CHARLIE KIRK'S TRANSITION TO MARTYRDOM

Charlie Kirk's assassination on the Utah Valley University campus on September 10 forcefully reminded us of a macabre American ritual featuring the combination of gun violence and toxic politics. The right-wing political activist, founder of the youth organization "Turning Point USA" had not been elected to any political office. However, given his status as a prominent supporter of President Trump's MAGA movement he touched a chord of nearly biblical dimensions, to some degree resembling the response traditionally anticipated after the assassination of prominent political personalities. It is uniformly understood that, in civil society, regardless of political affiliation, deadly violence generated by political viewpoints, can never be tolerated or justified. But, as a country, we have periodically cycled through times of upheaval, discord and division which, unfortunately, have culminated in a spree of politically motivated killings. During the 1960s we witnessed the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. During the early part of this century we experienced deadly encounters and assassination attempts of former Representative Gaby Gifford, Representative Steve Scalise, Minnesota Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman and her husband, an attempt on the lives of State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, an arson fueled attempt on the life of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and family, and multiple attacks on, then candidate, Donald Trump. A significant difference between the toxic environment of the 1960s and today is the influence of social media. Its reach not only helps to amplify extreme viewpoints, it can also be used to positively prevent adverse responses. To his credit, President Trump's initial reaction to Charlie Kirk's unconscionable execution was commendable and presidential. He pointed out that "It's long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequences of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most despicable way possible." This could have been the beginning of an attempt at proactively calming an anticipated national response. However, he could not help putting his foot in his mouth. Before any motive for this abhorrent act was even apparent, he reverted to his established mantra, and continued by accusing "those on the radical left [who] have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop now!" The president appeared unwilling to acknowledge that he was part of the problem. He routinely refers to his opponents as "vermin" that need to be rooted out. He calls judges "monsters," and identifies those who oppose his policies as "scum," radical left thugs that lie and cheat on elections, and will do anything to destroy America and the American Dream. He threatened to put Liz Cheney, "a radical war hawk," in front of a firing squad, shoot protesters "in the legs or something," and so on. In the mean time he spearheaded the public veneration of Charlie Kirk and "the American values for which he lived and died. While largely ignoring to acknowledge the recent threats, violent attacks and killing of Democrats. He similarly ignored the myriad of highly controversial hate filled viewpoints espoused by his "deceased" supporter. He ordered the American flag to continue to be flown at half staff past the remembrance of 9/11 "in honor of Charlie Kirk." He sent Vice President Vance to escort Kirk's remains from Utah to Arizona on Air Force 2. And he posthumously awarded Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our highest civilian award. Many conservatives view Kirk's death as a galvanizing force for years to come, an opportunity to supercharge the movement he started and to cement conservative Christian values into American life. Jackson Lahmeyer, a pastor in Oklahoma, founder of the "Pastors for Trump" network, contributed: "Charlie died for what he believed in, he died for something greater than just himself. The shooter's motive could have been political, religious or something else. Regardless, he was a martyr." Politically, leading figures on the far-right now feel empowered to call for a crackdown on their ideological opponents. Many call for the administration to "prosecute every single leftist organization." On the defensive, many others now fear that Mr. Trump and his allies will use Kirk's killing as a pretext to attack their political opponents, suppress liberal political activity and suspend democratic rights. Lilliana Mason, political science professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is one of many who worry that to the extent that leaders are framing this assassination as something that needs to be retaliated against creates a huge opportunity for bad things to happen. "If the cycle of retaliatory violence gets started, it's really hard to stop it." Both sides in our polarized political world will need to lower the temperature of our agitated discourse or find an off ramp before it gets worse. Designating a "chosen one" and elevating him to "MAGA Sainthood" won't solve our perennial problem. Theo Wierdsma

RESHAPING THE FOCUS OF HISTORY

From the first day his administration assumed office this January, President Trump broke all records issuing executive orders. He generated 26 on his first day alone. These presidential directives covered a wide swath of topics, from sweeping changes in how the federal government works to signaling his intention to reshape how the country's stories are told. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, creators of Mr. Trump's blueprint "Project 2025," especially welcomed the new administration's push to influence history and culture, combating what it referred to as "the totalitarian cult identified as the great awokening." The president's "White House Executive Order" of March 27, titled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" serves as a case in point. It calls for the removal of "divisive, race centered ideology" at the Smithsonian Institution, and instructs the Interior Secretary to revoke recent changes to landmarks and monuments if they are found to "perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history." It calls for "withholding federal money from programs related to diversity, equality and inclusion or promoting gender ideology," while it also mandates including a "patriotic" curriculum into K-12 education, accusing schools of indoctrinating children in anti-American ideologies. Jefferson Cowie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Vanderbilt University, suggests that Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again" points to how he wants to portray history. The idea is that he "works on nostalgia for a golden age," that there is some version of America we need to get back to. This approach hints at an essential divide when interpreting the story of the United States: Is America a country striving to return to former glory, or a nation on a continuous arc of self improvement? The "Organization of American Historians," the largest professional society dedicated to U.S. history, warned that Trump's order to rewrite history to reflect a glorified narrative downplays or erases elements of American history - slavery, discrimination, division - while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups. Angela Diaz, Associate Professor of history at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, observes that a large majority of Americans - for instance women, people of color, the impoverished - did not in fact flourish during the so-called golden era of the past. For many groups, a return to the past would mean "erasing a lot of the legal, economic, political, technological, and social progress that the country has made and calling all of this into question." It is, of course, not uncommon that in times of social and political upheaval political leaders seek to refocus the lens of history. History is replete with attempts at erasing unwanted philosophies, often by burning books and documents containing content controversial for the time and threatening established authority. These events took place as recently as the Nazi book burning organized by students during the 1930s and focused on purging literature representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. Even in our own country data shows that since 2021, more than 15,000 books have been banned from libraries across 43 states. Most of these feature characters or stories about people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals and those dealing with race and racism. This does not mean that historical revisionism is somehow illegitimate. The reinterpretation of a historical account by challenging established views using new evidence, questions or perspectives is a legitimate process essential for historiography. However, distorting the past, deliberately misrepresenting historical events to serve ideological agendas or fit a particularly political viewpoint without scientific foundation is not. The perceptive works of social critic George Orwell illuminated how the control of history could lead us down a slippery slope towards autocracy. He astutely projected that: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." The main character in his dystopian novel "1984", Winston Smith, who secretly rebels against the totalitarian regime of "Oceania" complaints pointedly: "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute to minute. Nothing exists except our endless present in which the party is always right." The Trump administration's push to rewrite American history is stirring up significant controversy, but what kind of lasting effect might it have? According to Vanderbilt's Cowie: "As long as the data is not lost, it all seems reversible. Essentially, since they are executive orders, they can be reversed by a new regime." Theo Wierdsma