Blood in Soil

This is no eulogy for Charlie Kirk. I didn’t know the guy. I never met him. I’m a nobody.

At the time of this writing, Kirk was was shot through the neck this afternoon by a marksman while speaking at a public event on the Utah Valley University campus in Orem. The bullet did exactly what it was designed to do, and apparently, so did the rifle; you can watch the footage for yourself if you’re so inclined. I would encourage you to. What happens to him in that short second of footage between the involuntary jolt of his body and blood pouring out of the hole by his throat is what has been begged for, encouraged, and even demanded by certain figures in this country for years. Public figures.

There needs be no pretending anymore. There needs be no pretenses. No need for debate. Kirk’s entire organization was for debate. His entire public persona was one of a debater. The reason anyone knew his name was because he debated people who held ideas he didn’t agree with. He did it in formal settings and at informal settings. He did it online, on social media, and he did it offline, under a tent, in front of random people on college campuses and public venues. It did not matter who came to the table. He talked to you, quickly, but that was what he did. That was his game. That was his career. He talked.

By no public measure could he be accused of being radical. There is no metric that conforms both to reason and to meter that would reveal what he argued, at any point in his career, radical. Common criticisms against him, ones I leveled myself, were that he was milquetoast, repeating things that were standardized, mainline conservatism, or otherwise, just barely to the right of that aisle. But that made him a bigger target because that granted him broader access and support.

He seemed normal. Why would anyone be upset with such a guy? There were videos, sure, of angry twenty-year-olds spittle-yelling at him about transgenders, but that was just something kids that age did, right? Their animosity, if taken to far enough extremes, could be cowed by the first sight of a policeman in riot gear, or the first squirt of pepper spray at a demonstration, or the first sight of their friend choking on tear gas during street clearing. Oh wait, that was in 2020. That was half a decade ago. Some of those kids were only in high school.

They’ve parroted the same rhetoric for so long that it’s easy to get confused, though. Was that rhetoric violence? They often argued that it was. But real violence, violence that everyone could recognize, only seemed to flow one way.

During the 2016 campaign, riots broke out at so-called demonstrations that resulted in people getting beaned by bike locks and improvised melee objects. And nobody died.

In 2017, Rand Paul’s neighbor broke his ribs. Three years later, he was mobbed during the Summer of Floyd and attacked again. And nobody died.

Also in 2017, James Hodgkinson shot up the yearly Congressional Baseball Game in Alexandria, and nobody died. Except Hodgkinson, later, at the hospital, after wounds sustained from the gunfight he engaged in with police.

In 2020, the Summer of Floyd and Covid resulted in violence the likes the country hadn’t seen since the Rodney King riots in 1992. Quite possibly worse, since 1968. City blocks were burned to the ground. Minneapolis, St. Paul. St. Louis. Seattle. Portland. D.C. Surprisingly, not Baltimore. People died from that, like David Dorn. And others. Regular people, for the most part. Some were found only days after the riots apparently ended, burned to charred remains inside buildings that had been set ablaze.

In 2020, thirteen men were eventually arrested and charged after having been discovered orchestrating the kidnapping of Michigan Governor Democrat Gretchen Whitmer. Twelve of them were federal informants. And nobody died.

On January 6^th 2021, after a year of lock downs, psychological warfare, organized urban violence and generational political tensions, a mob descended on the Capitol building. The doors were opened for them. The police let them in. They walked around. A member of the Capitol Police shot Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed woman who attempted to gain entry to the Speaker’s Lobby, which was eventually opened, anyway. She died. Another member of the Capitol Police suffered two strokes that same day. He died the following day in the hospital.

On July 13^th, 2024, then-campaigning former President Trump turned his head at a rally in Butler Pennsylvania to look at a different teleprompter’s screen. At that moment, a 5.56mm bullet was already in the air toward the approximate center of his skull. This action saved his life, hitting his ear and continuing on its path. But somebody else died: Corey Comperatore, a fifty-year-old former chief of the Buffalo Township Volunteer Fire Company. He was apparently in the way of the assassin’s bullet.

Thomas Matthew Cooks, the assassin, also died. By gunfire.

Between Cooks and Hodgkinson, at least the violence flowed both ways, insofar as the exact limits of discretion permitted.

Kirk was a debater. A rhetorician with some logistical skills in his pocket. He was not a thug or brute, nor was he an assassin. Debate is only possible when a level of civilization is acknowledged and operated within. Kirk was not someone who should ever have been targeted. He was someone who talked to the opposition. As the years have passed and the dialogue between left and right froze or quenched harder as if galvanized into two different metals, Kirk and his team still walked out onto those campus quads with his tent and, only where they were invited, set up shop.

Somebody decided, presumably of his own volition, this sort of thing was a lethal threat to innocent lives, and that it required lethal force to put down. Maybe they watched too much TV. We’ll see when he’s caught.

For my part, I was never a fan of Charlie Kirk. I thought he was a dweeb. His face was too small. His ideas were too small. So were his teeth. He just didn’t get it, I thought. And as Turning Point got the right backers, as he made the right choices, I thought this was all the more proof that he was sinking into the Conservative Inc. swamp of grifters who gatekept the right. Surprisingly, he shifted on topics that at the time seemed like ones any insider would be totally allergic to. Immigration. Crime statistics. Civil Rights. As he continued his work, and as he matured, he came across more sincere than ever. He was no liberal nor libertarian, but he believed in ideas and that there was value in parsing them out with rhetoric and logic. Almost a Millennial born too late. But he made no small platform out of it.

I was never a fan of Charlie Kirk, but I’m a nobody. I run a humble website in a humble corner of the internet, and he ran Turning Point USA. Good for him.

I don’t expect that Kirk was anything less than a real believer in what he touted. He changed his public beliefs with the coherence of one undergoing political transformation, as many Americans can surely relate to, particularly over the last decade. These were his formative years, after all. One expects beliefs to deepen, grow, gain nuance, and some, at times, to fall away. And that’s what I saw, at least in glimpses. Now he has no more formative years.

His assassination comes hot on the heels of Iryna Zarutska’s stabbing, which has propelled the insane degree to which criminal activity has been permitted in American life into the forefront of American consciousness. This was indeed something he was talking about. It’s a point along an intersecting curve.

Tonight, as I finish this, I’m going to go sleep in the same bed my wife sleeps in, under the same modest roof my kids sleep under. Across the country, Charlie Kirk’s body will be part of a crime investigation, and the motion of his body will cease after it has been given the careful attention of a mortician before being placed in a casket and lowered into the ground. There, he will not move in this world until this world’s Final Judgment: the ground will frost over, seasons will change, visits to his grave will become less frequent. Eventually, his grave will be visited for the last time. But one day he will be raised again united with this substance of flesh and given his public verdict, just like the rest of us. God willing and I pray, that verdict is recognition.