This was written a frew days after Kirk's assasination on the 10th September, 2025 when Candace Owens and co. had not distorted all meaning with their conspiracy nonsense.
There is something profoundly disturbing about the assassination of Charlie Kirk that goes beyond the tragedy of one man's death. Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025, while doing what had become the defining feature of his public life: engaging people in political debate. The FBI has described the killing as a murder and has emphasized that an attack on the First Amendment is an attack on the foundation of American democracy.
Whatever one's opinion of Charlie Kirk, nobody should be violently attacked, let alone killed, for exercising the right to express an opinion. If you dislike what someone says, defeat them with a better argument. Challenge their assumptions. Expose their contradictions. Debate them publicly. Vote against them. Write against them. Organize against them. But once political disagreement becomes a justification for violence, the argument has already been lost.
That is why I find the reaction of some people to Kirk's death almost as troubling as the killing itself. I have unfortunately seen people I know personally either celebrate the assassination or attempt to rationalize it. There is no moral sophistication in doing so. One does not have to admire Charlie Kirk, agree with his politics or even particularly like him to recognize that celebrating his murder is morally repugnant. The same standard must apply regardless of who the victim is or which side of the political spectrum he occupies.
And that principle cuts both ways. Advocating tit-for-tat violence against those who celebrated or justified Kirk's death is equally deplorable. If our response to political violence is to demand more political violence, we have learned precisely the wrong lesson. A civilized society cannot operate according to the logic that my side is entitled to violence because your side used it first. The answer to political extremism cannot be political vengeance.
Nor do I believe that every person who says something tasteless or offensive should automatically lose his or her livelihood. Free expression becomes meaningless if it protects only opinions we find agreeable. That does not mean there should be no consequences for speech. Institutions have legitimate standards, and people who use positions of authority to promote hatred to a captive audience—particularly schoolchildren—can reasonably be held accountable under the rules and mandate of the institution that employs them. But there is an important distinction between institutional accountability and the increasingly fashionable impulse to destroy anyone whose political opinion falls outside an approved ideological perimeter.
It is in that context that I think Charlie Kirk deserves to be remembered more honestly.
Kirk was not a saint. He had faults, said things I thought were wrong and occasionally expressed himself in ways I found unnecessarily provocative. But I believe he was, on balance, a good man with considerable strengths who was making an honest attempt to change the political and intellectual conversation on American campuses. He understood that something had gone badly wrong in the culture of debate at many universities, where wokeness, cancel culture and increasingly divisive forms of identity politics had narrowed the boundaries of acceptable opinion.
His response was not to retreat from those institutions but to walk directly into them. That was, in many respects, his greatest contribution.
Youth outreach was Kirk's bread and butter, and he possessed an unusual combination of energy, verbal fluency, confidence and optimism that made him exceptionally effective at connecting with young people. He understood something that many established politicians and commentators never quite grasped: young people don't necessarily need to be lectured; they want to be challenged. Kirk was willing to stand in front of a crowd of students, invite disagreement and argue his position in public.
That approach made him enemies on both the political left and the political right.
It is worth remembering that Kirk was not an ethnic identitarian. His conservatism was fundamentally political rather than racial, which helps explain why he was criticized not only by the far left but also by elements of the far right, including the so-called Groypers. Nick Fuentes, among others, was a persistent critic of Kirk. Given that history, I find some of the subsequent expressions of sympathy from that corner of the political world difficult to take at face value.
Kirk was also an unapologetic Christian. His faith was not merely a branding exercise; it was central to his worldview and public identity. At the same time, I never regarded him as a Christian nationalist in the sense in which that term is commonly used. His political vision was rooted in the American constitutional republic rather than in an attempt to establish a specifically religious state. That distinction is important in an era when political labels are routinely stretched beyond recognition.
Politically, I agreed with Kirk on many issues. His opposition to illegal immigration was broadly consistent with my own views. I agreed with his defense of open debate and meritocracy, and I thought he was often right to challenge some of the intellectual orthodoxies that had become embedded in contemporary institutions. His criticism of DEI initiatives, in particular, struck me as addressing a genuine problem: the substitution of identity categories for individual merit and the creation of institutional structures that sometimes seemed more interested in ideological conformity than genuine equality.
