Charlie Kirk is dead. The world is a much poorer place without him, but the conservative movement he founded will go on, stronger than ever.
I am not blaming anyone for his assassination because we don’t know who shot him or why. Duh. The obvious answer is a left-winger, but I’ll hold off on what’s “obvious” until the facts are in. This caution is born out of 20 years of being wrong in these situations often enough that I got sick of being embarrassed about it.
I was always half-amused at the jumping to conclusions by both sides when a high-profile death occurs in a political context. How many times has one side or the other been forced into desperate internet and social media searches, looking for “proof” that the deranged attacker wasn’t really a person of the left or right?
The internet’s gotta do what the internet’s gotta do.
One of the first things I did after Kirk’s death was confirmed was to peruse the usual suspects of left-wing news sites, looking for and finding the celebratory outpouring of joy at their nemesis’s death.
Low hanging fruit, to be sure, but high-profile sites (“serious news” sites) were circumspect, if not completely sympathetic. Their entirely predictable calls for “gun control” notwithstanding, most left-wing commentators realize that the assassination of Charlie Kirk has the potential to be a spark that could set off a wave of tit-for-tat violence and potentially catastrophic civil unrest.
That’s because (shocker!) there are brain-dead radicals on the right who catastrophize everything and make any untoward political event an invitation to wax hysterical about the left and call for “retaliation,” or “giving as good as we get.” I doubt very much whether Charlie Kirk would have approved of such rhetoric. Kirk was a gentleman who fought hard for what he believed. He was not above throwing sharp elbows when the fight demanded it. But, like Andrew Breitbart, he never lost sight of the fact that a difference of opinion was no reason to resort to violence.
Ezra Klein, founder of the left-wing site Vox and a former editor at The Washington Post and Wonkette, is now a New York Times contributor. He penned a beautiful essay about Kirk.
You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election.
Charlie Kirk didn’t persuade people through threats and intimidation. He did it with brilliant, soft-spoken logic and relentless, unflinching syllogistic argument. This is what attracted college students and the young. He never, ever talked down to them or, like most of their left-wing professors, sought to indoctrinate them and force-feed dogma.
Kirk opened a new world to them, and many embraced it. His success was predicated on a simple and uniquely American formula: talk to everyone and, more importantly, listen to what they had to say. The result is a dialogue, a means of communicating that we’ve lost over the last few decades. In trying to revive it, Kirk became the most successful “influencer” of modern times.
There was no room in Kirk’s America for violence against people you disagreed with.
American politics has sides. There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project — we are all, or most of us anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment. We can live with losing an election because we believe in the promise of the next election; we can live with losing an argument because we believe that there will be another argument. Political violence imperils that.
Kirk and I were on different sides of most political arguments. We were on the same side on the continued possibility of American politics. It is supposed to be an argument, not a war; it is supposed to be won with words, not ended through bullets. I wanted Kirk to be safe for his sake, but I also wanted him to be safe for mine, and for the sake of our larger shared project. The same is true for Shapiro, for Hoffman, for Hortman, for Thompson, for Trump, for Pelosi, for Whitmer. We are all safe, or none of us are.
America’s first attempt at manned spaceflight was NASA’s Mercury Program. A lone test pilot squeezed into a capsule sitting atop the Redstone rocket (a converted nuclear-armed ICBM). The Redstone was 1/5 the size of Elon Musk’s Starship booster pocket.
In his book, The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe spoke of these Mercury astronauts as “single combat warriors,” going into space to do battle with the Communist single combat warriors.
Single combat warriors, or “champions,” were ancient soldiers who did battle with the opposing side’s champion. Sometimes the entire battle was decided between the two champions. Sometimes, the champions fought as a prelude to the battle itself, where killing the opposing champion would demoralize the other side.
Charlie Kirk entered the battlefield as a conservative champion. He was never vanquished, never beaten. He was a modern-day single-combat warrior who fought fiercely for the principles he passionately believed in.
And the country he loved above almost all else.
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