The River is Bloodred
Reflections on Charlie Kirk
I don't fully understand why the murder of Charlie Kirk has affected me the way it has. But I'll try to get some of my thoughts down here if only for my own sake, and maybe some of you will be able to relate.
In the foreword to one of his published works, Curtis Yarvin evokes the image of a soccer referee throwing a flag, then calmly pulling out a gun and executing the offending player, stressing how unnatural and shocking such a thing would be to witness. One would immediately understand that this is not a soccer game, but something else entirely.
I've never considered myself a follower of Kirk, and don't know much about his personal beliefs other than that he was Christian, on the mainstream political right, and heavily involved in campus conservative and pro-life activism. From what I do know, I'm sure I agreed with him on all sorts of things and disagreed with him on others. Nonetheless, he's been a household name for nearly my entire adult life. Everyone, whether they liked him or not, has had Charlie Kirk and TPUSA clips appear on their feeds countless times, even if only to scroll past them. None of this is meant to take away from the impressiveness of what he built over the course of his short life, but on the contrary, to say that he blended in as a prominent terrain feature in the media landscape as seamlessly as a river in a valley, even to the only loosely politically engaged everyman. And in an instant, the river turned bloodred.
Most of us have probably seen the close-up footage of the assassination. If you haven't, I'd recommend you don't look for it. Though I'm a GWOT veteran who’s seen my fair share of tragic violence, and don't consider myself particularly sensitive to such things, that video is one of the most horrific I've ever witnessed. For the last 48 hours I've been unable to get it out of my head. I think the most jarring thing about it isn't the gore, but the setting. It isn't like combat, or a slasher film, where you're expecting to see such things and in some sense mentally prepared for it. This was a perfectly anodyne speaking event on an American college campus, no different from any of the countless others that have been hosted over the years by TPUSA and other activist organizations of all stripes. It was not a battlefield of any kind, or supposed by anyone to be contested territory. Yet against this backdrop, where we're so accustomed to seeing clips of the "Charlie Kirk responds to abortion activist" genre, we are instead met by this instantaneous, gruesome, grave violation of all decency and justice.
Murder is always evil, but most of the time you can at least make sense of it. The attempted assassinations of Donald Trump, though awful and enraging, were not especially surprising, nor would they be in the case of any high-profile political figure.
But Kirk wasn't a politician, or a judge, or a journalist, or even a pundit as that term is commonly used. He was a speaker, organizer and grassroots activist, albeit one of the most energetic and effective there ever has been or will be. He wasn't an extremist. He was, at least from my perspective, just a guy. He existed outside the domain of power politics. He felt like someone you knew, or could imagine yourself knowing. He was close to me in age, and like myself a husband and father of young children whom he clearly loved dearly (allegedly, his daughter tried to run to him out of fright when the shot rang out). Not long ago, in the Before Times, he could've been any College Republican, attending campus events and door-knocking for an upcoming local election. He was watching The Blaze in high school and criticizing liberal bias in the media. You can easily picture him wearing a “Reagan-Bush '84” t-shirt and sparring with his teenage peers on the school bus over illegal immigration or socialized medicine.
Most importantly, he was an innocent man by any standard. He never signed a bill into law or made a single decision on behalf of the state. He never held political power of any kind. Kirk was doing politics in what is supposed to be exactly the right way: engaging with those who disagreed with him in an open forum, trying to change their minds and allowing them to try to change his. From everything I've seen, Kirk was, as a rule, eminently cordial and respectful in these dialogues, and never incited violence against anyone or any group. All he did was speak. He was murdered for his words, words which represented the views of roughly half the American public.
His method represented the best of the American civic ideal. His death is so grievous, I think, because it feels like the death of that ideal, even for those of us like myself who've been skeptical of its continued feasibility for some time already. As many others have noted, to kill Kirk was to kill the part of ourselves which all of us saw in him, and the shared vision of what we all once hoped America could be.
But this is not a soccer game anymore.