Podcaster's Death Leads to Public Church Service

It's been a week since yet another alienated young white man decided to enact his grievances through the barrel of a gun. The victim has been sanctified in much of mainstream media despite his extensive archive or recorded speech.

the receipts

The Right has consolidated around the tragedy with aggressive praise of the victim, turning their collective mourning in a vicious and widespread national snitch campaign.

The well-oiled outrage machine built by the likes of LibsofTikTok, the Daily Wire, and a cohort of TPUSA-trained influencers set their sights on anyone not displaying adequate grief, mobilizing their radicalized followers to demand revenge, loss of jobs, prosecution and more.

Locally, the reactionary "parent" group best known for inciting death threats against public school teachers, harassment campaigns against LGBTQ+ people, and the 2023 Pride month riots at Glendale and Saticoy, emerged from weeks of silence with dozens of posts about the podcaster, eventually organizing a "prayer vigil" for Wednesday evening.

Posts about the rally featured comments from some of Glendale's finest neo-Nazis and their compatriots-- clearly making the GPV a little nervous! (Or maybe the neo-Nazi and Patriot Front led rally in Huntington Beach on Sunday made them worry about optics):

Although promoted as held in front of City Hall, the crowd of a couple hundred gathered in the more tucked away civic center courtyard. What followed was a mostly boring mix of church service/sing-along punctuated by moments of absurdity and menacing religious zealotry.

While expressions of religious speech are just as protected as the social media comments of thousands of persecuted teachers and professors should be, a few things stood out:

The first pastor (of many) to speak said: "Two years ago this entire nation was talking about this small community of Glendale, all because a small group of fearless parents noticed something was not right. They asked questions. They stood up... willing to do whatever it took to protect the children from this indoctrination that was taking place... we find that same dark spirit behind the indoctrination of kids at school behind the attempted silencing of [the podcaster]."

This is not indoctrination

Lisa on leftists.

Glendale Historic Preservation committee and Republican Party Central Committee member, Lisa Cusack said it's no longer her "worst fear" to see her children killed, but to raise a child like the person arrested for the podcaster's murder and added: "The really difficult truth we have to remember is we have to raise our kids as if they could die tomorrow." Yikes!

• An Armenian pastor reminisced without irony about his childhood under an authoritarian regime, one in which speaking of one's faith could lose to the loss of a job or prosecution-- imagine!

  
  

Legal Ministry

Advocates for Faith and Freedom (the "legal ministry" currently representing swastika-wielding former teacher Ray Shelton) attorney, Kelly Rickert with her husband Scott, said a prayer "for families." Well, some families.

• Podcaster "Def Noodles" announced he is running for Congress (???) and gave a history lesson about when Christians were persecuted by Romans nearly 2000 years ago.

  
  

• City councilman Vartan Gharpetian made an unscheduled appearance, saying the podcaster"died doing what he loved" (wtf?) and announced his support for a "Family Values Month" in the city.

Numerous speakers called on participants to don "the armor of god," "be bold in faith" and "pay attention to what is going on in schools" with the foreboding injunction: "Charlie's mission now belongs to each and every one of us."

Given the other recent posts by the organizers of the podcaster rally, this is an ominous message for our community.

While attendees will likely celebrate the "peaceful" gathering (and we're all glad things stayed relatively calm!) all the candle light and pained hymn-singing couldn't cover the sinister edge to the proceedings. In the moments of silence for a slain ideologue a student of history might do well to remember the sanctification of Horst Wessel first, then, do as Lisa Cusack suggested and look to the "problems right in front of us."

Here in Glendale, there's a long history...and all we can say is, know your history, kids.