Charlie Kirk often said, “When people stop talking to each other, that’s when bad things happen.” He was killed for trying to create that dialogue

PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK / PHIL MISTRY

I

must confess Charlie Kirk was barely on my radar screen prior to his assassination. He should have been, if only because he was one of the most influential political actors in America: Turning Point USA, the organization he founded, is credited with having increased the pro-Trump youth vote by 15% to 24% in swing states in 2024 and quite possibly determining the election outcome.

But I had at least seen enough videos of him debating under the banner “Prove Me Wrong” to feel sick to my stomach when I first learned he had been shot. America is circling the drain, I thought to myself.

Senator Bernie Sanders put it well: “A free and democratic society, which is what America is supposed to be, depends upon the basic premise that people can speak out, organize, and take part in public life without worrying that they might be killed, injured, or humiliated for expressing their political views.... That is the essence of what freedom is about and democracy is about.

“You have a point of view — that’s great. I have point of view that is different from yours. That’s great. Let’s argue it out. We make our case to the American people, at the local, state, and federal levels, and we hold free elections in which the people decide what they want.”

More people talking and arguing with one another, rather than retreating to self-reinforcing thought bubbles, is precisely what America needs, and if doing so can get you killed, then the American experiment is not only under attack, as Utah governor Spencer Cox said, but over.

I’m old enough to remember the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, within two months in 1968, not to mention the Weathermen terrorist bombings in the ’70s. But somehow America bounced back.

No one is confident that it will do so this time. As Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The assassinations of the 1960s took place in a healthier country, one that respected itself more.... We are brittler, and we love each other less, maybe even love ourselves less. We have less respect for our own history... and so that can’t act as the adhesive it once was.”

Jeff Jacoby noted another crucial difference between the ’60s and ’70s and now. In the earlier period, “most people watched the same nightly newscasts, read a daily newspaper, absorbed the same facts.” Today, there are thousands of competing public squares due to social media, which thrives on division. People live on social media in their own self-selected echo chambers, never meeting others who have another point of view.

Charlie Kirk often said, “When people stop talking to each other, that’s when bad things happen.” And he was killed for trying to create that dialogue.

AS SICKENED as I was by the initial news, that feeling was multiplied many times over by the celebration of the assassination that erupted on Bluesky and other left-wing sites. Have Americans totally lost their moral compass to mock the murder of a 31-year-old father?

Apparently yes. Liel Liebowitz describes a “society thick with brainwashed young men and women who hate themselves, hate the bodies they were born into, hate their nation and their faith and their families, and take directions from a top-down political infrastructure that instructs them what to think and when. It’s precisely the sort of environment that breeds shooters.”

MSNBC “analyst” Matthew Dowd began his analysis the night of the shooting by speculating that Kirk might have been shot by one of his fans shooting off a gun in a celebratory mood. He then echoed MSNBC host Katy Tur in calling Kirk a “divisive” figure pushing “hate speech” against certain groups. Summing up, Dowd opined that hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. In short, Kirk brought it upon himself.

Dowd’s comments, for which he was fired, were very far from the worst circulating. But they are nevertheless instructive. For one thing, Charlie Kirk was the farthest thing from hateful. Adam Rubenstein, who wrote a profile of him for the now defunct Weekly Standard, which Turning Point’s publicist hated, wrote after his death the word that best described Charlie Kirk was “gracious.” He never resorted to insults or put-downs in his many public debates. Even those determined to dislike him found it impossible to do so when they met him in person. He was, according to Heather Mac Donald in City Journal, the “sunniest personality on the MAGA right — buoyant, optimistic, and eager to engage with those who hated him.”

As for hateful speech against certain groups, that characterization is part of the problem. Opposing, for instance, biological and anatomical men in women’s restrooms or locker rooms or their participating in women’s sports — a position supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans — is not a call for “genocide” against those who advocate for those things.

That, however, is a common progressive meme. And it may help explain why Charlie Kirk’s assassin, Tyler Robinson, as well as Audrey Hale, who shot and killed six at a Tennessee Christian school, and Robin Westlake, who recently murdered two children at a Minneapolis Catholic school, all advocate for those positions.

Dowd did not specify what positions made Kirk divisive. So it is hard to tell whether he simply meant that Kirk held positions on a number of issues different from his own.

I have seen lines quoted from the Charlie Kirk Show that I consider crudely put or too much red meat for his primary audience of not-very-intellectual young males. His assertion that the best time in American history was when immigration was held to near zero troubles me, since those tighter restrictions were enacted in part to stop large-scale Jewish immigration from the Pale of Settlement and resulted in closing the gates to many Jews fleeing the Holocaust. But at least I know that Kirk would have given me priority to pose my objections had I been at one of his campus gatherings.

