Now is the time of monsters — Charlie Kirk Passes into history but his influence looms large

The idea of America – right from its birth – channelled rebellion and revolution. Charlie Kirk’s mission in his life – and now in his death – fits into that pattern and a continuing relevance for American politics.

Even before examining Kirk’s impact, coming to grips with aspects of American history is important. Even before there was the US, what would become that nation evolved out of rebellions against the ways of England. The idea of the new land was subsumed within a history of seizing hold of a continent and its untransformed landscape and subduing its inhabitants. Or, as the poet Robert Frost observed, “The land was ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a hundred years. Before we were her people.”

But as that new country was born, its laws and traditions embraced the enduring myths of rugged individualism and the rights of individuals to live their lives as they saw fit. If things got too crowded or tame, they could move westward and start afresh. Or, as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn says at the end of the novel that bears his name, “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

Concurrently, the right to bear arms for self-protection, despite the country’s evolution into a largely urban world, remains sacrosanct to many in the US. They see such a right as embedded deeply in the country’s basic laws. And for some, there are times when a person must settle things or defend their lives and possessions through the use of weapons, like a real-life version of a Western film.

Simultaneously, the idea of rebelling against existing rules and officialdom lives on in the US psyche. It helps give birth to populist political movements of poor farmers, factory workers and miners; it propelled the slave-owning Southern aristocracy’s attempt to break with the national government; it contributed to the rise of religious cults, and it energised individual, anarchical, sometimes inchoate acts of rebellion against government. While such ideas might eventually become the emotional and intellectual underpinnings for mainstream politicians, a dissent from prevailing ideologies has been a constant of US life — often with a resistance to such efforts by other social forces. For every yin, there is a yang.

The ideas of Charlie Kirk, a man who on Wednesday, 10 September was fatally shot on a Utah college campus, have their roots in a pushback against the seeming prevalence of those irritating, even “oppressive” left-liberal ideas and their promoters.

As the conservative commentator David French wrote in The New York Times just after Kirk’s death:

“An assassin’s bullet cut down Charlie Kirk, one of the nation’s most prominent conservative activists and commentators, at a public event on the campus of Utah Valley University. Kirk was a husband and the father of two small children. He was also a hero to countless conservative college students. And now he’s gone.

“Kirk might have been the most successful conservative political personality in America not named Donald Trump. He helped found Turning Point USA in 2012 and built it into the most influential conservative youth organization in the United States. And that was only one part of Kirk’s empire. He put together a vast get-out-the-vote operation for the 2024 election [supporting Donald Trump’s candidacy]. He hosted a popular podcast. But to simply recite a list of his accomplishments is to understate the impact of his life and of his death.

“As Emily Jashinsky, a Washington correspondent for Unherd, put it on X: ‘Charlie Kirk is a fixture of the Gen Z social media diet. People feel like they know him. This will hit very, very close to home in ways we are not prepared for.’ That is exactly right. When an assassin shot Kirk, that person killed a man countless students felt like they knew, and the assassin killed him on a college campus. Many students will take this loss personally. Many others will now feel a sense of dread on their own campuses.”

Trump had embraced this aspect and ordered US flags across the nation to be flown at half mast.

As to where the crime took place and why Kirk had been so eagerly cheered on by audiences, too often it is easy to think of students on university and college campuses as automatically of the left politically. (Keep in mind that in an earlier era, a majority of an earlier generation of young voters voted for Richard Nixon over both of his challengers in the 1968 and 1972 elections.

The ‘manosphere’

It is also important to realise that Kirk’s ideas reached back to an older set of ideas that resonated with millions. That was a yearning for a world of clarity and purpose,  where white heterosexual men were clearly in the pound seats. By contrast, women, ethnic, racial and sexual preference minorities must be positioned well below that tier. Kirk’s worldview was one of a “manosphere” pummelled from many directions — and needing a robust defence.

That was a world where such traditional, god-given determinations were seen as under threat from the unruly hordes expressing — or acting upon — all those dangerous, even subversive, woke ideas. This was a distant echo of how an earlier generation of politicians of the right mocked and threatened the dreaded hippies and their drugs and long hair, the university students in their elite schools, the infamous draft dodgers, black revolutionaries and women’s libbers a half a century earlier.

Kirk could tell listeners and acolytes, playing to their own preconceptions and fears, “[Black women like] Joy Reid, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Michelle Obama … used affirmative action because they do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken serious … so they had to steal a white person’s slot.” And to many, such formulations seemingly were the ideal, rather than a throwback to a much less equal world.

In step with the traditional sense of rebellion, the continuing importance of lethal firearms in the hands of virtually anyone who wished to be armed has allowed people to snuff out the lives of those they have disagreed with — actions that might help salve their sense of grievance.

The middle ground is disappearing

But beyond that, there is yet one more crucial element. And that is the way social media (along with much of the chatter on talk radio and podcasts such as Kirk’s) is helping engender and turbocharge the consequences of such anger, fears, and grievance.

Thus, the middle ground for any understanding of the complexity of the world or any potential for a tolerance of opposing views is increasingly absent. While we do not yet know the nature of the ideas that drove Kirk’s killer, we should remember that the person who killed a Minnesota legislator a short while ago, as well as the people who have attacked schools, churches, mosques and synagogues, the Centers for Disease Control, and individuals at Holocaust memorials seemingly were all driven by grievances that could only be addressed through bullets.

As French said in The New York Times, “Every threat, every assault, every shooting, every murder — and certainly every political assassination — builds the momentum of hate and fear. You can look at the history of American conflict and unrest and see the same pattern time and again. What starts as a political difference becomes a blood feud the instant someone is hurt or killed. And so each act of political violence has a double consequence. It shatters families, and — over time — it breaks nations. Already we’re seeing calls for vengeance online. In post after post, Kirk’s grieving friends and allies are declaring that ‘we’re at war’ and ‘THIS IS WAR.’ ”

How many times have readers of this article seen a posting or heard a broadcast comment that commences with a variation of: “Did you hear what A just said about X?” In this way, the battle between the Kirkian forces and whatever passes for wokedom today is joined. The ball rolls downhill ever more furiously.

The phrase “social cohesion” is overused and under-explained, but in a society increasingly ghettoised by economic status and professional categories, those in the cheap seats beyond those who can set the agenda feel increasingly isolated, under-appreciated, demeaned and ignored. Such people were, and still are, Kirk’s people — even if they are ensconced in universities or professional strata.

The problem is no longer that people sit at home, stewing over their separate lonelinesses, angers and fears. In that sense, the popular analysis by Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone”, which despaired at the disappearance of community activities that had bound Americans together, is no longer entirely accurate. Instead, people are now increasingly bound together electronically, reinforcing each others’ grievances, slights, fears and angers.

The US has become a nation whose people are increasingly bound together with those who live, shop, read, watch, listen and act similarly — and who even find those of the “other side” to be possible candidates for extirpation, rather than communication, discussion and debate. Add in hundreds of millions of firearms, and the result is what we see now.

Kirk’s people are saying they must prepare for battle against the other side. How this will end is hard to predict, but it is almost certain that those who will carry Kirk’s banner forward are people unwilling to accept half measures or compromise — or so they say. And the forces they despise may be discussing much the same thing. This is not going to end well. DM