Introduction
In the aftermath of the murderous assassination of Charlie Kirk, and in light of the moving memorial of his life this last Sunday, there are a number of things that still need to be said. Some of them are brand new and others will be said by way of salty reminder.
What I say below will have a common theme that will tie them all together, but will not be part of one sustained argument. It is rather a collection of distinct observations that were provoked by the same event.
I want to talk about various aspects of an American transformation that now appears to be underway, a hot reality that was precipitated by a very cold murder.
A Few Personal Word About Charlie
Charlie was courageous, and he was a true man. His was a very masculine courage. In his book Orthodoxy, Chesterton summarized this principle of courage nicely: “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.” Charlie took the initiative. He went into the arena. He did not build an impressively large organization so that he might sit through endless board meetings, doodling on a yellow legal pad. As I said, he went into the arena. He was not the first Christian to surrender his life in that arena, and he most certainly won’t be the last.
And this man, the best of us, was a product of broad evangelicalism. Think about that for a minute. When the devil went after us, he went after the dangerous one—and the dangerous one came from quite an unexpected place. And so I would urge all the brothers who do their theology the way Mary Poppins cleans up nurseries—spit spot—to remember that Charlie had more active Kuyperianism in his little finger than the scores of edgelords who love typing instead of doing. We can tell from how all this went down who was the first of us to get to the top of the scaling ladders. His name was Charlie.
A final note. While not knowing how time and eternity intersect, I am quite sure that Charlie is proud of his wife Erika. We certainly are,
The Crucial Principle of Pursuit
This is a sea change moment. People had already noticed a vibe shift recoil that was starting to develop, resulting in lesser things like Brexit or the reelection of Donald Trump. But all of that was chump change compared to what is quite possibly going to be happening now. We have before us the prospect of making the vibe shift permanent. I believe that history will show that Tyler Robinson, if he is convicted of firing the shot that killed Charlie Kirk, will also be revealed as the man who put a bullet in the neck of progressive leftism.
But only if . . .
One of the most important principles of war is pursuit. General Meade was the capable Union general at Gettysburg, whose leadership there secured a victory over the Confederate forces. But because he failed to pursue, the war went on for two more years. He won the battle when he could have won the war.
This was a crucial principle that Gideon knew well.
“And Gideon came to Jordan, and passed over, he, and the three hundred men that were with him, faint, yet pursuing them.”Judges 8:4 (KJV)
And this is quite a difficult lesson to remember. In the moment, the shooter took out Charlie, and there was a lot of unhinged celebration on the left. But it soon became apparent to insightful observers that this amounted to a full-tilt disaster for the left. More about that in just a few minutes.
But what I want to emphasize here is that it is still only a potential disaster for the left. Everything rides on whether or not conservatives pursue. If we pursue, we make the vibe shift permanent. If we fail to pursue, then we don’t. It really is that simple.
What Pursuit Looks Like
So what does pursuit mean? And by that I mean to ask what it means on a practical level. On a physical battlefield, it means one army chasing the other army. But what does it mean here? As we apply the metaphor, what constitutes this “chasing?”
In the first place it means finding a Bible-teaching, Bible-believing, Bible-practicing church. Worship there with your family, every Sunday. Read the Bible to your kids. Provide them with a thoroughgoing Christian education. Treat them as though they belong to Christ, because they do. This is the platform and foundation for everything else.
In electoral politics, pursuit means that any Republican legislature that has the opportunity to redraw their congressional districts has a moral obligation to do so, and to do so before the midterms. Be like Texas. This should all be done according to Hoyle, and no dirty work. Of course not. The adversary will say that I am urging legislators to go out there in order to mander the gerry, but I laugh this suggestion to scorn. More likely any manifestation of spine by Republicans on this issue will result a significant number of gerries getting themselves unmandered, and about time too.
This should be part of a strategy to have the midterms be the time when a strong angel from Revelation pours out the contents of the seventh vial over the top of the Democratic Party as it is currently constituted, resulting in it being reconstituted as something else, something resembling a quivering gelatinous mass, and then after the seagulls take it away, a wet spot on the pavement.