But agreement should not require pretending that Kirk was always right.
I disagreed strongly with his position on abortion. I do not believe that life begins at conception, and therefore I found his position on abortion too categorical. I also thought his position on gun rights could be too dismissive of measures such as background checks. Nevertheless, I respected the consistency with which he held his views. It is entirely possible to believe that someone is wrong while recognizing that he has arrived at his position honestly.
I was also skeptical of his decision to platform Tucker Carlson through Turning Point USA. I thought there were good reasons to regard that decision as a mistake. But Kirk also took pride in refusing to create a one-thought political bubble, and that principle should be applied consistently. If the objective is genuinely to encourage debate, then inviting controversial voices into the conversation cannot automatically be treated as an endorsement of everything those people believe.
Foreign policy was perhaps the area in which I found Kirk least compelling. He generally seemed to understand the realities of international affairs better than some of the more committed American isolationists who attempted to pull him in their direction, but I don't think foreign policy was ever his strongest area. Indeed, I suspect Kirk himself would have acknowledged that.
One issue on which I think the caricature of Kirk has been particularly unfair is Israel and the Jewish community. Kirk was a strong supporter of Israel and a vocal friend of the Jews. There are clips circulating in which he appears to say things that can be presented as evidence of hostility toward Israel or Jews, but many of these snippets are stripped of their surrounding context. In an era of social media politics, the shortest and most inflammatory interpretation almost always travels further than the complete argument.
That does not mean every statement Kirk made should be defended. It means that public figures deserve to be judged on what they actually said and believed rather than on selectively edited fragments designed to produce maximum outrage.
The same principle applies to accusations that Kirk was racist or homophobic. He was frequently described in those terms by political opponents, but I don't believe those labels accurately describe the man I observed. Like every public figure, Kirk could say things that offended people and could frame arguments in deliberately provocative ways. That is not the same thing as holding every hateful belief attributed to him.
Perhaps the best way I can describe Charlie Kirk politically is as a classical liberal who had been schooled in the Burkean conservative tradition. That may sound contradictory to people who have come to associate the term “liberal” exclusively with the contemporary American left, but historically it isn't. Classical liberalism places considerable emphasis on individual liberty, free expression, constitutional government and the ability of people to pursue their own lives without unnecessary interference. Burkean conservatism, meanwhile, emphasizes tradition, institutional continuity and skepticism toward grand attempts to remake society from the ground up.
Kirk occupied much of that territory. The problem is that the Overton window—the range of opinions regarded as politically acceptable—has shifted dramatically, particularly on university campuses. Positions that would have been regarded as conventional conservative arguments only a generation ago can now be characterized as extreme. Opposition to affirmative action, skepticism toward DEI bureaucracy, support for merit-based advancement, concern about illegal immigration or an insistence that controversial ideas should be debated rather than suppressed can suddenly place someone beyond the boundaries of what certain institutions consider acceptable.
Kirk understood that shift, and he deliberately challenged it. That does not make him infallible. It does not make every argument he made correct. It certainly does not make him a saint. But it does make the manner of his death especially tragic. A man whose life's work was largely about political argument was killed in the midst of exercising the very freedom that allowed that argument to exist.
That should concern everyone. The appropriate response to Charlie Kirk's assassination is therefore neither hagiography nor revenge. We should not pretend that he was perfect, nor should we demonize those who disagreed with him. We should reject the temptation to answer ideological violence with ideological violence of our own. And we should be especially wary of those who suggest that political opponents somehow deserve what happened to him.
They don't.Charlie Kirk's family has suffered an unimaginable loss, and I wish them strength and peace in the years ahead. I also hope that the people who believed in Kirk's mission will carry forward the part of his legacy that mattered most: the willingness to walk into hostile rooms, engage people with whom you disagree and argue rather than silence.
That is ultimately the legacy I would prefer to see survive him. Not vengeance. Not censorship. Not political tribalism. Argument.
Charlie Kirk spent much of his life insisting that ideas should be confronted rather than feared. In the aftermath of his assassination, that principle is more important than ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment