While many of us are still processing the assassination of Charlie Kirk, my colleague Josh Treviño has eloquently offered some words on the moment we may now be entering:
The armies of Charlie Kirk, martyr, will be much more vast: not a handful of Athenians but millions of Americans. Their work will not be in philosophical literature but in the politics of the years to come. Whatever benefit accrues to the Republican Party is merely incidental. We are now in the realm of fundamental politics, which is concerned with the nature of the nation and the wielding of power for the common good. The generation of Americans that Charlie Kirk molded will be drawing conclusions about both from his life and his death alike.
This may mean that the art of persuasion to which Kirk dedicated his public life experiences a revival. Perhaps an entire generation turns wholly from the Left and tradition, conservatism, and the Right become for the first time in a century the vanguard of the youth’s future. Millions of Kirk’s disciples may conclude that no politics is possible with an antagonist that reserves murder as its redoubt when argument fails.
None of these conclusions would be wrong.
When those conclusions are reached, the movement that helped precipitate Charlie Kirk’s murder may realize its error. They may finally understand that Kirk, Trump, and everyone else whom they hate with a blinding, intense passion were the moderates, the ones they could live with, the ones who didn’t wish to eradicate them. They may tell tales to their children of a time when the ascendant Right was perfectly happy to have a debate. They may say they wish it had never happened, that they weren’t for killing the man, that a lone extremist with a rifle was in no way representative of the whole.
When they do, we will remind them that on the day Charlie Kirk was assassinated, leftist members of the United States House of Representatives objected to a moment of prayer on his behalf.
What happens next has several templates, some more probable than others. There is the hunt for the shooter. Then there is the reckoning for what created him—a reckoning that’s long overdue.
We have too many martyrs now. Before Kirk there was a president who nearly suffered the same fate. Before Kirk there was a woman who just wanted to ride the train home. Before Kirk there were little children at Mass, praying as a killer opened fire.
American liberty requires sacrifice, and it requires martyrdom too. But the martyrs in our tradition should be afforded the choice of their fate. We celebrate the men of the Alamo and Corregidor. We find by contrast something horrific and unjust in death unsought and undesired. One is war, the other is crime.
Charlie Kirk chased the better angels of our nature. His killers herald the end of angel-chasing.
Brian Phillips
Chief Communications Officer