In short, the goal for the midterms should not simply be to retain the House. Too obvious, and hardly ambitious enough. The goal should be more than to put the recapture of the House by the Democrats out of reach during Vance’s two terms. Also too obvious. Rather, the goal should be to have all the discussion among teevee’s talking heads after the midterms to revolve around whether the Democrats can survive as an organized political party at all. And the consensus should be something like “no, they can’t.”
Then there are the realities of “direct action” politics. Napoleon once said that an army marches on its stomach. Yeah, well, so do riots. Armies need to have supply lines, and organized riots also need to have them. Pursuit means following up on all the dirt revealed in the DOGE work in the opening weeks of Trump 47—I am talking about USAID money. Not only does the spigot that funds Molotov revolutionaries need to be turned all the way to the right, as in, “no more of that, “ but we also need to have criminal prosecutions of those financiers behind all blood funding. I am talking about the pallets of bricks that get dropped off on the eve of riots, I am talking about the Butler assassination attempt, and oh, yeah, the other one, and of course the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Why on earth should we assume that the default is “lone actors” in this high stakes game where all the money and power in the world is on the table? In short, far more people need to be on their way to jail than currently appear to be.
The third area where pursuit is most needed is in the realm of media, communication platforms, the arts, and so on. When it comes to alternative media, we are more than halfway there. Long gone are the days when the big three networks or the big newspapers like the Times or Post could simply make a story go away. But we need to have an entirely distinct and parallel news economy. And another area where we are still hurting would be in the realm of the arts. Perhaps this is something Turning Point could look at. The arts—poets, painters, sculptors, actors, screenwriters—require patronage, but it needs to be patronage with a brain and with a deeply ingrained worldview.
Allow me to repurpose a point I have made over the years concerning racism. Every minister worth his salt in these times of ours needs to be accused of racism. That is the first point. It is equally important that the charge be a slander, a falsehood, a lie. In a parallel way we need gifted artists with supportive patrons who will be accused of being “propagandists.” If they are at all effective, they will draw the charge. But because heavy-handed propaganda is the death of all decent art, it is crucial that the charge be false. This point will require some doing.
Consequences for Ghouls and Celebrants
Speaking of the accused, Tyler Robinson, there is a difference between the trial of an accused assassin, which is and must be judicial and judicious, and the trial and conviction of a hate-filled generation, which is political and ethical. If the shooter is convicted, the two categories will then merge. While all the early indications are that Tyler Robinson was motivated in just the ways we might have expected, whether or not he was motivated that way does not drastically alter the political nature of this moment. If the killer had turned out to be a disgruntled Turning Point employee who had been sacked because of his embezzlement, that would not erase the cheering and celebrating that immediately erupted on the left. That is a radical societal disease, and that is what Kirk’s murder means. We are fully entitled to have views on that diseased corruption independent of any trial.
Firing teachers or doctors or other celebrants of murder from their jobs is not cancel culture. No one should be fired for ordinary political views, but celebrating a grotesque act of murder like this is not a legit opinion that any employer needs to tolerate. Celebration of murder does not fall in that category. If you have to make a trip to the ER, you shouldn’t have to worry about the fact that you have a Turning Point T-shirt on. So it is legit to fire people like this, but there must be no laws that mandate it.
There are crucial distinctions here that Pam Bondi clearly does not understand, and she really needs to get a grip. There is a difference between a sin and a crime, and there is also a difference between what society may be intolerant of formally (as in, charging someone with a crime), and what individual members of society may police through things like their discretion over employment, membership, admission, and so on. People should be charged in court for things like overt incitement to murder, obviously. But people who are simply being calloused and rude (“glad he’s dead”) are not guilty of any crime.
But at the same time, employers should be absolutely free to discontinue the services of someone who is bad for business—someone who argues vehemently online for the legalization of cannibalism, for example, or perhaps you don’t want to hire swish-Chad to be a cashier at your store because of how much eyeliner he uses. Or perhaps you think the late night comedian you hired to be funny should be . . . funny.
