The Silencing of Charlie Kirk Compels Millions to Roar
Perhaps his greatest virtue was his courage -- something we all must summon
Charlie Kirk confronted the ignorant, the wrong-headed, and the evil with words and political deeds.
Evil responded by striking him down with a bullet.
A family lost a husband, father, and son.
A nation lost a patriot, activist, and teacher who achieved more at 31 than nearly anyone will achieve in a lifetime – while making an indelible impact on our body politic, the lives of multiple generations of countrymen, and the American mind.
While my interactions with Charlie were largely limited to the handful of occasions when he was kind enough to invite me on his show, as myriad others have recounted in recent days, he was always gracious, thoughtful, and complimentary.
If you are like me, Charlie’s assassination has shaken you to your very core. One need not have ever interacted with him, worked in politics or media, or be a young parent for this tragedy to have hit close to home. Maybe it is in part because Charlie’s story, of a hard-working autodidact who built something from the ground up in pursuit of the most noble kinds of goals was quintessentially American – it just resonates.
Now, with his life having been taken, there is a sense that something has broken.
As destructive as the left’s efforts were to indoctrinate, engage in mass censorship, and weaponize our institutions against us, it has crossed a rubicon in resorting to murder.
Charlie himself had warned of this. Political violence has been a historic hallmark of leftism – including in the U.S., as illustrated from the countless bombings of the 1970s to the BLM riots. And of course, we have seen the attempted assassinations of Republican members of Congress, a Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice, and a Republican president.
Yet it is one thing to know a tragedy is possible and perhaps even likely, and still another to witness it.
President Trump survived only by a miracle, and that miracle galvanized a political force that Charlie helped foster, organize, and mobilize to storm back into the White House.
For Charlie, crushingly, there was no miracle, and now it feels as if things will never be the same.
That a sizable number of our fellow citizens have ghoulishly rationalized, or worst condoned his murder only makes the situation more gut-wrenching and demoralizing.
How are we to respond in the wake of this tragedy, and as the mask slips off for the leftists whose brains and moral compasses have been broken?
Today, we mourn, we grieve, and we lament.
But tomorrow, we ought to look to Charlie for how to act.
He died as he lived, fighting, fundamentally, for civilization against barbarism.
He paid the ultimate price because he was winning that fight – because civilization’s enemies determined they could not compete in the realm of argument and persuasion and instead had to impose their will by silencing through force.
The silencing of Charlie Kirk should compel millions to roar.
We must pick up the mantle and redouble our efforts in the fight in which he engaged.
We must confront evil head on, never to cower.
For all of Charlie’s talents, be they as a communicator, an organizer, or as a thinker, perhaps the most important trait he possessed, and modeled, was courage.
Courage is the most critical virtue of them all for the man in the arena.
And whether we like it or not, all of us who love this country and wish to see it protected, preserved, and flourishing are in the arena.
It is incumbent upon us all to summon our courage, and use what skills we have, wherever we may bring them to bear, to save our republic – whether through speaking, writing, debating, teaching, organizing, serving, or in whatever other capacity we may contribute to the war of ideas and our politics.
Only through reclaiming our culture, ultimately, as Charlie was effectively attempting to do in debating all comers at schools across the country, will we have any chance at reshaping, or, as needed, razing and rebuilding our institutions, and making conservatism durable.
While that effort is generational, in the immediate-term we must demand of our representatives that they use any and all lawful authorities at their disposal to disrupt and dismantle the networks of left-wing violence.
This requires probing the individuals and organizations involved in the funding, training, coordinating, propagandizing on behalf of, and otherwise fomenting and fueling those plotting, planning, and engaging in such violence – exposing them, stripping them of any public funding or privileges they may enjoy, and where merited prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law.
Freedom and civilization are the great exception.
Tyranny and barbarism – rule by the king or the mob at the point of a gun – is the norm.
Charlie died in defense of the former.
To ensure his death was not in vain, we must follow his lead, defend, and restore our republic.