MANY OF THOSE RUSHING to celebrate Kirk’s death were, not surprisingly, university professors and administrators, high school teachers, and college students — i.e., those who have been busy creating a monoculture in schools and on campuses and the products of that monoculture. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Liel Liebowitz wrote, “Charlie Kirk was shot because great forces spent decades reshaping social norms and institutions and creating vast cadres of Americans ready to do great violence to anyone they were led to believe was their enemy.”

Chief among those forces was the progressive takeover of the universities. Almost a decade ago, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt identified “safetyism,” one of the chief tenets of which is that speech is violence, as one of the chief causes of the rapid decline of American higher education. Lukianoff, who heads FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), explains the connection between that doctrine and violence: “Accept the premise that rhetoric is a physical attack and you hand extremists a moral permission slip to answer speech with force.”

Nor is that connection merely theoretical. In a recent FIRE survey of 70,000 students on 257 campuses, just over one-third of the students said that using violence to stop a campus speech can be acceptable in some circumstances, and as many as 72 percent said the same about shouting down speakers.

When coupled with the view that whatever challenges campus orthodoxies is “hate speech,” and those who disagree with the campus orthodoxies are “haters,” whose speech causes harm, a truly toxic brew emerges. As one small example of the impact: 78 percent of Jewish university students, according to a recent ADL study, have felt compelled to hide their Jewish identity.

Not surprisingly, leading universities had no trouble absorbing violent radicals from the late ’60s and ’70s: Bernadine Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayers (among Barack Obama’s early mentors) went from the FBI’s Most Wanted list to teaching at Northwestern and the University of Illinois; Kathy Boudin, who spent 23 years in prison for driving the getaway car in the robbery of a Brinks truck in which three people were killed, ended her life a professor of social work at Columbia.

Charlie Kirk set out to battle the campus monoculture. He sought to imbue conservative students with the confidence to stand up for their beliefs rather than hide them, and provided them with the facts and arguments to defend those beliefs.

NO DISCUSSION of the Kirk assassination would be complete without mention of the magnitude of his loss. He was the most influential person preventing many in the MAGA movement succumbing to their worst impulses, including wild conspiracy theories. Of particular relevance to Jews, he was both a philo-Semite and an ardent defender of Israel.

Videos of him debating students at Cambridge University about Israel’s war against Hamas are readily available. And Prime Minister Netanyahu eulogized him as a “lion-hearted defender of Israel.”

Among his earliest mentors were Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro. The Jerusalem Post ran a piece last week titled “I Am an Orthodox Jew Because of Charlie Kirk.” The author, Adam Sharf, describes the encounter with Kirk, then only 22, which led to his eventually learning in Machon Shlomo for two years, prior to Harvard Law School: “It was his conviction that moral truths exist outside of us, that G-d is an objective reality, not a construct. He forced me to ask whether I was living as if G-d was real, and whether I was honoring a tradition I barely understood. He never tried to convert me. What he said instead changed my life: ‘It’s important that you be Jewish.’ ”

Kirk and his wife, Erika, even wrote a book advocating for a form of the “Jewish Sabbath,” with total abstention from outside communications, to be released in December.

He also fought against the persistent anti-Semitism within parts of the MAGA movement, and the popular influencers fanning it, chief among them Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. In one clip I watched, he labeled Owens’s views “demonic,” before advising listeners not to become “losers” by scapegoating others, in this case the Jews, for their own various failures and unhappiness.

Unfortunately, he never cut ties with Carlson, who has himself platformed Owens and whose Jewish conspiracy theories rival hers in nuttiness. But it is a measure of the degree that Carlson and company saw him as an obstacle to their efforts to steer the MAGA right from support for Israel that in the immediate wake of his murder, they fanned rumors that Israel was behind his murder because he was about to abandon his longstanding support. That, despite the fact that the assassin’s motivations clearly have nothing to do with Israel.

Finally, Charlie Kirk’s biggest fans were young, college-age men. And for them, he was a bulwark against the violent misogyny that has drawn too many in that demographic.

It is crucial to remember that he was as much a religious revivalist, as he was a political figure, who believed that America could only be saved through a recommitment to Bible, faith, and family. He had created an adjunct of Turning Point USA called TPUSA Faith, with summit meetings, study groups, and online courses, and had just opened his first brick-and-mortar Christian high school.

In a lengthy 2022 interview with the Atlantic’s Isaac Stanley-Becker, who had been following him for years and written critically of TPUSA, he spoke of his legacy, though he was not yet 30. “I’m more focused on education, transformational, multi-decade change,” than on the momentary ebb and flow of electoral politics. Creating “Biblical citizens,” imbued with Judeo-Christian values, was the ultimate goal.

His energy, organizational skills, charm, and intelligence will not be replaced. To America’s great loss. (Stanley-Becker describes him answering questions in full paragraphs, not one-liners.) But neither did the assassin’s bullet succeed in ending his mission forever. Within days of his assassination, TPUSA received 32,000 inquiries about opening new chapters.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1081. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)