How I’m Staying White-Pilled In The Wake Of Charlie Kirk’s Assassination

It’s been difficult for everyone—difficult for liberals, stewing in self-induced ragebait that strips them of their humanity, and difficult for conservatives, tempted to abandon their principles for the chance to exact revenge on the very stewards of cancel culture who never hesitate to wield it.

There have already been attempts to weaponize Kirk’s death to shill for certain causes, pushing slippery-slope policies like the penalization of “hate speech”—a precedent that defies settled constitutional law and Supreme Court rulings on protected expression, and, worst of all, disgraces the very legacy Kirk lost his life defending. We’ve had to watch people we thought were our close friends and family members who love us, work colleagues and associates who respected us, throw their support behind a vengeful cause that justifies political violence against those they disagree with. 

The air feels charged with hatred and spite. The left refuses to empathize with a father, husband, and son who was brutally murdered simply for championing ideals they despised, as if freedom of expression or even, bleaker, just freedom to coexist, is contingent on bending the knee. It’s been a wake-up call for many of us who thought this level of radical tribalism, of endorsement for literal terrorism, hardly existed in the West. Meanwhile, conservatives are looking around at this madness, eyeing the moment as a chance to even the score. “After all, why shouldn’t I?” they ask, tempted to get libs celebrating Kirk’s murder fired from their jobs, banned from social media, ostracized from society, potentially even legally prosecuted. 

The air feels charged with hatred and spite.

Obviously, we have a lot of problems, and we’ve been given plenty of reasons to despair, to blackpill, to succumb to rage and vengeance and nihilism. To throw out our principles, abandon the social contract, and stew in the endless stream of ragebait that social media, the news, politicians, and terminally online commentators supply us. Now, more than ever, it’s important to maintain perspective of the bigger picture: that people are slaves to their emotions, impulsively say things they don’t mean or haven’t thought about, and are highly impressionable. That creates a cocktail of useful idiocy that certainly advances evil, but it doesn’t render people irredeemably evil themselves.

Kirk’s life’s work rested on the belief that people are fundamentally good and worth saving. That is why he spent years touring college campuses, inviting the students who disagreed with him most to step to the front and speak their piece. If he thought people were impervious to reason, he would not have bothered debating day after day. At times it seemed like a masochistic exercise, facing detractors whose hostility was matched only by their incoherence, clinging to positions he had already shown to be illogical or unethical. And if he thought people were beyond empathy, he would not have worked so hard to reach them, often with real success.

Take, for example, Kirk’s ability to cut through the steely exteriors of his opponents, dispelling their preconceived ideas about him and the broader movement through his gentle conduct. Whether it was in the grace he afforded those who hurled vitriol at him or in his measured responses that offered insight rather than venom (as so many of his rage-possessed opponents resorted to, especially on issues like abortion), Kirk remained an amiable sparring partner. That is what made him so effective. His calm not only won over countless spectators, both in person and online, but it also exposed the emotional instability of his opponents, who could not temper their outrage or respond with coherent reason. He could not have left a better legacy.

I’ve watched him talk to people from all walks of life; people the uninitiated would confidently label as his “enemies,” those he supposedly antagonized with hateful rhetoric. But when you play back the clips, reality stands in stark contrast to their caricatures. Speaking with young trans people struggling with their gender identity, contrary to the narrative that Kirk spreads hatred against this community, he offered compassionate guidance as a young woman identifying as a transgender male confronted the dizzying (and often permanent) medical choices that come with transitioning. She was concerned about withholding gender affirming care from transgender children and adolescents, citing her own early experiences with gender dysphoria as a child, but openly admitting that she doesn’t know what’s true and what’s not. 

Charlie prefaced his answer with the fact that he was going to give her an opinion that very few people will ever tell her: “I want you to be very cautious putting drugs into your system in the pursuit of changing your body. I instead encourage you to work on what’s going on in your brain first. I think what you need first and foremost is just a diagnosis, just someone that is going to listen to what you’ve gone through, listen to what else is going on. My prayer for you, and again, very few people will say this, I actually want to see you be comfortable in how you were born." To this, she responds with a receptive “yeah.” 

