Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was very publicly assassinated last week.
I was moderately familiar with his work from some debate videos I’ve seen, but, as one who doesn’t watch TV and listens mostly to jazz, blues or local talk radio, I missed out on much of what he did.
The thing I knew he did was what he was doing when he was shot — invite folks to debate issues on campus at school around the nation.
When he started, at 18 years old, the crowds were small and mostly opposed to his conservative views.
But he was effective at winning people over, and by the time he was shot to death, the crowds were big, and college-aged kids — especially males — had undergone a significant shift statistically to the right.
I suspect this is why he’s now dead.
Nearly a century and a half ago Marx and Engels laid the foundation of destroy-opposing-voices, embraced and brutally practiced by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and many others in the century that followed.
Today’s polling tells us that young Americans embrace the idea of political violence at alarming rates.
Surely some of this comes from Marxist professors who cling to the idea that Marxism hasn’t failed, it’s only been errantly implemented everywhere it’s been tried.
But most of it comes from my generation.
We’ve raised kids with the notion that they should never suffer, nor tolerate, any views with which they disagree.
We’ve sent them to schools that have eliminated critical analysis and reasoning from the curriculum.
We teach them in school to shame those who disagree or even ask the wrong questions — and reinforced that mindset by destroying the lives of folks who questioned orthodoxy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We grew up “agreeing to disagree” and then let internet algorithms shape us into shrill, offended whiners unable to tolerate any odd thought or perceived slight in querying the validity of our way of thinking.
Somehow Charlie Kirk didn’t get sucked into any of that.
He welcomed debate at every event, encouraging those who felt or thought differently to have the microphone.
Even when they called him a fascist or a Nazi, he would not allow himself to lash out.
He would thank folks for the dialog even as they’d just railed in rage at him for a view he held.
Oh yeah, they learned that from us, too.
Every weekend folks are in the streets screaming that our law enforcers are fascists, our president a tyrant, he and his supporters Nazis.
One of the paradoxical questions of theoretical time travel is “Given the chance, would you go back and kill Hitler before he could author the death of millions?”
“Absolutely!” most folks say.
Is it any wonder Charlie Kirk is dead?
We screamed, in effect, “He’s Hitler!”
And someone, lacking the reasoning skills denied by our education system and thus believing that debating on campus with politeness and well-structured arguments was akin to Hitlerism, put him in the crosshairs and pulled the trigger.
A young wife is widowed, two young children are fatherless, and yet the poison still rages through the veins of our nation.
Online comments celebrating Kirk’s death are everywhere, from X to Skysocial, to our own local STK Facebook page, which purports to be a Pittsburgh area antiviolence page.
We poured the poison.
I don’t know if we have an antidote.
Well said, Hogan. Brian
Maybe if Charlie Kirk kept his mouth shut about how easy guns should be to get in this country and instead preached for strict gun control laws, he’d still be alive.