Like many people, I was parasocially acquainted with Charlie Kirk. He was a Christian conservative activist, essentially. Since I’m neither Christian nor conservative, I didn’t find his content very interesting, but I was aware of him, and I was shocked by his death.
I first learned about Charlie Kirk during the “Groyper Wars” of 2019, when he was the target of real-life trolling by Nick Fuentes’s “groypers”. I didn’t align with either side in that frog-mouse war. I just found it entertaining.
If you don’t know what a groyper is, see:
I watched Charlie Kirk’s death on video. He was talking to someone in the audience, doing his typical thing. A shot rang out, the impact rippled through his body, he tensed up, and then he collapsed. He was dead in an instant. Maybe the paramedics managed to restart his heart, and kept him alive (in some sense) for a while, but he was already gone.
Death is always horrific to witness. It is difficult to grasp the profound transition between life and death. One minute, a person is going about his normal life, doing what he normally does. Thoughts and experiences are running through his mind, and blood is running through his veins. The next moment, he is gone. Death remains a mystery, even if we understand it intellectually.
It’s hard for me to imagine someone hating Charlie Kirk, especially to the point of wanting him dead. I can understand why some people hate Trump. He is often rude and arrogant. He has a checkered past. He wields power in a way that often seems clumsy or stupid. But Charlie Kirk was very different. He came across as a nice guy, someone you would want to sit next to on a plane, someone you could talk to, someone you could disagree with and still shake hands. He was a family man, with a wife and young children. He tried to engage with with the woke left, politely and (mostly) in good faith. And yet, many people on the left hated him and what he represented.
What did he represent? He started out representing milk-toast American conservatism, aka “Boomer conservatism”. Over time, he drifted toward a more reactionary position on immigration and the deep state. He also became more overtly Christian. So, to the left, he came to represent the new “fascist” right.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination was significant not only because it was clearly a political assassination aimed at MAGA republicans and the new right, but also because of the leftist response to it. Many leftists celebrated his assassination on social media. Many left-leaning news outlets emphasized his “controversial” takes. (Like the CBC, for example.) On one broadcast, people were heard laughing in the background at the news of his death.
The culture war is essentially a religious war. Wokism is a new religion, and it claims authority over all people and all aspects of life. The schism in our culture is between woke and anti-woke factions. The anti-woke side does not have a unified worldview. It includes atheists, Christians and some people of other faiths. They are only united by their opposition to wokism.
This war is asymmetric in other ways. The two sides have a different view of what is going on. The anti-woke side views the woke side as misguided, perhaps insane, but still part of the same society. The woke side, however, views the anti-woke as moral outsiders, as evil.
This explains why there is no woke version of Charlie Kirk. The woke do not engage with their opposition in dialogue. There are woke public figures, such as Hasan Piker, but they do not actively try to engage with the other side. Instead, they just vilify the other side from a distance.
Charlie Kirk went to college campuses to engage in dialogue with young people, including many on the opposing side. He did not treat them as evil scum who should be excluded from society. He treated them as fellow human beings and members of his society who could be persuaded to change their beliefs. There is nothing like that on the woke left.
Wokists will engage with the opposition on social media only briefly, to insult and preach, before blocking. They fear the ideas of the other side. They believe that opposing views are evil, constitute violence, and must be suppressed. They are intolerant. This assassination is just an extreme example of that intolerance. It follows naturally from popular leftist slogans, such as “Make fascists afraid again”. (You can purchase a T-shirt with that slogan from Amazon.)
Because wokists reject dialogue, they respond to disagreement by trying to use force to silence the other side. Sometimes, they use institutional power, such as getting a person fired from his job, or getting a campus talk cancelled due to “security concerns”. Sometimes, they use mob violence, such as rioting. It is a short step from condoning “mostly peaceful protests” to condoning political assassination.
The political goal of killing Charlie Kirk was to stop dialogue.
The killer in this case, Tyler Robinson, seems to have acted alone. I don’t know much about him, but he seems to fit the “autistic killer” pattern, like Adam Lanza, Elliot Rodger and others. My guess is that he was motivated more by alienation and the desire for notoriety than wokism. He wanted to carve his initials in the world, so to speak. Of course, his political/religious beliefs played a role, especially in his choice of a target, but I don’t think they can explain what he did.
However, it isn’t that important why this individual did what he did. The reaction to the killing is more important. It shows that the culture war is far from over.
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