He was wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Freedom’. A one-word rallying cry emblazoned in black across his chest. It was his core belief: that liberty, especially the liberty to speak, is preferable to tyranny. Then, following the crack of gunfire, that word was stained red with blood. We’ve heard of blood being spilt for freedom: here it was for real. Not a metaphor, not an analogy: the literal drenching of liberty with the blood of a young man who devoted his life to fighting for it.
This is America’s Charlie Hebdo moment. Violence wielded against ideas, a man punished for his ‘blasphemies’, gunfire cutting down discussion
The killing of Charlie Kirk has horrified the world. It is, in President Trump’s words, a ‘dark moment for America’. It was first and foremost an act of wilful cruelty. He was a 31-year-old father of two. A woman widowed and two kids orphaned at the brutish, unilateral behest of what we can only imagine to be a despicable person. But it was an assault on America too. It was a bullet not only in the neck of a young man but also in the beating heart of the American republic: the First Amendment.
Kirk was the kingpin of America’s new conservatism. He famously forswore college – a wise move these days – to devote himself to battling the immoral excesses of what passes for leftism in the 21st century. He built not only a brand but a movement: Turning Point USA. He and his earnest crusaders brought the conservative case directly to schools and colleges. Kirk is credited with winning untold numbers of young voters, especially young men, to the Trump camp.
I met him in LA once, fittingly while recording a podcast on the urgency of liberty. I was on his TV show, The Charlie Kirk Show, a couple of times. He always struck me as a sincere young man. His guiding belief was that open, unfettered debate, about everything was America’s best hope. ‘Prove me wrong’ was the slogan of his viral campus events. He sought not to shun or silence his critics but to hear them. He invited them to challenge his ideas, and to air their own. ‘Because when people stop talking, that’s when violence happens’, he prophetically said.
There was something Milton-esque about his faith in free debate. ‘Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?’, said Milton. This was Kirk’s belief too: that truth will always fare better than fallacy in the free town square. It is unconscionable that someone at Utah Valley, we don’t yet know who, responded to Kirk’s good-faith invitation to debate with extreme violence. The barbarism of cancel culture wielded against the life-giving endeavour of truth-seeking.
The hunt for Kirk’s killer goes on. So we don’t even have a name yet, far less a motive. But it feels safe to say this terrible assault will have been fuelled at least in part by intolerance. A deep, burning, savage intolerance, presumably for Kirk’s ‘MAGA’ beliefs or perhaps his love of free discussion. The contrast between Kirk’s bustling, rowdy gathering at Utah Valley and the gunfire that brought it to an end is so striking. On one side, the free and noble exchange of ideas; on the other the violence of suppression. Freedom literally cut down, in broad daylight.
These are the Two Americas. The America that still loves freedom and the America that fears it. The America that still adheres to its traditions of liberty as forged in the fires of revolution, and the America that is rejecting those radical democratic ideals in preference for the alien culture of cancellation. The America that still believes in the public square and the America that prefers to seek sanctuary in the ‘safe space’, far from that madding phenomenon of alternative points of view.
It is possible we have just witnessed the savagery of grievance culture, the apocalyptic endpoint of the neo-medieval belief that ‘words hurt’. After all, if speech is violence – as so much of the wet left says it is – wouldn’t that make violence a legitimate response to speech? We are potentially seeing the dire consequences of re-educating an entire generation to fear disagreement, to cherish their own self-esteem above all else, even liberty. It seems to me that a young man might just have paid the highest price for this lethal ideology.
This is America’s Charlie Hebdo moment. Violence wielded against ideas, a man punished for his ‘blasphemies’, gunfire cutting down discussion. And so we should say of Charlie Kirk what we said of Charlie Hebdo: Je suis Charlie.
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