Incitement to violence should be prosecuted. For the rest, we can restore civility to public discussion by granting employers the right to discriminate. In a free society, a person should have the right to talk like a weirdo. And also in a free society, employers should have the right to discriminate against weirdos for being weirdos. That would take care of a bunch of this crap.
A vast range of bad behavior can and should be policed through mores, not through laws. Laws should be reserved for “fighting words,” or other forms of direct incitement to violence. So let’s make Godwin’s law great again.
Pam Bondi Steps on a Rake
I mentioned Pam Bondi a moment ago. She foolishly tried to make a distinction between free speech and hate speech, which showed that she is not reading the law, and she is certainly not reading the room. I have heard that line before—when I was trying deliver lectures years ago at Bloomington. There were numerous protesters there at our event, attempting to shout me down. One of their chants was, get this, “We believe in free speech, but this is hate speech!” I hate all hate speech jargon. Really hate it. So is that hate speech?
Bondi should have said there is a distinction between free speech and incitement-to-violence speech. That would have been defensible. Her current line is not defensible, and is right out of the leftists’ playbook.
Pantheons Don’t Work
I have been arguing for some time now that different worldviews and religions produce differing ethical systems. What we are dealing with now is a nihilistic paganism, and the reason people in the grip of that worldview are cheering the murder of Charlie Kirk is because they are acting in a manner that is consistent with their system. According to their tenets, there is no problem with murdering someone who is in their way . . . and Charlie Kirk was most emphatically in their way.
Normal America is aghast at this because it violates the standard of our religion, but must come to realize that it does not violate theirs. The reason this is so shocking to us, the reason we are all so surprised, is because of our hidden and very naive assumption that all worldviews and religions are supposed to generate the same vanilla ethical system. But they don’t. If they did, then a secular society might be a possibility. But they don’t, and it isn’t.
So this is why their religion—and leftism is a religion—must not be granted any formal legitimacy. Some religions, some worldviews, sanction murder. This is why, as long as you live in a world as fallen and as twisted as ours, you cannot have a pantheon. Some gods are sociopaths,
Some religions fly airplanes into skyscrapers. And some of them are much bloodier than that, and sanction the murder of millions of unborn children. And yes, you read that right. Our black-robed ghouls who authorized murderous abortions in the darkness of their constitutional penumbrae are the worst. The jihadi weird beards are pikers compared to our ghouls.
So this tragic event, and the convulsions following it, also mark the end of any successful attempts to build out a secular right. Secularism has no bonding agent. You cannot have any kind of big tent without a tent pole—and Christ crucified and risen is that tent pole. Without that, your big tent is just a half acre of limp canvas flat on the ground, under which John Stuart Mill and Al Goldstein are wrestling with each other, and both of them are having trouble breathing. It is Christ or chaos. Really.
The Power of Martyrdom
There are different ways to understand the word martyr. One way is to define it strictly, as someone who gives up his life willingly, rather than deny Christ. Such was Antipas, the faithful witness (Rev. 2:13). But there is also a broad sociological definition, where someone simply becomes a martyr through an overwhelming and almost instantaneous consensus, a consensus that cannot be argued with or gainsaid, regardless of the facts on the ground. Martin Luther King Jr. was a martyr in this sense. In his personal life, he was a heretical adulterer, but that did not in any way diminish the number of boulevards named after him. George Floyd was a manufactured version of the second kind, through sheer dint of propaganda and browbeating. He was a martyr who came in an IKEA box.
But Charlie Kirk is a martyr in both senses. He was faithful in his testimony of Christ. The fact that he spoke about conservative political issues as well as the lordship of Jesus Christ does not alter or dilute anything. That simply means that he did not have his faith locked up in a holy pietism box down in his heart. He was a martyr for worldview Christianity, with Christ at the center of everything. His testimony was that people must turn from their sins—which includes godless leftism, remember—and turn to Christ. So he was a faithful witness to both sides of the repent/believe coin. He was a true martyr, in other words, and no “yes, but” martyr.