He went on, “I know that you might not feel that way, but I think that is something that you can achieve. I think that with the right team and the right people, you don’t have to wage war on your body; you can learn to love your body.” Nothing is more indicting against the trans lobby (by which I mean a damaging cult of ideology, not indiscriminate hatred directed at trans-identifying people) that wants to hack off children’s body parts, erase biological sex, and insist the opposition are all hateful fascists endangering their lives than this conversation. If Kirk represents hate, I can only imagine what they consider love. Essentially, “Your boos mean nothing. I’ve seen what makes you cheer.”

Speaking to a group of women on the Whatever podcast, some of whom participate in the production of pornographic material, Kirk spent the duration of the podcast trying to convince them that God had a better plan for them. “I know that might sound preachy and not what you want to hear, but maybe you’ll have an encounter with God. Jesus loves all of you. He can transform your life; he transformed my life. Every day is a new day; it’s a hopeful, beautiful life ahead of you. God loves every single one of us. We’re all sinners and Jesus died for our sins.” 

The usually indignant panel? Warm. Receptive. In their feminine energy. “You're definitely the most respectful one that I’ve seen,” said one of the participants. Kirk remained modest even about his decorum, owing his grace not to his own strength of character, but to the Holy Spirit. Kirk isn’t the first person to go on this show and proclaim to these women that they need to accept Jesus Christ into their hearts and that they’ll pray for them, but he is the first I’ve witnessed do it with sincerity, not with condescension.

Journalist Jennifer Greenberg observed Kirk to be “one of the only men who could have gone onto this podcast and told these women about Jesus, and about God’s love for them, without lusting, without judging, and without watering down the truth. This is who many are calling a ‘misogynist.’ This is who was murdered.” It’s a great point, too, because this ethos reverberates throughout Kirk’s exchanges. He was an astute conversationalist. He walked a delicate balance between holding firm on his principles, conveying his thoughts (often about deeply unpopular beliefs) articulately, and without concessions, but simultaneously upholding respect and compassion for the person for whom the issue they’re debating is often deeply personal.

Perhaps what best illustrates his commitment to walking this line can be understood by the passionate way he explains to a student how John: 8 best embraces Christ’s mercy and love but also his commitment to truth. “Sometimes, in the modern Gospel, we overemphasize the grace and we underemphasize the truth, and so we are far too willing to say hey Jesus loves everybody, but we don’t get to the second part of the conversation that says Jesus doesn’t want you to live in sin.” Charlie explains, “Jesus was 100% grace and truth, and that tension is very hard in a modern world.”

It’s like they really couldn’t have picked a more stand-up guy to be a martyr for the cause. There are hours upon hours of backlogged footage, and the worst thing they can find that this guy ever said about his political enemies who want to kill him is “God bless you, I hope that you find God and accept Jesus as your savior because we’re all God’s children and he will welcome you into the kingdom of heaven." It’s poetic, really. That’s why so many have to resort to lies, claiming he made this or that comment or held vile thoughts about a certain group of people, always misconstruing or omitting crucial context. 

As much character assassination and terrorist apologism have taken place in the last couple weeks, they can’t suppress the raw reality of who Charlie was, thanks to the beautiful testimonies of his loved ones. They can’t suppress what he fought for, because the movement is now stronger than ever. They can’t suppress his own words, who many have gone to great lengths on social media to correct the record with threads disputing claims that Kirk is racist: here is a video of him rebuking racism and dispelling the notion that there is a DNA-level difference between races, “racism is a social construct that I want to break out of.” 

Or owning this guy using red pill talking points to pin the divorce rate entirely on women: ”Women might initiate the divorce proceeding, but we are the ones as men that ignore the subterranean threat and the brush fire that is growing,” Kirk responded. “We’re the ones that should take the family back to church, that go seek counseling if necessary, and it’s not good enough just to say it’s women that initiated. It’s men who don’t act confidently and strong enough, in most cases, to actually make sure that marriage is a safe haven to have children in a holy, protected place.” 

