Havdalah #56: AMOR, Antifa, and Some Thoughts on Charlie Kirk (we're sorry)

Hey y’all,

After the last few weeks, I have been sore for some good news and, boy, did the global church deliver. Between the Pope directly addressing income inequality, immigration and climate change, and the announcement of the first female Archbishop of Canterbury (God be with you, Dame Mullally), I feel like we might be seeing a wave of Progressivism in the church. I pray this continues and this wave crashes onto American shores soon, Deo volente.

This month’s Sidebar is from Katherine addressing Charlie Kirk and we have a new Mutual Aid from the AMOR Community Fund for ICE Detainees.

There are some fun events in the area this week so take a minute out of your busy spooky-season schedule to check them out.

So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, adieu…

Jackie (she / her)

PS: We’d like to hear from you! Let us know how we’re doing!

Workers and Renters: Providence General Assembly

• When: Saturday, October 4, 12:00pm and every other Saturday

• Where: 134 Mathewson Street, Providence, RI 02903

• From their Instagram:

  • Worried about Trump?

  • Want to defend our communities?

  • Want a world that works for everyone?

  • Come to the Providence General Assembly!

• Spanish, ASL interpretation and childcare available upon email request

• Masking requested and masks will be provided

• Direct questions to [email protected]

• Providence General Assembly

• Workers and Renters Website

Banned Books Week Event: 1984 and How We Protect Our Freedoms

• When: Monday, October 6, 2025, 6:00pm-7:15pm

• Where: Cranston Central Public Library, James T. Giles Community Room, 140 Sockanosset Cross Road, Cranston, RI 02920

• Join the ACLU for a discussion of 1984 and a short presentation about how the themes connect to present-day threats to our rights.

• In collaboration with the Rhode Island Library Association.

• Event is free but spots are limited; registration is required.

• This event is not endorsed by or affiliated with the Cranston Public Library.

• You'll leave with a packet of resources, Know Your Rights materials, and some tools to take action.

• You don't have to read the book to attend as short excerpts will be read out loud during the event. Nonetheless, you are encouraged to get a copy from your local library or bookstore, listen to an audiobook recording, or watch a film adaptation to celebrate Banned Books Week!

• RSVP Link for Banned Books Week Event

The Art of Autonomy: An Exhibition Exploring Community and Art Activism

• When: September 13 - October 11

• Where: TWP Annex Gallery: Ritual Spaces, 719 Westminster Street, Providence, RI 02903

• Through a combination of two community collaboration projects, The Womxn Project Education Fund is being hosted at Ritual Spaces to explore bodily freedom and one's own interaction with art, civic participation and democracy that intersect with our organizational focus — past, present, and future.

• Schedule of events:

  • 10/10, 4:00pm-7:00pm: Closing Reception Party and Talk. Explore and add to the final outcomes of the Community Mural Project and Oral History Report with a small speaking program about the oral history project by TWP co-founder, Jordan Banick at 6:00pm

• The Art of Autonomy Information

Tomaquag Museum: Indigenous Peoples Day

• When: Saturday, October 11, 2025, 10:00am-5:00pm

• Where: Waterfront Park, 36 Merrimack Street, Newburyport, MA, 01950

• This will be a free, family-friendly, outdoor gathering to celebrate contemporary indigenous cultural arts and diversity and to honor our region’s Indigenous Nations and all Native peoples. It will also be in support of recognition of Indigenous Peoples Day at the city, state, and national level.

• This year’s event will highlight Indigenous maritime arts, including the creation, launch, and paddle on the Merrimack River of a traditional hand crafted mushsh8n (mishoon dugout canoe) made by Darius Coombs and Jonathan James Perry.

• Indigenous Peoples Day Celebration Page

ACLU Rights Explainers

• When: Up now

• Where: Online

• The ACLU just released two updated versions of their explainers about your rights when interacting with immigration agents (ICE) or the police. They have them available in 10 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Cape Verdean, Haitian Creole, French, Swahili, Dari, Pashto, and Khmer.

• Read and save this material – regardless of your own immigration status – and send to friends and family! Click the link below and scroll to the bottom of the page to download PDFs that you can print, plus the ACLU posted on all their social media platforms (@riaclu) if you want to save and share online.

• If you have a specific way to distribute larger numbers of the paper copies, please email the RI ACLU at [email protected] or call them at 401-831-7171. They have a limited supply printed, but will provide as many as they are able.

• ACLU Rights Explainers

AMOR Community Fund for ICE Detainees

The Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance (AMOR) is a grassroots, community-led organization in Rhode Island working to counter state-sponsored and interpersonal violence against marginalized folks.

The AMOR Community Fund for ICE Detainees is looking to support all people experiencing detention in RI, especially those detained by ICE at the Wyatt Detention Center.

Here are some examples of what your donation to the AMOR Community Fund for ICE Detainees can do!

$10 — A ten minute phone call from detention
$25 — The first meal after release from detention
$45 — Clothes after release from detention
$100 — Grocery shopping after release
$300 — Flight back to home state after release
$450 — Filing Fees with USCIS
$500 — Consultation with a lawyer
$1,500 to $7,000 to post bond for an individual and see them released from detention

One element of AMOR's work is support for immigrants in our communities, particularly in the legal realm. As the federal government continues to enforce immigration policies that attack immigrant families, AMOR has fiercely resisted these unjust policies, including connecting clients with legal services, organizing rallies and fundraisers in support of individuals with whom we work, putting on know-your-rights training, accompanying individuals to court dates and ICE check-ins, and more. 

