Charlie Kirk Ain't The Only Big Name Born October 14

You say it's his birthday, well it's their birthday too yeah!

Canadians don’t celebrate a genocidal Italian madman on the second Monday of October each year like Americans do.

Historians are unsure where and when exactly Canadian Thanksgiving became a thing but the holiday held the same day grew organically out of gratitude for the fall harvest that allowed early settlers get through winters. It eventually became entwined with America’s origin story about the time the Wampanoag people made the mistake of breaking bread and teaching survival skills with the pale-faced immigrants who arrived uninvited aboard The Mayflower, but the earlier date for our own Turkey Day was specifically chosen in 1957 to not interfere with Remembrance Day (the Commonwealth version of Veterans Day) in November.

We also bought wholesale into Black Friday Week minus the hand-to-hand retail combat although it won’t be quite the same anymore now that nobody wants to buy America’s shit anymore. But we aren’t expected to mark the upcoming new National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk hereby decreed by the US Senate after the podcaster’s mysterious assassination in Utah last month, although it won’t be a surprise if flags are flown at half-mast outside the Alberta Legislature in CK’s honor on what would’ve been his 32nd birthday.

While the young man’s murder was a tragedy, he at least died doing what he loved, which was demonizing trans people and shrugging off gun violence in front of a crowd of impressionable college kids.

It seems fitting Saint Charlie was born the same day Nazi Germany reached their turning point and withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933, never mind the 2007 debut of Keeping Up With the Kardashians. But if you don’t want to spend Tuesday with Charlie and the wall-to-wall coverage of his sad legacy, here’s five other prominent Libras born the very same day whose life stories are worthy of remembering:

Joyce Bryant

Born in Oakland in 1922, Joyce Bryant was a performer and civil rights activist who was dubbed “the Black Marilyn Monroe” for her four-octave singing voice as much as for her sexy mermaid gowns and signature silver mane she made herself using radiator paint.

Bryant was the first Black headliner to perform at the Miami Hotel in 1952, where the local Ku Klux Klan welcomed her by burning her in effigy, as well as at the Casino Royal in Washington two years later. She went on to earn Beyoncé money with up to $3500 a gig but the devout Christian chose to take an extended hiatus from show biz after tiring of the racism and misogyny to dedicate her life to the the Seventh-day Adventist Church instead.

Hannah Arendt

Jewish political theorist and antifa OG Hannah Arendt was born in Germany in 1906 but moved to the US in 1941 for obvious reasons. The chain-smoking philosopher literally wrote the book on authoritarianism with works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and On Revolution, and a collection of her essays and letters can still be found online at the Library of Congress because Stephen Miller hasn’t gotten around to deleting them yet. Arendt is best known outside academia for coining the term “the banality of evil” through her coverage of the 1961 trial of the pathetic SS officer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem for the New Yorker.

Natalie Maines

Natalie Maines turns the big five-oh on Tuesday, and she and her bandmates are probably getting a bit long in the tooth to be calling themselves the Chicks after 33 years together. Although the top-selling female band of all time has already gone through one name change after the country music industry issued a fatwa against them in response to their lead singer saying she was ashamed of Dubya, a fellow Texan, for dragging the country into war with Iraq for no good reason in 2003. The trio soon found themselves facing a firehose of death and rape threats from proto-MAGA types but refused to back down, an experience documented in the film Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, whose title I recently stole for a headline about Sarah McLachlan standing up to Mickey Mouse.

Beth Daniel

Southern belle Beth Daniel is a retired pro golfer who rose to the top of their game without once being accused of cheating, unlike Charlie Kirk’s personal hero. Daniel won a total of 33 LGPA events — including one major championship and setting a record for the oldest winner in tour history at 46 — and was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. As was Daniel’s life partner and former rival Meg Mallon, who revealed that media keeping their relationship an open secret allowed their love to flourish at her own induction ceremony 17 years later.

George Floyd

George Floyd, a father of five, would’ve turned 52 if he hadn’t been publicly executed by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin five years ago; his death sparked a global outcry. It’s hard not to imagine the only reason Dear Leader hasn’t pardoned Chauvin yet is because he’s saving it for a double-whammy with one for his old pal Ghislaine Maxwell.

Ghislaine Maxwell Was A Child Sex Trafficker, Not A Victim!

It would only be a symbolic fuck you to decent society as the disgraced cop is serving 22 years on state murder charges that Trump can’t touch concurrently with 21 years on federal charges for depriving Floyd of his civil rights. But we shouldn’t be surprised if he’s given his very own special day on his birthday next March 19, which would have the added bonus for the redhats of being Adolf Eichmann’s too.

[Library of Congress / CTV / Wonkette Bluesky Starter Pack]