WASHINGTON (RNS) — As he sat behind a microphone for nearly two hours in the White House complex on Monday (Sept. 15), Vice President JD Vance’s face hung with visible emotion. As the guest host of Charlie Kirk’s podcast, he talked with a series of White House officials as they told stories about Kirk, the right-wing activist who was killed by an assassin’s bullet last week while speaking at a college in Utah.
But as the vice president began to draw the episode to a close, the tone shifted from mournful reflection to righteous indignation. Vance recited a version of the Apostle’s Creed, saying it was the “most important truth” Kirk uttered during his career. Vance then spent several minutes railing against the “far left,” suggesting it was a source of political violence, even as the motive for Kirk’s shooting remains unknown. The vice president encouraged listeners, who numbered at least in the hundreds of thousands over the course of the broadcast, to complain to the employers of anyone they saw “celebrating Charlie’s murder.”
As he concluded, Vance turned to a passage from Scripture about spiritual warfare. “St. Paul tells us in the Book of Ephesians to p …
