The assassination of Charlie Kirk represents an incalculable loss to his young family, to the conservative movement, and therefore to the United States. We mourn his death but we also feel deep anger in our breasts. If we did not represent the forces of constitutional order, it feels like it could be the opening salvo of a civil war. It provokes us to wonder what might have happened if the assassination of President Trump had succeeded during last year’s campaign.
We have no idea what evidence the shooter left behind, but it appears that Kirk’s assassination was something of a professional job. Whoever did it — and whoever may have backed him, if anyone — knew what he was doing. It was the opposite of “senseless violence.” He or they have accomplished the purpose of depriving the conservative movement of an irreplaceable asset.
I never met him, but I will call him “Charlie” here in the manner of his innumerable friends around the country. Everyone who knew him liked him. He had the gift of making himself likable — of being impossible to dislike. He disagreed without being disagreeable. That too is a gift.
Charlie was a Pied Piper of the conservative movement. He saw the opening to make the case for conservatism on campus. In doing so, he had an incomparable ability to win friends and influence people, especially among the young. He had a zest for his mission that showed in everything he did. His assassination leaves a gaping hole that will not be filled.
Charlie texted a friend the day before his murder at Utah Valley University: “I’m back on campus. Will be back in the trenches against the enemies of civilization!” That’s the spirit that was his spirit.
Charlie’s death reminds me of the death of Rush Limbaugh. Like Charlie, Rush left behind a hole in conservative advocacy that has not been filled. Charlie, however, was murdered at the age of 31. At the age of 31 Rush was working as the director of group sales and special events for the Kansas City Royals baseball team, a job he took after a series of failed attempts at being a radio disc jockey. He had not yet found his calling. Charlie was a precocious force of nature. He had a long life and great future ahead of him.
Charlie found his calling as a teenager. He sought to make the case for conservatism on campus and turn the campus into an organizational base of the conservative movement. It sounds outrageous. Indeed, it sounds impossible. If he hadn’t done so we might have said it was impossible.
We know that we have the better case to make against the left on the many questions of public policy that agitate students. We want only a forum in which to make our case. Charlie created the forum and made the case.
In May Charlie visited the United Kingdom to debate the students of Oxford and Cambridge. Charlie’s debate with 400 students and a professor can be viewed here on YouTube. The Washington Free Beacon has embedded a few good clips in its remembrance of Charlie.
At Oxford and Cambridge the forums were ready-made. He did not need to create it. Asked to reflect on the experience by the Spectator, Charlie wrote:
In the US, an ideological transformation has swept almost every campus I visit. Five years ago, I’d typically meet a wall of hostility like the one I found at Cambridge. But in today’s America, college-age students have moved toward Trump more heavily than any other demographic. The decline of religiosity among young people has halted and may be in reverse. On dozens of campuses in the past year I’ve met thousands of young people refusing to passively accept the decline of their civilization. In contrast, at Oxbridge I found the dominant outlook to be a depressed and depressing near-nihilism. They were students who hardly cared their country has less free speech than 50 or 100 years ago. They were appalled that a person might think life begins at conception, but not that their own country is being steadily Islamicized. They loved the abstract fight for “democracy” in Ukraine, but find the actual outcome of democracy in America very icky. That fixation on America says it all. There’s more interest in moralizing about the bad man across the Atlantic than in salvaging their own declining country.
Charlie set himself the mission of saving our own country and contributed greatly to the current respite created by President Trump’s 2024 victory. He knew what he was about, he knew how to do it and he did it.
I ask what is to be said as the predicate for asking what is to be done. God help us.
