Charlie Kirk is Gone, and Our Nation is Worse For It (posted 9/10/25)

Yesterday afternoon I was noodling around with some snarky thoughts on today’s politics for my Friday column, when the news hit that Charlie Kirk had been shot, and then that he had died.    

Like most conservatives, I followed him often over the last several years, and admired his energy and his committed leadership.  He was a solid debater, by turns generous and pointed; he was combative without being hateful, and matched his responses to the good faith (or lack thereof) of his opponents.

A self-educated and hard-working college dropout, he routinely bested his “educated” interlocuters with a combination of good humor and well-chosen counters to the logical fallacies that leftists routinely tried to use against him. 

It’s so sad to see him stolen from us so soon, and right now I’m more angry than anything.  Already a lot of the usual leftist suspects are gloating about and celebrating his murder, while continuing to think of themselves as the good guys in our political debates.  The same creeps who call us Nazis and implicitly justify the violent attacks by their leftist co-religionists – on Steve Scalise, on Trump, on Jews in Boulder and DC, on the Christian school kids in Nashville and Minneapolis, and now on Charlie – have the gall to blame Charlie’s non-violent rhetoric for his murderer’s cowardly act. 

As I write this there is no info yet on Charlie’s killer, but if he turns out to be the kind of hateful,  leftist narcissist we’d most expect, I hope good guys with guns can run him down quickly.  And I hope that they shoot him a lot, and that he dies painfully.  But not too quickly.

I’ll repent for these thoughts later.  But the best I can do right now is to try to find some slight silver lining in this dark cloud of a tragic killing.    

When Rush Limbaugh died in February of 2021, I was glad that he had had the chance to see Trump elected the first time, and to get a Presidential Medal of Freedom from him at Trump’s last SOTU.  But it had to be a bitter pill for him to see Trump lose in 2020, and to see Trump and the GOP at their lowest point, in the wake of January sixth, shortly before Rush died.

By contrast, I’m really glad that Charlie got to see his hard work come to fruition when Trump won in November.  I just re-watched the video of him on election night, surrounded by the conservative young men and women he’d helped inspire and lead.

At a little after midnight, after months of hard work and hours of frantic coverage and endless reading of tea leaves and exit polls, the early returns had begun to look better and better for Trump.  When the news came in that Pennsylvania, and thus the election, had been called for Trump, Charlie got quiet.  With tears of joy in his eyes and his pretty wife hugging him, he took it all in, while the other guys were buzzing and chattering all around him. 

When one of them noticed that Charlie had become speechless for once, he laughingly called for him to say something.  At that moment, all Charlie could get out was, “I am just humbled by God.”  

A few minutes later he said, “I want you to remember that we did not earn this, that this is God’s mercy on our country.” 

I never met him, of course, but that’s how I’m going to remember Charlie Kirk.  Over the last months I’ve had cause to contemplate the many ways that death can come for us – from Alzheimer’s in old age to a brain tumor out of the blue; from a sudden heart attack to a long, debilitating illness. 

And although 31 is way too soon, and though Charlie leaves a young wife and two children under 3, he died in honest service to God, a good cause, and a great country.  Painful though it is, there are many worse ways to die than that.

Our nation owes him a debt, and to uphold his widow and his children.    

Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.