On 10 September 2025, Charlie Kirk was gunned down. He was, like me, only a few weeks shy of his thirty-second birthday, just getting his life started. Happily married, a father of two, and poised to bring a career that had begun in the wilderness of college campuses to its next step, or even further. Not necessarily more statesmanlike, for he was always gentle, well-spoken, and scrupulously fair. His only “fault” was that he had opinions that diverged from the progressivist zeitgeist. He was marked chiefly for that, and for that he was slain. Mind you: his politics was not the whole reason. We will return to this later.
Of his killer, Tyler Robinson, I will not say much. There are anons on Twitter/X who have analysed his motivations and his perversions in a far more granular fashion than I can manage. Suffice it to say that, for Robinson, heaping scorn on Kirk (and his ilk) was not enough. He was driven by his fixations to climb a rooftop, armed with a rifle, and kill a man in cold blood. Robinson risked arrest and execution to murder a man who, for all his celebrity, did not yet command explicit political authority. I am not intimately familiar with Utah’s death penalty statutes, where Kirk met his end. But there is no doubt that this was a premeditated murder by a man fully compos mentis. Robinson may well be headed for the electric chair.
For what? What could Kirk possibly have said to provoke such murderous derangement? I cannot pretend to know. My friends say I lack theory of mind: I struggle to imagine how others think. This inability, I gather, accompanies autism. They may well have a point. But my moral sense is intact, and I share with Kirk the conviction that man can abstract truth from what he sees. Whatever the murk of another man’s mind, I can say with confidence that there was nothing in Kirk’s words, nor in how he said them, to merit such violence.
As Bishop Robert Barron said in his eulogy, Kirk died as he lived: with a microphone in his hand. Kirk was, to the end, a debater: patient, persistent, unwilling to meet words with anything but words. He embodied free and open debate; he did not censor others, nor did he shy away from issues of consequence. His own position was remarkably moderate: nothing he believed was not mainstream not so long ago. He was not smarmy or smug. Unlike, say, Ben Shapiro, he did not make a sport of “owning SJWs with facts and logic”. Nor did he farm resentment or peddle in what many on the online right term “outrage porn”. He eschewed violence; neither did he mock those with whom he disagreed. If he had a guiding belief (beyond his personal faith), it was that people could arrive at the truth through courageous, honest, civil discourse. This trust drove his life’s work. For that, he was murdered.
Understand this. Kirk believed that man could apprehend the truth through reason and memory, understanding and imagination. He believed that there was a truth to reach. Kirk was articulating a view that has undergirded Christian, Western civilisation (and, until fairly recently, its fractured successors) for millennia. In this vision – but not necessarily in those of the successors – there is an objective moral order and an order of meaning, both subsisting in the Creator, Who is their source and guarantor. As creatures, as children of this Creator – above all, as brothers redeemed by the scandal of the Creator upon the Cross – we are beholden to that order. We must submit to it, body and soul. Apart from it, talk of progress or improvement or law or justice makes no sense. Acknowledging this truth is the sine qua non of debate; the rest is detail (important detail, maybe, but nonetheless secondary). Yet, by the time Kirk came on the scene, this most basic truth had been driven underground.
What remained of this vision in mainstream discourse was flotsam and driftwood. “Common-sense”, perhaps, was the most intact heir. Yet even this had been unmoored from any referent beyond the political requirements of the day. Thus: common-sense gun control, common-sense school curriculum reform, common-sense COVID-19 church shutdowns, common-sense abortion of babies with Down’s syndrome, common-sense euthanasia.
We shall not now explore how this came to be. That tale is complex and long and sad, and quite beyond the scope of this essay.
Suffice it to say that Kirk sought, at times explicitly, to fight his way (and ours) out of this desert of un-meaning. He was not a metaphysician. Yet at times the fight required him to insist that being devoted to the Creator, being a Christian, meant hewing fast to the truth. It meant naming falsehood and calling sin what it is. Kirk knew well that this was not a “winning” proposition in our orphaned age. As he remarked in a late interview, “Imagine how much trouble today you would get in if you would go up to somebody and say: stop sinning. Well, you’re being too judgemental. No, no – you’re actually being Christ-like.” Kirk knew, then, that debate was a means to an end. The end was nothing less than the reconciliation and reconsecration of the nation – and ultimately the world – to God. This was his witness. This was the threat he presented.
