Last Thoughts on Charlie Kirk

I didn’t want to write this piece until Charlie Kirk’s killer had been caught. I was haunted by the thought that he might disappear, leaving us all to accuse one another in ignorance and fear. I’m sure we will learn more about the suspect in the days and weeks to come, but it was important for me to know that, at the very least, he was no longer out there. That we wouldn’t have to wonder anymore and inevitably descend into conspiratorial thinking. (We have instead traded this for conspiratorial speculation about the suspect’s motives and affinities.)

I don’t want to engage in that, not here, not now. (Let the crazies spin their wheels.) It has been a long and emotionally exhausting week for many of us here at National Review, just as I imagine it has been for those on the right who write, speak, and engage in public debate about American politics for a living. So I am just grateful for a resolution of some sort.

But it is harder to “move on,” as I feel I am already being prodded to do preemptively by my media betters. Do not dictate to me how to react to this. I am not going to forget it, for I feel like all of us were attacked — and specifically people like me, who believe much of what Charlie Kirk did. It’s hard not to at least ponder the idea that the penalty for participating too successfully in the public debate from the American right may now be death. The ultimate heckler’s veto.

What I don’t think some on the left fully grasp is that all commentators I know on the right — those willing to argue with any fool who approaches them — feel in some way as though the bullet that targeted Charlie Kirk could just as easily have been aimed at them. This, of course, is the literal definition of terrorism. The reason Kirk died — as opposed to, perhaps, one of my friends — is merely that he was more famous.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox — who has conducted himself with admirable dignity during this entire nightmare — said it best this morning, during the announcement of the suspected shooter’s apprehension:

It is much bigger than an attack on any specific individual. It is an attack on all of us. . . . Political violence is different than any other type of violence, for lots of different reasons. One, because, in the very act that Charlie championed, of expression — that freedom of expression that is enshrined in our founding documents — having his life taken in that very act makes it more difficult for people to feel like they can share their ideas, that they can speak freely.

I want to take something other than a feeling of persecution from an event whose repercussions will not be properly measured for a very long time. But it’s not easy; in truth, what is there that any one individual person can do? (Some idiot said on Twitter that conservatives ought to be reacting to the Kirk assassination the way the left reacted to the death of George Floyd, and all I could think was, “But what did my local 7-Eleven ever do to deserve that?”) I think the answer has to come down to a commitment to fight in the same arena that Kirk did.

Tonight, Charlie Kirk’s widow, in a speech I cannot even fathom how painful it must have been to deliver, spoke to her husband’s fans and to America and delivered a counter-message that I hope everyone listens to. It points a way forward.

“Our world is filled with evil, but our God is so good, so incredibly good. And we know that all things are good for those who are called according to His purpose,” she said, invoking Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Erika Kirk, through occasional sobs and prayers to the Creator, delivered a message that rejects hatred and calls for persistence of witness in the face of evil. “The evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination have no idea what they have done. They killed Charlie because he preached a message of patriotism, faith, and God’s merciful love.” Later: “If you thought that my husband’s mission was powerful before, you have no idea; you have no idea what you have just unleashed across this entire country. You have no idea the fires you have ignited. . . . The movement my husband built will not die.”

I think she’s right. More importantly, I think it feels like a calling. So I’d like to end on some words suggested to me by a commenter here — those of Charles Mackay, poet, plain speaker, and 19th-century Britain’s happy warrior in the battle against Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds:

You have no enemies, you say?
Alas, my friend, the boast is poor.
He who has mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure, must have made foes.
If you have none, small is the work that you have done.
You’ve hit no traitor on the hip.
You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip.
You’ve never turned the wrong to right.
You’ve been a coward in the fight.

Charlie Kirk was no coward. The best we can do to honor that, to reject what his assassination was intended to inspire in the rest of the world, is to never back down — and never forget to reach out our hands, either.