‘Courage is committing yourself to the correct course of action, regardless of the cost associated to it.’
Those were the words of the late Charlie Kirk, when asked by a 13-year-old girl at one of his rallies what advice he had for her.
‘Aristotle said that courage is the ultimate virtue,’ he told her with his usual eloquence. ‘Without it, there are no other virtues. If people aren’t courageous, you don’t have honesty. You don’t have justice.
‘So at age 13, I want you to commit yourself to a life of courage. Courage is doing the right thing when you don’t know how it’s going to work out.’
Sadly for Kirk and his family – his wife Erika and their two young children – he paid the ultimate price for that courage. Yesterday the FBI confirmed the arrest of the suspect, Tyler Robinson, 22, whom they allege was his killer.
Kirk, whether you agreed with him or not, was always fearless in his commitment to expressing his views and to the rights of others to challenge him.
There was no arena he would not enter, no stage he would not brave in his desire to openly confront the most thorny and contentious issues of our time, from abortion and trans rights to gun control, ‘critical race theory’ and religious faith.
He could be extremely provocative, and some of his opinions were definitely hard to stomach.
Charlie Kirk hands out hats before speaking at Utah Valley University shortly before his assassination. ‘Just because you disagree with someone does not mean you should shut them down, otherwise life becomes one big pointless echo chamber,’ writes Vine
For example, however much one queries positive discrimination, it doesn’t help your cause to say things such as: ‘If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic black woman, I wonder: is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action?’
Or: ‘If I see a black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.’
Likewise, he had no truck with notions of sexual equality.
When Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce got engaged last month, he urged her: ‘Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.’
And as for the idea that if his young daughter were raped at the age of ten and became pregnant he would force her to carry the baby to term, I’m afraid I just thought that was deeply odd.
But that’s not really the point. Just because you disagree with someone does not mean you should shut them down, otherwise life becomes one big pointless echo chamber. Everybody has the right to be offended.
Arguably it’s better to have these views out in the open than suppressed and festering – and that was what Kirk was really about.
He believed trouble begins when people stop talking. In that respect, he was utterly devoted to keeping all channels of communication wide open, regardless of the vitriol he faced or the reactions he elicited.
And part of the reason he was so inflammatory was because he knew that was often the only way to get people to engage. He was happy to debate anyone about anything, and his quick-thinking, clear-sighted logic and his mastery of the facts often reduced his opponents to gibbering wrecks.
Charlie Kirk with his wife Erika and their two young children
He was a ruthless skewerer of flimflammery, wokery and intellectual indolence, which made many people very angry.
Entire careers and reputations can be (and are) destroyed in a matter of seconds by mindless mobs where bigotry masquerades as compassion.
Moral cowardice is often the easiest and safest course of action, but he had the courage to stand up and be counted warts and all. And for that, he was killed.
The fact he died for what he believed in will be little consolation to his grieving family. But if you believe that freedom of speech is the battleground of our time, Kirk was not only a fearless warrior, he was also a hero.
He belongs up there with the likes of JK Rowling, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson.
Like all these people, he dared to say what many could not admit and didn’t want to hear – and still don’t want to hear.
That is why in the wake of his death so many on the Left have been celebrating, with no regard for the fact he was a father of young children, nor that this was an unprovoked attack on a defenceless man.
The important thing to them was that someone who had repeatedly and successfully challenged their narrative had been eliminated.
A powerful and persuasive voice of dissent had finally been silenced.
Hence the glee of the Oxford Union President-Elect George Abaraonye who, having debated Kirk earlier in the year on the subject of toxic masculinity, posted ‘Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f***ing go’ to a WhatsApp group, plus on his Instagram account wrote ‘Charlie Kirk got shot loool’.
Or the peevish response of author Nels Abbey, who compared Kirk to David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, on Good Morning Britain.
To them – and to the many others gloating and celebrating – this is vindication. They are so blinded by their righteousness they cannot see the man, the husband, the father, the human being – they only see the politics.
His refusal to subscribe to their worldview made him sub-human, Untermensch, in much the same way that to hardline supporters of Palestine, the murder, rape and mutilation of Jewish women and festival-goers on October 7 remains an irrelevance.
Liberals are right – and anyone who dares challenge them is not only wrong, but also evil.
