September 15, 1789, the United States “Department of Foreign Affairs,” established by law in July, was renamed the Department of State and assigned a variety of domestic duties. Thomas Jefferson was the the department’s first secretary.
September 15, 1789, the United States “Department of Foreign Affairs,” established by law in July, was renamed the Department of State and assigned a variety of domestic duties. Thomas Jefferson was the the department’s first secretary.
For several years now, Paul Jacob had applied his demand for government transparency to the UFO topic. While for decades there has been a big cultural divide on the subject, between the Sophisticated Scoffers (who think there is absolutely nothing to the UFO issue) and the UFO Nuts (who express a range of opinion, from the suspicion that “there’s something to this” to the belief that “the aliens are here and running the Bilderberg Group”), in the last few years a number of government officials, military leaders, whistleblowers and pencil pushers have affirmed that some Unidentified Flying (and Submersible) Objects are puzzling and disturbing and somehow real, no matter how odd. To protect themselves they’ve re-dubbed the issue as one of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP, previously “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”) and have set up official inquiries and congressional investigations.
Some disclosure is ongoing.
And the House Committee run by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R‑Fla.) has made some progress, even in this past week of tumultuous socio-political turmoil. Consider a recent installment of Clayton Morris’s Redacted show:
The new UFO telemetry video is interesting, if not exactly knock-down. Historian Richard Dolan covered the mid-week hearing live:
It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the publick to be the most anxious for its welfare.
Edmund Burke, Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769).
On September 14, 1741, George Frideric Handel completed his oratorio Messiah, one of the most widely beloved masterworks of western music.
On Thursday and Friday, Paul Jacob addressed two elements of the Charlie Kirk assassination. But much more has happened, especially since writing these two Common Sense commentaries.
First, Mr. Kirk’s wife, Erika, addressed the public:
Good evening. My name is Erika Kirk. Charlie Kirk is my husband. I first want to thank the local, state, and federal law enforcement who worked tirelessly to capture my husband’s assassin so that he can be brought to justice.
I want to thank the first responders who struggled heroically to save Charles’ life, and the police who acted bravely to make sure that there were no other victims on that terrible afternoon. I want to thank the officers who have protected our Turning Point USA family these past two days, and I want to thank the Turning Point USA board, the COO, Justin Streiff, and my husband’s chief of staff, the amazing Mikey McCoy, for all their work in these terrible days to be the stability for our family, and for the wider Turning Point USA family as well.
My heart is with every one of my husband’s employees who lost a friend and a mentor. I want to thank the staffers of his amazing Charlie Kirk show, who helped him broadcast from this studio, this chair. Every day, he loved it. He loved what he did.
I want to thank the millions of people who have shown their love for Charlie here in Phoenix, across America, and worldwide. I want to thank my husband’s dear friend, Vice President Vance, and his phenomenal wife, Usha, for their love and support. You guys honored my husband so well, bringing him home. You both are tremendous.
I want to thank President Trump and his incredible family for the same. Mr. President, my husband loved you, and he knew that you loved him too.
Transcript: “Mrs. Erika Kirk Delivers Public Address: ‘His Movement Will Go On,’” The Single Post (September 13, 2025).
One of the more prominent commenters on X, horror writer Stephen King, apologized and retracted his egregious comment on Kirk and his assassination: “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages,” tweeted Mr. King. Uh, OK.
The apparent assassin, a 22-year-old Utah native, has been the subject of much speculation and inquiry. “His father sells granite kitchen countertops, his mother is a healthcare provider for handicapped people — and they are members of the Mormon church, but inactive,” reports KTen News.
According to NPR News, “The arrest of Tyler Robinson sent shockwaves through the small community where his family lives. Washington, a city of around 30,000, sits next to St. George in Utah’s southwest corner. It’s a 3 ½-hour drive from the Utah Valley University campus” where the shooting occurred.
The 22-year-old is the suspect in the killing of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk during a Wednesday event at the campus in Orem. After a 33-hour manhunt, Robinson’s family helped turn him in the following day.
On Friday morning, after law enforcement released Robinson’s name, officers from the Washington City Police and Washington County Sheriff’s Office patrolled a quiet street, preventing onlookers from approaching the family’s two-story gray stucco home.
But it is hard to forget that many news sources’ tilted coverage against the victim. The Guardian’s coverage is typical: “Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy,’” runs the headline; the blurb is perhaps worse: “The far-right commentator didn’t pull his punches when discussing his bigoted views on current events.”
Call me old-fashioned, but I remember when we used to be okay with shooting Nazis.
Random post on X, immediately after the September 10th, 2025, assassination of Charlie Kirk; screen capture. Note that the last time it was “okay” to shoot Nazis was in World War II. And also note that Mr. Kirk was not a Nazi.
John Calvin returned to Geneva on September 13, 1541, after three years of exile. His subsequent work in church reform and theology became known as Calvinism, and profoundly influenced the course of European and (eventually) American culture, including several concepts of servitude and liberty.
On the same date in 1989, Desmond Tutu led South Africa’s largest march aganst Apartheid.
But to anyone who’s looked online at the cruel comments, jubilation, and sick jokes about the murder and about Mr. Kirk, the idea that Democrats are of one mind about the corrosiveness and injustice of killing ideological opponents just because you disagree with them falls to pieces. One popular thread included jokes of the sound the victim made after being shot in the neck, a lot of talk about Kirk’s gun control opposition (and the “irony” of him being shot), and the like — but when I went back to look, the posts had been taken down.
Thankfully (?), the UK’s Daily Mail collected some of the most egregious:
People have always been like this, I remind myself: partisan hatred and mockery are as old as politics. Yet, on the Internet folks too often don’t even hesitate to shout their darkest thoughts as if they were gems of wit and righteousness. This leads to . . . well, “Violence leads to more violence,” as respectable Democrats said.
Too many activists and “influencers” seem heedless of the consequences of ideological brinksmanship, of taking the nastiness in their minds and spewing it to the masses.
It’s horrific, but maybe we, as individuals in a culture at a perilous moment in history, should acknowledge what horrors always hide in the dark. Now made visible.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The honorary degree is a way of honoring a pompous ass. No honest person would accept a degree he hadn’t worked for. Honorary degrees are suitable only for realtors, chiropractors and presidents of the United States.
H.L. Mencken, as quoted by Alistair Cooke in a speech before the National Press Club, October 8, 1986.
On September 12, 1848, Switzerland — known by endonyms Schweizerische Eidgenoßenschaft (German), Confédération suisse (French), Confederazione Svizzera (Italian), Confederaziun svizra (Romansh), Confoederatio helvetica (Latin) — became a unified federal state with a constitution limiting central government powers and providing decentralized state (canton) power patterned on the U.S. Constitution.
In 1880 on this date, H. L. Mencken was born. One of his earliest books was a debate with a socialist, The Men versus The Man (1910); his greatest lasting contribution was probably The American Language (1919) and its supplements (1945, 1948). His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, such as Alistair Cooke’s Vintage Mencken (1955) and the author’s own Mencken Chrestomathy.