{"id":5128,"date":"2025-09-22T08:44:14","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T04:44:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=5128"},"modified":"2025-09-22T06:45:21","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T02:45:21","slug":"a-neutral-word-for-a-polarizing-figure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=5128","title":{"rendered":"A neutral word for a polarizing figure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two weeks ago I&#8217;d never heard of Charlie Kirk. Literally never. I had no idea who he was.<\/p>\n<p>In the days since his death my entire news feed is stories, not so much about Kirk, but about the various comments &#8220;people&#8221; have made regarding said death. In general the storyline goes something like this: person posts that A.) they&#8217;re happy that he died, or B.) somehow he had it coming. And then others either applaud this or the original poster receives backlash.<\/p>\n<p>This is what passes for &#8220;news&#8221; these days.<\/p>\n<p>See opening sentence for how I feel about Charlie Kirk. I at least know that he wasn&#8217;t a murderer or a war criminal or anything like that. Yeah, &#8220;people&#8221; were probably happy when Hitler died; this is a little different.<\/p>\n<p>Nobody deserves to be murdered. Come on, &#8220;people.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two weeks ago I&#8217;d never heard of Charlie Kirk. Literally never. I had no idea who he was. In the days since his death my entire news feed is stories, not so much about Kirk, but about the various comments &hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/?p=5128\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5128"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5135,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5128\/revisions\/5135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeoconnelljr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}