That is a fundamental distinction and it informs so much of the current political climate. For decades, those to the Right in politics have been characterised as closed-minded, short-sighted, bigoted and uncaring. The assumption has been that if you are a liberal, you are automatically good and kind, whereas if you hold more traditional views, you are intellectually and emotionally rigid.
But that trope no longer applies, if it ever did.
The most intransigent bigots these days are to be found in the ranks of the so-called liberal Left, those whose ideological entitlement leads them to insist they have a right to impose their beliefs on others.
Anyone who disobeys or pushes back against them must be punished to destruction, as we have seen time and again with the likes of Graham Linehan and others.
That is what Kirk set out to challenge. Except Kirk did not believe his detractors were evil (although his religious faith meant he saw them as lost souls), he simply thought they were wrong and wanted to explain to them why. He didn’t jeer or mock his opponents, as so many have done in the wake of his death, he didn’t rub his hands in glee at their discomfort or lose his temper at their insults.
He would just continue to press his case calmly and respectfully – which only seemed to enrage his opponents more.
There were inevitably moments where he lost his patience, but usually only under extreme provocation. He also took his fight to a sector of society that few dared to challenge: the self-assured callow youth, the intellectual equivalent of the petulant toddler who won’t eat his or her peas.
He calmly and steadily spoon-fed them an alternative narrative – and in many cases they swallowed it.
Many still reviled him for his views, but others were convinced. This made him an extremely powerful ally of US conservatism but also extremely dangerous – especially to the American Left.
Republicans had all but given up on capturing younger voters, but Kirk willingly led them to the conservative cause.
Meanwhile, the Democrats – who, like the Labour party here, always considered the young to be ‘theirs’ – found their assumptions challenged. The one thing they thought they could rely on – the youth vote – was no longer a slam-dunk.
Kirk’s actions led to large-scale political disruption. He challenged the status quo and in so doing rewired the political landscape.
Whether his actions were right or wrong depends very much on one’s point of view, but what is undeniable is he built a huge following through his organisation Turning Point USA and arguably reshaped the views of an entire generation. He has been called a ‘Cicero for the TikTok age’, and in many ways that’s true.
But he was also a kind of Pied Piper: someone who, with his tens of millions of online followers, knew how to make the youth dance to his tune.
He spoke their language and understood how to engage them, making full use of explosive short-form clips, memes and other ‘grabby’ content.
Crucially, by framing conservatism and conservative views as a form of youthful counter-culture, he managed to make traditional ideas seem cool and edgy.
He mounted relentless incursions into territory that had previously been the domain of the Left.
He not only invaded their ‘safe spaces’ on college campuses, but also played them at their own game online by deploying many of their own tactics against them.
He also gave shy conformists cowed by an intimidatory and intolerant Left a voice.
Young people finally had permission to reject the prevailing narrative, the relentless peer pressure around incendiary issues such as trans rights and the Middle East.
He was in many ways a liberator of opinions, a freedom fighter for ideas. His assassination won’t end any of that.
Indeed, if anything, it will reinforce his influence posthumously. And there will inevitably be many queuing up to take his place.
Which is why, of course, many of his detractors are suggesting his death was engineered by his own side to make him a martyr, just as they thought the assassination attempts on Donald Trump were staged by Republicans for similar reasons and Israel engineered the October 7 massacre in order to give itself an excuse to launch an all-out attack on Gaza.
Such victim-blaming is the stock response of the liberal bigot when they can’t accept the notion of their own side being in the wrong.
Kirk’s death could be an opportunity for America’s political poles to move closer, for opposing tribes to lower their weapons, take a few steps back and take stock.
Sadly, we have already seen from the response of his critics that is not to be.
America’s culture war is on the brink of becoming a civil war, one which threatens to divide the nation at a time when, more than ever, it needs to come together.
And the same is true of the UK. The less the voices of dissent among us are tolerated, the more people’s opinions – however unpalatable – are silenced, the deeper the dissatisfaction grows.
The roots of discontent burrow into the soil of our national consciousness, quietly growing in the dark. Kirk fearlessly shone a light on all that.
He practised what he preached, and as per his advice to that 13-year-old girl, he was courageous to the very end. Regardless, as he said himself, of the cost.