However, there are still countless immigrant Rhode Islanders who are seeking assistance, and AMOR hopes to be able to continue to support them tirelessly in the year to come. Please contribute anything you can to their community fund — all money donated will go directly to supporting our community, specifically to pay for legal expenses and bond.

Any donation is much appreciated!

You can find them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as: 

@amornetwork

or at https://amorri.org/

Donation Link for AMOR Community Fund

News Round-Up: Local

Attorney General Neronha co-leads coalition in filing emergency lawsuit to protect critical homeland security funding (Press Release from Attorney General Peter Neronha in SteveAhlquist.news, September 30, 2025)

R.I. neo-Nazi member pleads no contest to child porn charge, must register as sex offender (Amanda Milkovits in Boston Globe, October 1, 2025)

Ethics Commission adopts needed reform and closes the “lobbyist loophole” (Steve Ahlquist in SteveAhlquist.news, October 1, 2025)

Pod Recs: It Could Happen Here and Throughline

Everyone Hates Them: Trump, the Media and Jimmy Kimmel (It Could Happen Here, September 30, 2025)

What Does the Antifa Executive Order Mean for Free Speech? (It Could Happen Here, October 2, 2025)

From the Frontlines (Throughline, October 2, 2025)

Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #36 (It Could Happen Here, October 3, 2025)

I’m sure the last thing you want to read today is yet another hot take on the Charlie Kirk assassination, or worse yet, a weird mealy mouthed eulogy for the man (looking at you, NYT). I’m not even sure I would want to read this, if I didn’t have to edit it. But I do feel like I want to write it, if only to get it out of my mind.

Charlie Kirk made the world worse. That’s the least that most of us hope for, that we left the world better than we came into it, and he failed at it; the world was a worse place because he was in it.

I think we are all too used to the sentiment “don’t speak ill of the dead”. It is, I think, an injunction not to slander someone when they are no longer around to defend themselves. But it’s not slander if it’s true. And certainly there is no obligation to pretend someone was better than they were.

Every time I hear yet another moderately liberal commentator talk about how “at least Charlie Kirk stood up for what he believed in,” or “can’t agree with him, but have to admire the strength of his beliefs,” paired with the most mild criticism of his views before moving onto a condemnation of political violence it just makes me more and more disgusted. You can say that murder is bad and Charlie Kirk was a racist, fear-mongering bigot; gun deaths are terrible and Charlie Kirk said gun deaths were worth it for the 2nd Amendment; political violence is dangerous and Charlie Kirk created an environment by his own actions that made political violence more likely. He was a terrible person who made the world worse by his presence and murder is horrible. It’s not hard!

(Unless, of course, your platform has to answer to the FCC…)

As a rule, I don’t pray for people’s deaths. This isn’t anything I proscribe for anyone else; your relationship with God, or the divine, or the universe is your own. But for myself, praying for the death of someone is not a mindset or an action I want to indulge in. I can feel the hatred lurking underneath it and it’s not an emotion I should let have root in me: it would have, I fear, too fertile a soil.

What I do pray for, though, is for people to stop. The best version of this would be, of course, if the people in question not only stopped the harm they were causing but understood and repented of it, and then worked to undo it. How much better than a dead Charlie Kirk would be one who actively repudiated the work he had done; one that turned against the organization he had founded and dismantled it?

That is, of course, the least likely option.

People can also stop without any repentance or restitution; their priorities change, they have health issues, they’re arrested, they lose their money or their platform or their liberty. Not the best possible outcome, as the harm they’ve done lingers in the world, unaddressed, but at least they put no more into it.

And finally, they can stop because they’re dead. Dead of a heart attack; dead of covid; dead of choking on a pretzel; dead of a bullet. Better to die of natural causes; the more undignified and ironic the better, because a bullet makes a martyr.

A martyr is dangerous; they can be more effective in death than in life; the harm they cause in death, used as propaganda by others, may very well be worse than the harm they were causing of their own volition in life. Better they have gotten a terrible flu; have turned away from public life; have repented and atoned for the evil they’ve done. And more than that, political violence corrodes public life; each death makes the next more likely because it is that much more thinkable; that much more normal.

But sometimes that doesn’t happen; sometimes people who do terrible things are shot in front of thousands, on camera, by a politically confusing killer. The damage Charlie Kirk caused will live on after his death, both the institutions and movements he set into motion, and his glorification as an example and a martyr will be used to advance the causes he believed in. The world is the worse for having him in it, and it will continue to be made worse by him having lived in it, even after he is gone.

The Catholic church teaches that while we can be sure that Heaven is full of saints, we can’t say anyone is in Hell. And C. S. Lewis posits a view on Hell that I find deeply compelling: that Hell is only Hell until you choose to leave, at which point you realize that it was only ever Purgatory.

And so I hope that Purgatory teaches Charlie Kirk what a lifetime on earth failed to: the harm he caused; the people he hurt; the evil he did. And I hope the ripples of his life die to nothing; that his name is not spoken; that the work of his life lies unfinished and is never taken up by another; that his legacy is nothing and no one.

Needle Drop: “Abraham, Martin, and John”, Dion