David Ignell: A Turning Point back to God for a nation that has been corrupted by Marxism

Reflections on Charlie Kirk’s memorial

This past weekend I traveled to Phoenix to attend Charlie Kirk’s memorial service.  It was a beautiful, phenomenal service.  It was truly another Turning Point for our nation following the election of President Donald Trump last fall.  

Charlie got his wish — the Holy Spirit came to a Trump rally.  

In a huge way.  Millions are turning to God.

On Sunday, 80% of State Farm Stadium’s parking lot was shut down for obvious security reasons.  President Trump, Vice President Vance, and most of the Cabinet of the United States was in attendance with just a few days for our nation’s security forces to prepare for their arrival. 

By 6 am, traffic around the stadium was gridlocked for the official 11am start of the Memorial.  Thousands of drivers scrambled to locate parking spots while avoiding the thousands of pedestrians gathered at crosswalks on the way to the Stadium.  

My companion and I reached the ever-growing, serpentine line by 7 am, but we weren’t there soon enough.  It turned out we should have arrived around midnight to get a good seat in the Stadium.  

Law enforcement started telling people in our area that we were unlikely to get into the stadium, so we joined a second line to get into the adjacent Desert Diamond Arena, former home of the Arizona Coyotes hockey team. There, we found great seats and sat next to a young couple who had flown in from Lexington, KY.

In some ways, I think sitting in the arena may have been a better experience. The stadium is cavernous while the arena is tight fitting, intimate, and more intense. The rows of seats are narrow, stacked nearly on top of each other. A giant, four-sided Jumbotron hanging from the rafters in the center of the arena gave everyone there an up-front and personal view of the speakers. It was a great place to feel the Holy Spirit at a Trump rally.

Preceding the official start was a four-hour worship service led by professional Christian musicians, all extremely talented. As they played and sang, thousands in the arena stood and lifted their hands, singing along and offering praise to God.   

Musician Brandon Lake spoke to the crowd and asked, “Can we acknowledge that the presence of God is in this place?”  The crowd in the arena erupted in confirmation as we watched and heard the crowd in the Stadium do the same.   

Most of the worship songs were new to me and I didn’t know the words. I remarked to my companion about missing the old church hymns. Sure enough, the musicians soon broke out with “It Is Well,” the hymn written in 1876 by Horatio Spafford after suffering devastating tragedy in his family.  Hearing this song, a fresh jolt of the Holy Spirit surged through my body as it is today, a day later, writing these words.   

The power of the Holy Spirit was at its crescendo when Charlie Kirk’s widow came to the podium to speak. On that oversized Jumbotron and on millions of TV screens throughout the world, we could see her lips trembling and praying to God for strength to hold her composure as she spoke to hundreds of millions of people around the world.  

Amid her tears, Erika’s God-inspired speech was one for the ages. She spoke about her husband and the spiritual revival breaking out around the world following his assassination. With her audience hanging on every word, this courageous, remarkable woman paused, gathered her strength, and then uttered perhaps the three most important words that have been spoken in nearly 2000 years – “I forgive him.”   

The man who Erika forgave is 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, charged with aggravated murder by Utah prosecutors who have announced they will seek the death penalty against him.

The jury that will decide Robinson’s fate will be asked to weigh aggravating and mitigating circumstances. I suspect one of the issues that will eventually come to the forefront is whether Robinson was manipulated or brainwashed. Robinson, along with millions of other American kids, are the products of manipulation by our government, our public education system, and their unions.

Some of the evidence publicly disclosed by Utah investigators suggests Robinson may have been influenced by woke ideology pertaining to gender identity. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox has said Robinson lived with a romantic partner who was undergoing a gender transition from male to female. A relative of this young man said he was grappling with substance abuse, video game addiction, and gender identity.   

One of the most important speeches at Charlie’s memorial was by Dr. Ben Carson whose 2024 book, “The Perilous Fight,” is a book I purchased about a year ago and highly recommend reading. Dr. Carson’s book is subtitled, “Overcoming Our Culture’s War on the American Family.”  An endorsement by Tucker Carlson on the back cover ends with “This book spells it out. Reading it is well worth your time.”  

In his speech, Dr. Carson was short and to the point saying:

“Our nation was founded on the kind of principles that allowed us to rise from nothing to the pinnacle of the world in record time.  That was no accident.  That was because of what we believed including our Judeo-Christian belief that our rights come from our Creator and not from government.”

After a few moments of hearty applause, Dr. Carson continued by talking about a book titled, “The Naked Communist,” first published in 1958 and written by an FBI agent, W. Cleon Skousen. Carson talked about how Skousen exposed the Marxist strategy to gain control of our country, “such things as gaining control of the education system and the teacher unions so they could infiltrate and indoctrinate our young people.”

Dr. Carson explained how “A radical leftist said give me your children to teach for four years, and the seed I sow will never be uprooted. That’s what’s going on.”  Dr. Carson continued for another two minutes. I encourage all readers to search out his speech on YouTube.  

In “The Naked Communist,” Skousen set out 45 objectives that the Marxists implemented to take control of America, from the inside.  Some of these were:

• #24:  Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
• #25:  Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio and TV.  
• #26:  Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy”
• #38:  Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand or treat.
• #39:  Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
• #40:  Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
• #41:  Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.  

America’s moral decay leading to Charlie Kirk’s assassination can be seen in these objectives. This morning, I listened to a podcast by Jordan Peterson in which he interviews Dr. Jared Ross from the Do No Harm organization. The title to the episode says it all, “14,000 minors, $120 Million: A Pediatric Medical Scandal.” 

The thoroughness of the Marxist saturation of our culture can be seen in some of the other objectives:

• #15:  Capture one or both of the political parties in the US.
• #16:  Use technical decisions by the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights. 
• #17:  Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks. 
• #20:  Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.  
• #21:  Gain control of key positions in radio, TV and motion pictures. 
• #27:  Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.” 
• #28:  Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”  
• #32:  Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture –education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

Skousen’s book reveals the Marxists for the conniving, yet absolutely brutal propogandists they’ve been for decades, as manifested in countries like Russia, Ukraine, China, and Korea.  In some places, they have let peace-loving socialists do the heavy lifting before they come in and massacre anyone who stands in their way, including the socialists. 

The Naked Communist is free online. I urge all readers to download it and start reading cover to cover. It was an eye opener for me. Central to the Marxist strategy is to destroy our faith in God. Skousen wrote how Karl Marx longed for “an age when men would have no religion, morals or competition in everyday existence.”

The Marxists have had over 60 years to implement these strategies, and we can see the resulting saturation engrained in American culture today.  These ideologies are what Charlie Kirk fought so hard against.  The product of these ideologies is what assassinated Charlie Kirk.

One of Charlie’s young friends spoke at the Memorial and quoted Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher who wrote, “the tyrant dies and his rule is over.  The martyr dies and his rule has just begun.”   

America, the shofar has sounded.  This is our Turning Point back to God.

David Ignell was born and raised in Juneau Alaska where he currently resides.  He formerly practiced law in California state and federal courts and was a volunteer analyst for the California Innocence Project. He is currently a forensic journalist and recently wrote a book on the Alaska Grand Jury.

John Quick: Charlie Kirk and the lost art of listening

Kevin McCabe: Charlie Kirk and JFK were from different eras, both called us to step into the arena

Analysis: Trump’s Antifa terror designation has more bark than legal bite, but may be a good strategic move