Who Was Afraid of Charlie Kirk Becoming President?

The 31-year-old was likely becoming too powerful for entrenched interests who feared he would eventually land in the White House.

There’s a terrifying and poignant scene in the Godfather Part II when Vito Corleone’s mother takes him (when he is nine years old) to see Don Ciccio, who has just killed her husband because he refused to comply with the Don’s mafia rule of the district. Vito’s mother begs Don Ciccio to spare her son, pointing out that he’s just a boy and not a very bright one at that. Don Ciccio replies that he’s not afraid of the boy, but of the man he will soon become—a man who will certainly seek to avenge the death of his father.

It’s a very poetic scene that seems to allude to the tyranny of Pharaoh and Herod the Great wishing to eliminate threats to their power before they mature. The Roman historical Suetonius mentions that the Emperor Tiberius once allegedly described the young Caligula as “rearing a snake for the Roman people,” suggesting it would have been better to have eliminated Caligula before he become Emperor. In a 1949 speech before Parliament, Winston Churchill lamented that the British had failed “to strangle Bolshevism at its birth.”

For the monstrously corrupt U.S. government, there is probably nothing more terrifying than the prospect of an extremely strong, intelligent, and honest young man eventually become president—a young man resolved to obey the dictates of his conscience instead of the demands of the powerful.

When John F. Kennedy fired Allen Dulles and refused to take the advice of Air Force General Curtis LeMay—who advocated immediate military action against the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis—he signaled to the corrupt old men in Washington that he wasn’t going to do their bidding. I suspect that this significantly reduced his life expectancy.

And while Kennedy had a weakness for women that FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, could have probably used against him if push came to shove, Charlie Kirk was apparently free of personal vices that could have been used to blackmail him. It’s important to remember that in our corrupt system, having some skeletons in the closet is a prerequisite for holding high office. The squeaky clean need not apply.