His voice shall be missed. And already is.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk—the God-fearing and God-proclaiming conservative polemicist and America’s unrivaled practitioner of public free speech and political dialogue, the unafraid articulator of ideas in the public forum that has now proven so unsafe, so literally deadly—unleashes a torrent of thoughts and reflections and a cavalcade of hot emotions, the latter perhaps best left to cool.
As for reflections, there are personal ones about Charlie worth sharing.
Charlie was a truly interesting cat (that’s a compliment). By chance, I first met him at a private dinner in a New York City Fifth Avenue apartment, where many of the attendees were older, elegant women of poise and means, and the host’s penthouse walls sagged with French impressionism. That night belonged to Charlie. As for anything to do with impressions, he made them. Bigly.
Asked to offer a few words, he did so, about Turning Point USA and his mission. The attendees were charmed, utterly, and enthralled by his despite-youthful eloquence—charmed not only by what he said, but by his obvious self-confidence. Charlie was smart and determined and came off effortlessly as a leader deserving followers and supporters. With his gangly body and boyish face (somehow proving an asset), he assured, by tone and presence, a conservative future with a decent ROI. His political pheromones filled the air with capability, charisma, and the certainty of accomplishing things. Important things.
Things such as saving the next generation of students and defending those vital, unalienable rights so increasingly alienable to ideologues.
The ladies rushed him after dessert was served. His ice cream surely melted. Others (big shots!) spoke that night, but what they said has been forgotten. This Charlie Kirk, a purposeful guy going places, was the only thing memorable.
Several years later, the Center for Civil Society, in its initial conference held in 2021, concluded with a special panel that I was fortunate enough to moderate that featured a quartet of young and impressive nonprofit leaders, Charlie among them.
I could not help but mirthfully pose a question to Charlie: “If I snuck into your bedroom and I looked at your nightstand . . . what books I'm going to find on it?” After all, I told him, “you just can't keep doing radio shows and running around the country holding conferences”—there had to be some foundation. So what “inspires your intellect?”
How’s this for an answer (partial):
"I just finished reading Christopher Caldwell's Age of Entitlement, which is really good. It's the most important book I’ve read of the last two years. . . . He commits the largest, the most egregious thought crime you could do, which is he challenged the Civil Rights Act, and he said that this had ramifications that you don't even begin to understand. And he does it in a thoughtful way, in a historical way. I'm also reading Churchill's Trial by Dr. Larry Arnn, it's a great book. I just finished Vishal Mengalwaldi’s The Book That Built Your World, which is a phenomenal eastern analysis of American culture, on how the Bible built Western civilization. . . . I actually had never read Russell Kirk until this summer, so I just finished The Conservative Mind, which was really good, and is kind of a Conservativism 101 book. I’m working my way backwards. I started doing things at an early age, and now I'm starting to take the time to actually dive deep into those ideas.”
There was much more to Charlie Kirk than leading and growing TPUSA and going into the belly of the woke-college beast to plunk down on the quad to take on all comers—that alone a homeric duty. Time had to be made—and was—for intellectual enrichment. It was a passion which seemed to emerge from his DNA rather than from some self-help book—which may strike as odd given that Charlie Kirk was someone who travelled the non-college route to relevance and consequence.
Recalling his high-school years, he told the conference attendees too of his youthful affinity for learning from YouTube videos:
"I kept coming across these dialogues . . . of Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman, and it red-pilled me. From that point forward, I realized that basically everything I was being told about economics and history and unions and education and minimum wage [was false]. It just opened up this whole new intellectual tradition that I was unaware of—especially Thomas Sowell on the race issue. Thomas Sowell really made me reconsider how we talk about it, how it's viewed. 'Discrimination and Disparities' is one of the first real books I read on this kind of topic."
Another major influence was Friedman’s acclaimed PBS series, Free to Choose. That, along with the works of Sowell and historian Victor Davis Hanson, “had a profound impact on my life.” Kirk added, “The last couple of years I have become even more serious about rethinking, deeply, these issues.”
All that was much at odds with the Left’s anti-intellectual caricature of the degree-less Kirk, their caustic rhetoric that was on relentless display on Reddit and bubbling in other social-media cisterns which spewed a range of derisions that were . . . surely a product of fear, no?
Yes.
