The Day That Civil Discourse Died

Reflections on the assassination and martyrdom of Charlie Kirk

“This feels like the end of our entire political order.”

As I drove on a road trip with a friend yesterday, our joyful banter was replaced by shocked silence for what seemed like hours until he said the above.

Charlie Kirk has been shot. Charlie has died.

I never met Charlie, but I long admired him. What is being lost in the frantic moments as the killer is hunted, leftoid ghouls celebrate, and normal Americans call for an aggressive response is that you can count on one hand (with missing digits) the people more responsible for Trump’s victory in 2024.

Charlie was not merely a pundit with opinions. He wasn’t some grifting commentator. He was the most effective political organizer the American right has ever seen. He became this before he was out of his 20s through sheer grit, immense talent, and unfailing optimism. His debates on college campuses would draw crowds of thousands, all of whom would be asked to register to vote. Through the organization he built, Turning Point USA, he almost singlehandedly drove a +44 shift toward Trump among Zoomer males in 2024.

This young man accomplished more by the age of 31 than most people could in dozens of lifetimes. He is irreplaceable and his loss cuts extremely deep.

Charlie’s interest was not solely in politics, either. His primary interest was his sincere Christian faith, and political engagement was his outlet to pursue faithfulness to Christ. He made a concerted effort with his organization to mobilize Christians to live out their faith through political engagement, and for this he was labeled by the leftwing hate groups like the ADL, SPLC, Rightwing Watch, etc. as a “Christian Nationalist.” Charlie died as a Christian and an American patriot. The opinions he was killed for having are shared by tens of millions of his fellow Americans, including me. For all of us, seeing Charlie killed was a moment we will never forget. The wave of emotions that we all felt were precisely the same as the those of us old enough to remember 9/11 also felt. The grief, the sadness, the uncertainty, and the anger. They don’t just want him dead. They have been programmed to want all of us dead. It feels like a very dangerous future ahead.

Charlie’s crime was engaging in good-faith debate and peacefully pursuing change within the electoral process. He was not a radical. He was not calling for violence. He politely argued with college kids and registered people to vote.

But the left (at the moment, it appears the shooter is a far-left transsexual) does not want civil debate or a peaceful political process. To them, Charlie was a nazi and nazis deserve to die. To them, political opinions you disagree with are “hate speech,” hate speech is violence, and therefore, it can be responded to with violence. Their favorite acronym is FAFO (you can Google what it means).

Leftism is by definition revolutionary and violent. If society does not conform to their ideals, then it must be made to with bloodshed, just as the human body must be made to conform to the transsexual’s ideal through bloody surgical mutilation. Leftism hates all that is good, true, and beautiful. It hates Jesus Christ. It hates the distinction between male and female. It hates marriage. It hates babies and children. It hates healthy, stable families. It hates everything that Charlie Kirk embodied.

I know countless people who have come to Christian faith in the last five years because they recognize that evil is a very real thing, and that the thing that evil hates more than anything else is sincere Christian faith. I have friends who were committed agnostics who could not shake these thoughts; they couldn’t get away from them. Every time they saw the most evil people on earth doing what they do, they always saw them hate Christians, Jesus, and the Bible in the next breath. This happened with such frequency and such consistency that they could only conclude that the Bible is true. I always tell them that the Left hates reality, and they hate the Bible because the same God made both and is revealed by both.

The recent attack on the Catholic school in Minnesota by a leftwing transsexual and now the assassination of one of the most outspoken Christians in the country, apparently by a leftwing transsexual, should demonstrate conclusively that this is a spiritual war. The left-wing-dominated media has seeded the idea that “Christian nationalists” are “Nazis” and nazis deserve death. They seeded the idea that speech you disagree with is violence. They are, almost as much as the shooter, responsible for Charlie’s death.

What this signals is indeed what my friend noted. This is indeed the end of the old order. They understand “violence works,” as Tucker Carlson once said of the 2020 riots. Tucker, obviously, was not himself calling for violence. He was pointing out that the violence was not opposed with legitimate force, but rather the rioters were given every single one of their demands. Police departments were defunded, prisoners were released from jail, cash bail was abolished, Soros DAs were installed, BLM received endless millions, and DEI became the law of the land. Violence worked. The lesson the left learned from 2020 was that their political goals could be accomplished outside the electoral process. They could get what they wanted by force.

Despite the Trump election, this has not changed. They lost an election. But they operate outside of electoral politics. Violence works. Charlie Kirk says things you don’t like? Kill him. A bunch of Christian children are assembled at a school? Kill them. A man is the CEO of a health insurance company? Kill him. A man you hate more than life itself might become president again? Kill him. This is what the left believes. You saw their viciousness during the tail end of Covid. Let the unvaccinated starve. The Biden White House tells the unvaccinated to prepare for a winter of severe illness and death. You saw a preview of their online glee for Charlie’s murder whenever a prominent antivaxxer died of Covid. Leftism is a celebration of death.

Charlie truly believed in the political process and civil debate. That world has died with him. It will not come back until leftism is fully eradicated in American society. You can have civil discourse if the other side does not kill you when they lose. If you actually care about the democratic process in America, the left has to be destroyed. Transsexuals must be involuntarily committed until their dysphoria is cured. Every institution must drive out pronouns in bio or BLM support like they would a swastika or the number 1488. Democratic Congressmen and women who have justified Charlie’s killing should be expelled from Congress. News stations that do not fire anchors who did the same should have their FCC licenses revoked. Every NGO like the ADL, Media Matters, and SPLC needs to be charged with incitement and RICOed and sued out of existence. The old Cold War laws regarding communist agitation need to be dusted off and applied to antifa. This must be done not because we want authoritarianism but because we want the free and democratic American system we inherited to persist. If this violence is not punished severely to the extent that it is unthinkable, it will continue, and you will get authoritarianism from one direction or another.

I remain optimistic that the better America that Charlie envisioned and dedicated his life to bringing about will be realized in our lifetimes. This will require strength and resolve from elected officials. This will require millions of politically engaged conservatives not being cowed into submission by the violent left. And above all, this will require a courageous Christian faith unafraid to declare what God has said, no matter how much people want to kill us for saying it. Have faith. We will win.