Frederick Haynes III, the pastor who secured the Democratic nomination to replace Rep. Jasmine Crockett in Congress, used his Sunday sermon to attack Charlie Kirk just days after the Turning Point USA founder was assassinated on Sept. 10, 2025. From the pulpit of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, Haynes called Kirk's positions "rooted in white supremacy" and told his congregation that Kirk was "murdered, not assassinated."
The man hadn't been dead a week.
According to the Daily Caller, Haynes drew a deliberate line between Kirk and civil rights icons, arguing that the conservative activist didn't deserve the same language reserved for their deaths. Speaking to his congregation, Haynes laid it out plainly:
"We ain't got nothing to do with what they just did. A white Christian gets killed, murdered, not assassinated."
He then rattled off a list of names he considered worthy of the word "assassinated."
"We're gonna tell the whole truth today. Martin King got assassinated. Malcolm X got assassinated. Medgar [Evers] got assassinated. Don't compare Kirk to King. Ain't no such comparison."
Haynes did offer a brief caveat, telling the congregation he was "anti-political violence" and that "Kirk should still be alive." But the qualifier barely landed before he continued:
"I don't agree with… anything Kirk said. What Kirk said was dangerous. What Kirk said was racist, rooted in white supremacy, nasty and hate-filled."
This is a man who will likely represent a congressional district. He stood in a church, days after a political killing, and spent his time not mourning the dead or calling for peace but litigating whether the victim deserved the right word for how he died. The perfunctory "I'm anti-political violence" line did not change the temperature of anything else he said. It was a disclaimer, not a conviction.
According to the charging document released by the Utah County district attorney, Kirk's alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, told his romantic partner that he "had enough of [Kirk's] hatred" and urged the partner to delete the messages. That sounds like a politically motivated killing by any reasonable definition. Haynes can play word games from the pulpit all he wants, but the facts in the public record tell a clear story.
A man targeted a prominent conservative figure because of his political views and killed him. Whether Haynes approves of the terminology is irrelevant. The act speaks for itself.
What's telling is the instinct. A conservative activist is murdered for his beliefs, and the immediate reflex from a Democratic congressional candidate is not solidarity, not even silence, but a sermon about why the victim doesn't rate the proper noun. This is where the rhetoric of dehumanization leads. Not to the pulling of the trigger, but to the shrug that follows.
Haynes won the Democratic primary for the seat Crockett will vacate in January 2027, after she decided to mount her ultimately unsuccessful campaign for the Senate. If Haynes is the replacement, the district isn't exactly trading up in the decorum department.
Crockett herself has a history of using inflammatory rhetoric directed at Republicans. She called Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas "Governor Hot Wheels," a reference to Abbott's use of a wheelchair after he was paralyzed following a back injury. She also falsely accused EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin of taking money from registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a debate on the floor of the House of Representatives in November on legislation to force the Trump administration to release files about Epstein.
Mocking a man's disability. Leveling false accusations under the protection of the House floor. And now her likely successor is workshopping which murder victims deserve dignified language based on their politics.
The pattern is consistent. The cruelty is the feature, dressed up as righteousness.
There's something particularly grim about using a church to deliver this kind of message. Haynes is the senior pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church. His congregation came for a sermon. What they got was a political speech that sorted the dead into categories of deserving and undeserving based on ideology.
Conservatives are routinely told they need to watch their language, lower the temperature, and consider how their words might inspire violence. The standard is applied with extraordinary selectivity. A conservative activist gets killed by a man who explicitly cited political hatred as his motive, and a Democratic congressional candidate takes the pulpit to explain why the victim's beliefs made him dangerous, racist, and nasty.
Not one word about the climate that produced the killer. Not one moment of reflection on whether years of labeling political opponents as white supremacists might contribute to the very violence Haynes claims to oppose. Just a carefully constructed distinction between which dead men earned the right word.
This is the person Democrats chose to send to Congress.