Allow two more personal-reflection anecdotes, fresh from recent days, which bear witness to the unnerving trepidation that Kirk stirred on the other end of the political spectrum.
The first involves a family member, a sweet niece and college undergraduate who is most definitely not someone who would utter a compliment of Charlie Kirk. Perish the thought. And yet: Two days before his murder, she did just that, freely introducing him to her uncle (“Don’t you know him?”) as a conversation topic, and admitting that, while she did not agree with everything—or maybe most things—Kirk said, she in fact admired that he engaged in discussions and debates on campuses and other forums, and that she found the Left’s increasing disdain of free speech and open dialogue—and all the social-media vilification of Kirk—troubling.
Was a conversion happening? Uncle cheered, in good fun: You are becoming a right-winger! It was met by a smile, and no statement of correction. As goes the old cliché, many a truth is said in jest.
The following day—a day before Charlie Kirk’s murder—provided the second anecdote: On the sunny campus of Yale University, a celebration was held for the formal unveiling of a commemorative United States postage stamp honoring William F. Buckley Jr (my old boss—I had been the publisher of National Review). A conversation was struck up with another attendee, and the subject quickly came to . . . Charlie.
Did he not fulfill the role “WFB” had of the man who publicly took on all debate challenges, who described (eyes glinting, smile curling) those who would not engage him as akin to the baloney which fears the slicer?
Bill Buckley was a unique man of enormous talents and large personality. He defied comparison and off-target designations that this one would “fill his shoes” or that one was “The Next Bill Buckley.” While he may have been the founder of the aforementioned fortnightly magazine, Bill was far better known to a generation of Americans as that conservative who, mostly through his weekly public-television show Firing Line, saw the public square as an arena where debate, argument, and civil discourse were rightly to take—all of which had to take place, this being a republic after all—maybe with occasional harsh disagreement, but without risk of being murdered.
Many Buckley fans disdained talk of “The Next,” such as when Rush Limbaugh would be compared to the conservative movement’s founder. Such talk (to many) was off limits: WFB had je ne sais quoi and a thesaurus vocabulary while El Rushbo was reduced to a radio fuzzball preaching to dittoheads while decrying feminazis. Or so it went. But Bill Buckley adored Rush Limbaugh, because he took conservatism’s principles and brought them to a wider audience—to millions—serving as a remarkable and admirable evangelist standing athwart a new medium and creating disciples while yelling stop at liberals.
Might not Buckley have thought the same today of Charlie Kirk and his accomplishments? A not so rhetorical question: Would not the controversialist and author of that very thing which instigated modern conservatism—his 1951 work, God and Man at Yale—be heartened by the young man who took those principles espoused by Buckley and a generation of followers and, in a kind of Firing Line 3.0, by fearless, direct, open-dialogue ask-me-anything / call-me-anything engagement, on the very campuses supposedly conquered by progressives, preach conservative truth to leftist power, winning over an ever-growing number of converts in the process?
It's fair to say that in his ability and desire to engage, confront, and articulate through civil discourse in open spaces before unrehearsed and often-adversarial foes—ranging from mere dissenters to foul-mouthed antagonists and whatever was in between—Charlie Kirk was some modern-day version of a Limbaugh, of a Buckley. And even for those conservatives who do not think in those comparative terms, Charlie Kirk was the person of these times who evangelized the principles of this Republic and its God-endowed unalienable rights, and who called out their enemies, better than anyone else. Far better than anyone else.
And now he has been killed. It seems very much because of that—because of his embrace of vigorous free speech, because of his answering the call, from wherever it came, from his heart or conscience or from God above— to claim a corner of the public square and wage civil discourse.
What shall come from this murder the days and years ahead will tell, and tell loudly, for this is no crime that will go quietly into the night. The ramifications will be many, and serious, and may prove so significant as to conscript all into the future of this great nation. A battle? A war?
Or may there be peace? What to do? Pray.
Pray, for that peace, and for wisdom. Pray—for the intervention of God into the affairs of man. After all, He is said to break hearts of stone, and of those there are many. Pray—that God maintains America’s promise as the last best hope of Earth. And pray—for the peaceful repose of the soul of Charlie Kirk, who, lacking the pedigree that is supposed to entitle one to speak loudly and broadly, nevertheless took up the duty to preach to the nations, or at least to this nation.
His voice shall be missed. And already is.
