There are a number of adjustments, all within the bounds of the Constitution, that I feel are required to pull us back from the political disaster we currently experience. The most important reforms I think are ones required for the United States House of Representatives.

The fact that there are so few competitive seats in the House and that it often has a lower turnover of members than the British House of Lords for god’s sake is a prime reason that we are in this current mental death grip between the two parties. For far too many of the Congressional Districts the only election that matters is the primary election because the voting population of the area is so skewed by the way it has been drawn that only one party ever wins the general election. That said, national legislation addressing the practice of gerrymandering is unlikely to pass constitutional review, so another approach needs to be employed: expand the House.

In 1963, about the time the nation began shifting to a primary-based system for party nominations, each member of the House represented 410,000 constituents, a ratio already more than doubled from the start of the century when it was 193,000 persons.

Because the number of members, which used to be adjusted quite often for population growth, is unchanged, today the ratio stands at about 760,000 persons represented by each member of the House.

Such large population districts make the practice of gerrymandering, particularly ‘cracking and packing’ where populations are either split up or combined into districts with overwhelming populations of a single party or voting bloc, more effective. Expanding the House would not only force a new round of redistricting but with many more districts make some of the tools for gerrymandering far less effective.

Doubling the House I think is impractical, but perhaps an increase of a quarter might suffice to help us back onto a road for more sane governance.

.

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer leveraged his former professional credentials in psychology to facetiously label Democratic politician Howard Dean, who had suggested a conspiracy theory that President Bush (the second) had some awareness of the coming attacks on 9/11, as suffering from ‘Bush Derangement Syndrome.’ The term took off with more enthusiasm than the release of Star Wars, becoming the verbal counter to every criticism of the Bush Administration. (I feel compelled to note that even when the initiating column had been written, ‘Disorder’ has already replaced ‘syndrome’ in official terminology.)

Trump’s election saw the ‘diagnosis’ repurposed into ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ and then again by another cultish following into ‘Musk Derangement Syndrome.’ TDS remains currently an often-deployed rhetorical device to dismiss critics of the current president as unworthy of rebuttal. After all, the opposition is not only wrong—they are mentally incompetent.

If we are to look at the historical record, it seems to me that the real disorder, again this is facetious, is Democrat Derangement Disorder, a condition that compels the afflicted to always, no matter their past positions or statements, ally themselves with whichever politician is, at the national level, currently winning over the Democratic party.

Let’s look at the Democratic Presidents of the last 40-odd years and the criticisms lobbed in their direction. See if any apply to the currently adored resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Jimmy Carter: Accused of being too ‘soft’ on the Russians, lacking the resolve to face them down, particularly when they invaded a neighboring nation.

Bill Clinton: It’s a long list here; financially corrupt, a sexual predator, a draft dodger, a criminal, and someone who sold executive actions and pardons for personal profit—all were reasons argued to impeach and remove him from office.

Barack Obama: As his opponents often insisted during the ‘War on Terror’, Barack Hussein Obama. He was accused of being a political lightweight, too inexperienced for the office of president, and that his supporters were not guided by policy or principles but rather adoring and praising him like some ‘dear leader’ of a third world cult of personality.

Joe Biden: The reasons given for why Biden was unqualified for the office included such accusations as that he was motivated by rage and, due to his age, did not possess the mental faculties for the responsibilities, often wrapped up as ‘Angry Joe Dementia’ insults.

What I find so fantastically wild is that not only has every one of these failings and faults been discarded the moment they appeared in a conservative politician, but that all of these failings are housed by a single person to whom they have shown nothing but slavish devotion.

The most important thing to understand is that there is no amount of argument or demonstration of their hypocrisy that will sway their position. It isn’t about rationality but about outcome, and it always has been.

.

First off, and let me state this clearly for those in the back, The Murder of Charlie Kirk was NOT justified and was a crime against Kirk, his kin, and our nation.

The events in Utah last week have spurred my pondering and thinking about assassination. There are certainly persons whom nearly everyone might agree would have improved the world by being subjected to a successful assassination, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and many others. Such a conclusion though comes from the precise knowledge of history. We know of the deaths of millions because that is in our past, but such is not the case for any assassin of these people save the fanciful time traveler.

A man successfully killing Hitler in 1930 does not know of the mass murder to come. Oh, the clues are certainly there, the hate that spews from the party and its leader is vile, intense, and unending but thinking that such hatred might lead to mass murder and knowing it will are two very different things. If Hitler dies in 1930, he’s quickly forgotten just another of dozens of politicians murdered in Germany’s turbulent post-Great War period. It’s also important to remember that Hitler worked within the system. Even as he and his party stated clearly a hatred for democracy, they pledged to destroy it from within, by using the system itself to gain the power to annihilate liberal democracy. The perspective from 1930 would be one where a divisive rabble-rousing politician with noxious views is murdered by his enemy.  The people of that parallel reality could never know what the act of assassinating Hitler changed for them and the world.

Conversely, there are assassinations in our history that we mourn and decry as terrible events, Lincoln, Kennedy, King, and others but we cannot know the shape of the world if these leaders had lived. Any projection of that parallel world is more likely than not to be heavily influenced by the political biases of whoever is making the projection. Lincoln’s reconstruction might have avoided Jim Crow and the horrors it created, or he might have continued to amass power in the office of the president fundamentally changing the nature of our system of government and becoming an American dictator.

We can’t know.

Only with historical hindsight, when the act becomes impossible, can we say with anything approaching certainty that in some cases assassination can be a good. In reality we muddle along, ignorant of the future’s shape and in those cases, the real-world cases, there are vanishingly few cases that justify assassination and last week, no matter how odious he may have been, does not meet those criteria.

.

So, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) revised its report on employment and job growth, reducing the number of jobs created in the reported period (May 2025) from about 129,000 to a mere 19,000. The correction was quite large, but it is not unprecedented. However, since this is well within the chaotic, on-again, off-again tariff merry-go-round of Trump economic activity, a weakening of job growth is bad news for the current administration and the allies that have slavishly lashed themselves to it. I’m given to recall a scene from The Godfather.

Tom Hagen had been sent to Hollywood to bend a studio mogul to Vito Corleone’s will. Acting out of personal pride and stubbornness, the mogul refuses Hagen to his face. Hagen thanks the man for a pleasant evening and meal and excuses himself because Vito Corleone insists on hearing bad news immediately.

This is competent, intelligent leadership. Crises cannot be handled well and the best possible outcomes cannot be obtained if full and accurate information is not at hand for the decision makers. Every two-bit serial villain that kills an underling for delivering bad news is sabotaging their own operation with such shortsighted and idiotic measures.

Trump is idiotic and shortsighted.

He fired the head of the BLS, made wild and unsupported accusations that the bad report was an orchestrated conspiracy to make him look bad, and insisted that the news was, of course, “fake.”

This nation is facing its most critical crisis since the Civil War, and it is only by our actions today and tomorrow that we can save it.