Steve Deace: 3 things America MUST do after Charlie Kirk’s assassination

Just a couple of months ago, Steve Deace spoke at an event at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, where Charlie Kirk regularly worshipped and collaborated on initiatives. Right before he walked on stage, Charlie leaned down and whispered a word of encouragement in his ear.

“Go hard,” he said.

Today, as we continue to wrestle with the loss of Charlie, we all need to take that advice to heart. It’s time to go hard.

But what does that look like? How do we “go hard” in a way that hits at the root of this violence and culminates in positive change?

At a recent event for Conservative Partnership Institute, Steve answered that question with three bold initiatives that we all bear the responsibility of ensuring come to fruition.

1. Punish evil

Steve beseeches all of us, but especially elected officials, to treat evil as such. Enough with leniency and delay. Either we punish evil, or we welcome it through the front door.

“The scriptures say the only reason God permits government on this Earth is to be an avenging angel, a sword of righteousness against evil,” Steve says.

“The people in this room who hold elected office and the ones who [do] not, you must punish evil. ... You must!” he urges.

Failure to do so will have one outcome, he warns: “more evil.”

To the dissenters who argue that to meet evil with fitting consequences will backfire because Democrats will only return the favor, Steve has a sobering message: “They’ve already done it all! They’re all going to do it all over again. 2005 called, and it wants its talking points back. That’s not where we are right now. My friend’s body is cold to testify to that truth.”

But it’s not just Charlie’s tragic death that demands justice. There are many atrocities in this country that have yet to be addressed, Steve says. Whether it’s the deliberate invasion of illegal immigrants perpetrated by the Biden regime or the fact that the American people were lied to about Joe Biden’s mental acuity while a cabal of shadowy Democrats ran the country in his stead, justice has yet to be served on a number of iniquities.

“Who’s gone to prison for this? Who’s been referred to prosecution? Who’s been arrested?” Steve asks.

“We have to punish evil. If we don’t punish evil, there will be more evil. I promise you,” he reiterates.

2. Stop the contagion of political sadism

“We have a social contagion, and I’m not talking about trannyism. ... This is actually worse. I will call it political sadism,” Steve says.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s near assassination and Charlie Kirk’s murder, the radical leftists have shown their true colors. Their brazen celebration of the attacks on people they consider their political enemies reveals just how sick and twisted they’ve become. They are reveling in “the physical suffering and debasement of people,” Steve laments.

It’s not even taboo anymore. “Now teachers, nurses, public officials, financial advisers just post this stuff under their names, and they’re proud to do it,” he says.

“It’s like a macabre carnival of ghouls fetishizing, turning the death of, I think, our best general into a kink that they cannot wait to satiate and rub in your faces and share with others.”

So what do we do? We employ one of the left’s favorite weapons: “cancel culture.”

“We have to publicly shame this out of existence. That’s the only antidote,” Steve says.

“I kind of like cancel culture when my side’s doing the canceling,” he admits.

“We have to [employ cancel culture] in return because they’re already doing all those things to us right now. This stuff has to be shunned. There should be a graveyard of lost jobs, lost careers. The social stigma to this should be overwhelming.”

3. Redden the red states

“Our red states have to be every bit as red as the blue states are blue,” Steve says.

He explains that blue states never eased up on their progressivism after Donald Trump became the president. If anything, they doubled down because “they have complete and total control of the governing infrastructure ... [and] the policy-making” in their states.

So why aren’t red states doing the same?

“It needs to be inconceivable that they could propose these [liberal] policies in the places where we have total control,” Steve says, urging states like Wyoming and Idaho to become the right’s California and Massachusetts.

The attitude we need to have toward progressive voters moving into red states is this, he says: “You’re not going to move here because Google gave you a job and come here and vote communism and cultural Marxism into my state. ... There’s more to life than a balance sheet, and part of that calculus needs to be the moral one.”

We need to adopt the bold stance Ronald Reagan took when he declared an arms race against the Soviet Union: “Do not launch on us, [or] we will launch on you.”

“We have to immediately establish that mutually assured destruction deterrent. We have to. If we don’t, I’m telling you right now, we’re going to bury more Charlies,” Steve says. “Well, we won’t bury any more Charlie Kirks because there’s nobody like him. The void he has left is immeasurable. But we’re going to bury more of us because they’re unbowed.”

The debate is no longer Republican versus Democrat or even conservative versus liberal. The debate is now: “Do I still get to be an American or not?”

How we respond to the death of Charlie Kirk will determine the answer to that question, Steve says.

“Don’t sentence your children and grandchildren to have to settle these disputes in unpeaceable means because we weren’t aggressive enough to defend them with the peaceable means we still have,” he pleads.

This is the fight Charlie was fighting until his last breath. That’s “why I am confident the next words he heard after that bullet ripped through his neck were, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant,’” he says.

We should all live our lives so that we, too, can hear these words when our time comes.

So “go hard,” Steve says.

Our future depends on it.

To hear his full speech, watch the video above.

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