But to the dismay of the radical left, Charlie Kirk has also become a martyr in the broader sociological sense, and this happened within hours of his death. This kind of thing can be hard to define, but when it happens, the thing is palpable. It is comparable to a momentum shift in a stadium at a football game. Something triggers it, say a recovered fumble, and within a few seconds the demeanor of whole crowd is transformed, including the fans of both teams. It affects the players on the field, but they are not the ones doing it. It is simply something that happens to the entire murmurating organism of the crowd and players. Something just like that has happened here. Our culture is different now. The moment is different. Everything is different.
Aghast Leaders on the Left
There was the shooting itself, and then there were all the little geysers of hate all over the Internet. But it should also be noted with some gratitude that there were responsible voices from leaders on the left who denounced all such violence. With the gratitude noted, those voices can be divided into two categories.
Some are those in whom the embers of the old liberalism are still faintly glowing. There are places here and there in the Democratic party where vestiges of a conscience are still trying to function. We may wish those guys luck, but I don’t have high hopes.
The other category is made up of leftist leaders who, while having no affection for Charlie Kirk personally, are nevertheless not morons. They see and understand the massive shift that is now underway, and the shift is against them and their entire program, and they hate watching all their progress blow away from them in the whistling wind.
Just like the right has some folks online who will not think strategically for love or money, so also the left has the same kind of people. They also have people who don’t care about actually winning, but only about being the center of attention. We have our right-wing screw-ups, and they have left-wing screw-ups, and to date theirs have far surpassed ours.
Grifters and Morons on the Right
I say this understanding that the right has its morons also. We still have to do something about ours. But I do deny that we have them in equal numbers. The numbers are tiny, but their ignorance has been noised abroad—in their attempts to make the left’s slanders of the entire right more plausible. That has been the whole point, after all.
However, in the name of the friend/enemy distinction, some folks smudge and blur the friend/enemy distinction—celebrating the Nazis who euthanized hundreds of thousands of unfit albeit very white Germans and Austrians in their T4 program. I leave Jewish victims entirely out of it because whenever I mention Jews some folks who claim to be on the right start barging into furniture while barking at the moon. Nevertheless, I do want to say a word in their defense. So far, our dank right weirdos have not yet descended to the point of dressing up like raccoons and such. I mean, the last thing we need at this point would be furries with swastika armbands. That would mean we had surpassed our allotted levels of fruitiness. But perhaps I should say they have not descended to such a point so far. I suppose it depends on whether Candace gains any new insights.
Allies and Co-belligerents
The center of all of this is Christ. It really is Christ or chaos. We are talking about a choice between Christ risen or chaos rising. In the meantime, there will certainly be blessings and side benefits to be gained from the work of co-belligerents who are willing to join with us in the pursuit. Men like Peter Thiel or Dave Rubin really do have clarity on some important issues, but for various reasons the center of it is obscure to them.
That means in order for the torch to be passed, it has to be a torch on fire, and the fire has to be Jesus Christ risen from the dead.
So there are ways in which “unite the right” makes perfectly good sense. There are other ways in which attempts to unify around inconsistent and alien principles would be disastrous. So always make a distinction between aid from Rohan and aid from the Púkel-men.
Could Tyler Robinson Be Saved?
I have seen some taunting from the left, with people asking what would happen if Tyler Robinson converted, and said that he believed in Jesus now? The answer is that he would be forgiven. Erika Kirk understands this. Worse men have been forgiven, including the man who wrote the majority of the New Testament. But one of the central indications that such a conversion had been genuine would be seen in the fact that he accepted the justice of his execution, and ceased any and all legal efforts to prevent it. “For if I be an offender, or have committed any thing worthy of death, I refuse not to die” (Acts 25:11).
A Brief Concluding Miscellany
Christianity Today wrote about the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk in their ongoing efforts to prove to evangelicals everywhere that they are the publishing equivalent of a fifty-gallon drum of lame sauce.
Always remember that Aristotle made a distinction between behavior that democracies like and behavior that will preserve democracies.
In one way or another, we are all kirkers now.
There will be much more to say about all this in the coming months.
Erika, may God richly bless you, and strengthen your heart, as well as your right hand.