Charlie Kirk and America’s Crisis of Meaning

The American Spectator ^ | October 3, 2025, 11:14 PM | Richard Shinder

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Last weekend’s memorial may show the way home.

There is a through line that connects several recent news headlines: the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Luigi Mangione murder trial, and Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy. It is the crisis of meaning in modern American life.

Mamdani — an avowed Democratic Socialist — cruising to a surprise victory in the New York City Democratic primary (and maintaining a durable polling lead for the general election since) spotlights the decline of secular materialism. New York, once thought to be ungovernable, became a playground for the rich and increasingly livable for the middle and working classes during 20 years of the competent Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg mayoralties. Two listless terms of Bill DeBlasio, to be followed shortly by Mamdani’s impending victory, give the lie to the belief that all voters want is a safe, prosperous and well-run city. What today’s NYC voters now seem to demand is collectivism, and (to borrow H. L. Mencken), they are about to get it good and hard.

The Mamdani phenomenon highlights that as religious observance has receded from civic life, young people have increasingly sought meaning in one of two unsatisfying ways: the consumerism produced by a free-market economy, or the pursuit of trendy causes with which to identify. The latter include “social justice,” radical environmentalism (qua Greta Thunberg), health care as a human right (see Mangione), and transgenderism, among others.

The first, experienced directly by the young via tech- and social-media enabled consumption of “content” and the related celebration of extravagance (perhaps best symbolized by a 2023 Morning Consult poll finding that 57 percent of Gen Z desire a career as influencers), may be losing steam. Mental health trends among younger Americans have deteriorated significantly over the last decade, with increases in sadness, hopelessness, anxiety, and...

[ProgressingAmerica]

Our history has been viciously and aggressively stolen from us by malicious government schools. The crisis is existential. If we don’t know who we were previously we can’t possibly know who to be in the future.

You can easily zero in on that crisis by just imply asking Americans to (1)name five founding fathers. Most can struggle through that by simply naming presidents and what they saw on the money.(USD)

(2)Name two founding fathers who weren’t presidents or on currency.

Even here on Free Republic the crisis is present since most of us went to government schools over the generations. Those educated two or three generations back would fare better if you asked them to (3)name ten founding fathers, but it would be a hard hill to climb for any product of a government school in any generation to (4) name ten founding fathers who were not presidents.

And that’s just trying to get “easy” information. It’s just names.

Try asking people to name five of the 27 grievances in the declaration of independence! Many didn’t even know there were 27. Some will see this and realize they didn’t know there were “grievances” at all, thinking that a “grievance” is just a modernity lodged by the race industry by hustlers such as Al Sharpton.

It is the greatest conflict of interest for government to have control over education at any level, because then government gets to pick its own future leaders simply by dictating what can or cannot be known.

[Jim W N]

The Left and gov’t HATE freedom because a free people don’t need nor want the chains of unlimited gov’t which the Left loves, around their necks.

And that is why the Left and gov’t HATE and BANNED from Gov’t schools, the Bible, the Declaration of Independence (DOI), and the Constitution because the Bible explains how to be spiritually and individually free, the DOI explains the individual’s God-given rights to be free from unjust and unlimited gov’t, and the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the Land, SECURES those rights (political freedom).