With this in mind, let us consider the responses that his murder has evoked. There have been vigils, yes, and panegyrics; many have offered their support to his widow and his children. Many, myself included, continue to pray for the rest of his soul. Some have even declared him a martyr; still others warn that he does not qualify as one under some ecclesiastical law or other. A great many (I would like to think they are in the majority) have decried the sheer brutality of this act. These are all human and even Christian reactions – thank God that He has not wholly abandoned us.
But the rest? Ordinarily, I would avert my eyes from the ghoulish glee that they have been showing. The most common sentiment on this end of the spectrum, when they have broken silence, is that Kirk was a fascist, and so it is good that he was offed.
That is unsurprising. Western political morality still anchors itself in the passion play of the Holocaust. The actual history of that great crime – and its setting within the still greater tragedy of the Second World War – is, of course, irrelevant to the discourse. As is the meaning of the word “fascist”. Like an accordion, it contracts and expands at need. It has become a totem to wield against the enemy, a curse-word, channelling the bottomless emotive potency of the Holocaust. “Never again” is the one commandment, so when a fascist (or someone so designated) presents himself, all bets are off.
But to see so very many celebrate what is, by any sane metric, a cold-blooded murder disgusts and chills me in equal measure. One of my friends wrote that he could not help but think that such gloating would meet his murder too, and he is a “bleedin’-heart liberal” compared to Kirk. I agree. What, then, is going on? Why is someone who discusses gentleman’s attire on Twitter leaping to defend the President-elect of the Oxford Union – the dishevelled, disrespectful slob who cheered the killing? Why did Jimmy Kimmel, whose chief failing is being unfunny, try to paint Robinson as Kirk’s fellow-traveller in the “MAGA gang”? Why is a British councillor posting on Facebook that Kirk brought it on himself, and good riddance?
The issue, pace Rev. Robert Sirico, is not the “ubiquity and legitimisation of violence”. Neither is it political polarisation, nor, indeed, is it an outgrowth of rhetorical animosity that fails to respect the dignity of the individual. These are, at best, proximate causes. The true issue lies deeper – and we return here to my original claim that politics was not all that Kirk was killed for.
For violence is not the problem here. I do not decry the application of violence, nor even political violence. There are things such as retributive justice and just war. We cannot eschew violence altogether. That is a utopian suggestion – let us not live in a fool’s paradise. The problem is that Robinson and those cheering him on are, in the final analysis, evil. They serve a master who is opposed – and always has been – to the God whom Kirk followed. Their servitude has grades, of course, and their excuses vary. My Guardian-reading friends who have kept their peace occupy a less exalted rung on the “lowerarchy”. Robinson with his rifle is nearer the Pit.
We must allow ourselves to admit this moral reality. Of course this does not mean that they are beyond saving, or that we cannot remain friends or parley with them. Not recognising this serves no-one. What is ironic, of course, is that the Robinsons of the world do not deny this calculus exists. The light by which they see might be wan and sickly, but it illuminates all the same. They are extremists because they understand how zero-sum the game of morality is. To the extent that their acts are ugly, their beliefs repulsive, and their sense of beauty inverted, they are at least consistent with the master they serve. They hate goodness. They hate beauty. They hate the truth. They hated what they saw in Kirk; they hated his beautiful wife and his ruddy-cheeked children. Their gloating is therefore wholly accordant. The horror, if they are not beyond horror, is not that they see too little, but that they see enough – and choose the horror regardless.
I hope I am wrong, but I believe there will be more Kirks in the future. This battle that we are in – which Kirk knew, and which, irony of ironies, Robinson also knew – does not end until the Son of Man sits in glory upon Zion. We must then steel ourselves, and gird our loins, not in revenge and despair, but with truth, courage, and fidelity. We must not for a moment forget just what is at stake. Debate, witness, prayer, and hope remain our weapons – our last and only defences – against the darkness that would devour all.
 | A guest post by
|