When I came up with the idea for the Whores and Hustlers column, I was in a big fat funk. I’d been running low on a spinning log, with a river of despair and wrath coursing furiously under my heels… Nobody but I could feel it swell and spit out acid that seared my rear-end with droplets of fury and reminded me to put a pep in my step. If I stopped, even for a second, I would’ve gone right over the other side of the cruel log and ended up as a floating pile of disinfected bones. 

Speaking of infections, the runt of the Kennedy litter, Bobby the second, was one of the potential subjects for the first edition of Whores and Hustlers. The whole idea of the thing is to focus on real-life characters of fascination — even though I have a breaking news gig now, I’ve always been into profile-style work — and to toss my opinion of them into the great ether. The hope is that some of my rambling about how these people fit into our current time, political sphere or my own bizarre life, may reveal something about their place in the world. 

Whores and Hustlers occupy strange positions in our society. The Whores, I believe, are the people who will forgo any morals and fork out anything to get ahead; think commentators like Nicholas Fuentes, Latino superstar. I implore you to dispel any belief that I’m talking about whores in an anti-feminist context — it’s the 21st century and sexual freedom is as much a God-given right in the U.S. as gun ownership… For now and until Stephen Miller’s prudishness catches up to us. 

Hustlers aren’t so easily hooked on positions of power, or even money. They’re in it for the game. Hustlers have some sort of sick disease that doesn’t let them stop getting more and more until whatever they want is spilling over the edge of the cup and whatever is under it is a sticky, terrible mess. A well known hustler is AIPAC Shakur, Hakeem Jeffries. Rather than adopt the majority position of the Democrat voters for virtually any issue, Jeffries only wags his tail for attention from donors and pats on the back from the likes of Chuck Schumer. It’s not the power or position he craves, but upholding old-school, comfortable establishment norms. He hustles blind liberals by posing as a progressive and practicing politics like a conservative. I think he might get off on long speeches he practiced in the shower as a kid. 

Being a Whore or a Hustler doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person, but I believe all bad people fall neatly into the categories. 

Eventually, the log stopped spinning for long enough that I planned to write my shiny new column, an imminent weekly chore, on how words have lost meaning. And goddamn, was I off. The man of perhaps too many words, Charlie Kirk, was murdered in the midst of my writing in Utah at a college full of Bible-thumping young adults. And most likely, it was because the words I planned on saying had no meaning came back to bite Kirk in the ass. 

The recent drama surrounding Epstein, the immigration raids and Supreme Court rulings were the reasons I concluded that words had lost meaning. Transparency about the world's biggest crooks was betrayed, laws were broken and the Constitution was flipped on its head before I wrote this, so I only hope I’m not blamed for my lack of foresight in believing that word was no longer bond… 

Kirk’s words mattered, regardless of how sanitized they’ve been through three heavy-duty news cycles. The man spoke poorly of almost every group that ever missed the starting gun, and almost always hid behind Christianity to throw stones at people who decided to race another track altogether. What most fascinated me about Kirk was the fact that he wholeheartedly believed he was David, the little hearty soldier of Israel, slinging shots at the Philistine’s, a brutal group of savages composed of college students and the Democratic establishment. To me, it seemed like pure, Christian, family-oriented whoreishness for the sake of Instagram reels. 

But the question is, did his words matter enough to get him killed? I think not. 

I certainly don’t espouse the legacy media narrative that Kirk was on some knightly crusade to better the dialogue between America’s halves. His debates, if you care to watch them in full, were brimming with ad hominems, false equivalencies and a field’s worth of strawmen. This was not Noam Chomsky we’re talking about… I don’t think Kirk’s debates did much but bolster confused respect for the Conservative movement from people who couldn’t grasp different ways of life, and chose to refuse them.  

David said to the Philistine, “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, and I’ll strike you down and cut off your head. This very day I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds and the wild animals, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel. All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord’s, and he will give all of you into our hands.”

Kirk talked about death frivolously during his life. He talked about victims of what has been widely recognized as a Genocide like they were the cruel Philistines; like he was meant to help usher in the prophecies of Revalations with his own word and prints and rallies. One of his last posts online was a call to “politicize” the murder of Iryna Zarutska, weeks after it went under the radar as a tragic local news story. Somewhere in his mind, he knew what that would become. He understood the potential for violence… Big faith does not always mean Good faith. 

Despite all of this, I don’t think Kirk deserved to die. Nowhere near it. If basic morals or logical thinking still come easy, I don’t think anyone should think this was a righteous death. Kirk’s murder was an impediment on free speech, no matter how you want to flip it. It falls right in line behind the censorship and twisted media narrative that was disseminated about the college encampment protests for Palestine. It is another incident that will erode the fabric of free dialogue in the U.S., which has already been stretched to transparency.  

I understand that some will say the indirect material effect that Kirk’s word on certain communities was violence in of itself, and I concede that he did almost nothing to push forward open dialogue in the United States, no matter how good of an orator or organizer he was. But, I think we have become so attuned to political violence in the United States with no semblance of a movement behind it that people have somehow convinced themselves this was a good thing. In my professional opinion, all it did was extend our cruel and unusual political time by about another decade, and by that time, all the children who saw that violence unfold on their phone screens will be conspiratorial, fearful and AI-trained adults that may start this strange cycle all over again. 

David ran and stood over him. He took hold of the Philistine’s sword and drew it from the sheath. After he killed him, he cut off his head with the sword.

Kirk was a conservative political mastermind, and his loss will reverberate around that space for a long time to come. Many will succumb to extremist ideology, and others will try and fill the space with someone much more fiendish. For those saying this was a justifiable act, aside from disliking how a majority of Christian fundamentalist hypocrites see the world, what needle has this killing moved? I’d argue, with the orders concerning abortion and immigration profiling passed in the wake of the killing, and the potential for a Charlie Kirk Act that makes it so Peter Thiel can scroll through our Twitter likes, that it didn’t achieve much. 

It’s likely that Kirk didn’t have much time to consider where his words had led him, so no point was proven. All that could be concluded once the shot rang out was that Charlie Kirk indeed was a human being… Not many who saw the video will see it differently. I don’t doubt that some antisocial fool out there is planning the next big new cycle, parsing words from some other talking head and getting heated as all hell in a room below sea level. Others are just praying that we stay southbound. 

I’d recommend everyone remain composed and balanced. The log has begun to spin again, and with much more fervor and savagery than ever before.