Or his take down of a homophobic conservative at a TPUSA event during his Culture War tour, who criticized Kirk for his and TPUSA’s platforming and tolerance of “homosexuals,” claiming they had no place in the conservative movement, to which Kirk responded that appropriately interpreting what theology says for the individual is only part of being a Christian. It also requires patience, love, and kindness. “Jesus Christ talked to all people. He went and did his ministry through Judea and Samaria, and he had dinner with tax collectors, he had dinner with prostitutes, and he did his ministry in every part of the Mediterranean. What it means to be a Christian, my friend, is to be open-minded but firm in your belief, so you can have that belief, but if you say there’s something inherently wrong with communicating or associating just because they make different personal decisions than you, then you, sir, are not a Conservative.” 

Each time detractors tried to brand him a racist, accuse him of hating gays, or insist he was spreading vitriol, the evidence of how he lived, spoke, and conducted himself stood in direct contradiction. Had he been quicker to anger, less charitable, or unsuccessful in persuading those who began as sycophants of ideology, he would have been no more deserving of the tragedy that ended his life, but it would also be far more damaging to the cause and the fundamental ethos he sought to promote. I believe Kirk would take solace in knowing that his greatest advocacy was not in presidential endorsements, “owning the libs,” writing books, or rubbing shoulders with politicians, but in modeling the very ideals he urged others to adopt. 

He would look people in the eye who wanted him dead every single day and say, “God bless you, I hope you find God, and I will defend your right to say the things you say.” He discouraged people from attacking deranged leftists who came to debate him, and he condemned cancel culture with his full chest. I know that he would have risen above doxxing or attempting to get someone fired from their job, so while I can understand why some on the right no longer have the patience and are tired of constantly turning the other cheek, it really is in wanting to keep Charlie’s spirit alive that I don’t even desire to seek retribution in that way. It’s like he’s given me the strength to rise above it. It’s legitimately an untenable option for me. 

I want to live in a society where we don’t kill our political enemies and where we can make offensive jokes on Twitter without getting fired from our jobs ten years later and likewise can say things we don’t mean in the heat of the moment and even if you can find an example that actually disproves my point, I think that’s probably a good legacy to leave: to inspire people to be just as good if not better than you rather than worse. It’s beyond even “we have to be principled because the pendulum will swing back the other way and we won’t always have the power,” it’s that I have genuine pity for these people. 

Kirk’s life’s work rested on the belief that people are fundamentally good and worth saving.

So, despite the left’s inappropriate tone policing of the right in the past week, whether it be the callous “obituaries” that slander his character or the finger pointing at the right for drawing attention to legitimate concerns about left-wing tolerance for political violence or even the suggestion for Kirk’s widow to bite her tongue and avoid stirring up division for delivering an impassioned eulogy filled with righteous anger, it’s Kirk himself that inspires me to hold myself to a higher standard. Not to pull the whole “when they go low, we go high,” but well, maybe we should. It was always in allowing the libs to demonstrate their poor impulse control and emotional regulation that we emerged as the obvious adults in the room. 

The Senate has just unanimously passed a resolution to make October 14, Kirk's birthday, a the National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk. Viral compilations show people swarming to church services inspired by Kirk’s devotion to his faith. Vigils and marches in his honor, in honor of freedom of expression, have taken place across the world. I attended a vigil for Kirk the other night at a university in Australia, where turnout was so high that we ran out of candles. I listened to beautiful speeches, touching testimonies, and moving tributes. 

It felt surreal—full circle. Kirk was some kid with far-fetched ambitions to take back the universities. It seemed ridiculously optimistic even a few years ago, let alone when he first started. And look at them now. I sat there at a vigil at a university campus on the other side of the world, where people were mourning this young American man, telling us he gave them the courage to be a young conservative in college with conviction and with pride.

As we mourn Charlie Kirk and honor his legacy, we can say with confidence that he was a man of great moral character. Not that he was never wrong or never had missteps and certainly not that he never made a clumsy, erroneous statement, but he did more to advance civility and open debate free from the coercive forces of censorship, force, or threat of violence than he ever did to corrode it. His prophetic warnings about the assassination culture festering on the fringe left, and his insistence that keeping dialogue open with the other side was essential to the survival of democracy, feel more prescient than ever. They may have been able to blow him off before, but everyone is listening now.