My 2 cents on Charlie

It has taken me a week to process last week's assassination of pundit Charlie Kirk. And there is likely much more processing to be done.

Of course I had heard of him. Very few people who dabble in modern sociopolitical discourse could have missed him.

But I honestly knew little about him, apart from his being a conservative commentator. That’s because, as a middle-aged fart, I was not his target audience. His movement, Turning Point USA, was birthed on college campuses with his peers. Astonishingly he was only 18 when he began this movement and it blossomed into a national force under his leadership.

Because of all that, any impression I had of him was obtained through osmosis. I knew he was an unabashed Christian who touted traditional conservative values in both fiscal and social matters. I likened him a bit to Ben Shapiro...conservative nerds with a head full of facts, coupled with an ability to relay those facts in an understandable and relatable manner. That is a very difficult combination to master.

But I also noticed something else. Or rather, something that was missing. Volume. In the clips I came across he was never screaming or yelling. He never seemed to be out of control---or even close to it. He commanded his delivery and his body language like a much older person who was quite comfortable in his own skin.

Another thing I noticed was his willingness...even his *eagerness*...to bring his message directly to likely-hostile audiences. He actively sought out those with different opinions. Not to demonize or argue...but to debate. To exchange ideas.

Yes there are many clips with him smugly outperforming some woefully-overmatched college student with brightly-colored hair. But there were also clips of him engaging respectfully with better-prepared liberals in these same venues. Indeed he seemed to get energized when he was verbally sparring with an intelligent opponent. In an age where political punditry too often rewards the loudest lout in the room, this stood out precipitously.

Charlie may have been our last chance of having honest dialogue about our issues. He was not the one-dimensional, cartoonish villain the people on the left made him out to be. He was willing to talk. He was willing to listen. He routinely went into the proverbial lions den to debate.

He was not some firebrand praying for violence or saying provocative phrases just to get a rise out of people. He was an old school social and fiscal conservative who targeted his peer groups for debate, meeting them where they were.

He was shot not because he was a white supremacist Nazi. He was called a white supremacist Nazi to give deranged young progressives a permission structure to do what one of them did last week.

Neither is he the flawless demigod that some are making him out to be. Whatever martyr status that is conferred upon Kirk needs to recognize that. Yes, he said some things that gave me pause. But when you consider that he was a public speaker who spoke often in his 13-year public career, that's going to happen. One of my old college professors pointed out that if you speak or write long enough, eventually you are going to say or write something stupid. The fact that there are only a handful of statements attributed to Kirk that I strongly reject suggests he had a pretty darn good batting average, all things considered.

Here is the deeper problem from all this madness. History strongly suggests that the movement which forms in the wake of his assassination is NOT going to be as friendly as graceful as Charlie was. Best I could tell, he was someone who honestly tried to channel the better angels of his nature in sharing his views.

His replacements will be FAR less interested in such manners.