Charlie Kirk Is Dead and I am Sad (Sad And Angry)

Charlie Kirk is dead. And I am sad. Sad and angry.

I am sitting here on September 11 in Sydney, on a pouring wet spring morning, trying to take it in.

Yes, September 11.

I remember sitting in our lounge in Perth late that night in 2001 while Jill was feeding our baby daughter watching in horror as the Twin Towers came down.

Back then, in the aftermath of those events, the West sincerely believed that the existential problem it had was coming from the outside. We had to ensure that we were better organised and that our borders were more secure.

Now waking up to the terrible news that Charlie Kirk has been shot and killed at a university reveals the ugly truth: the existential problem of the West has come from the inside. Our borders can be as secure as we like, the people that truly hate us come from within us. We have rotted from within.

We have bred and nurtured a cohort of people who hate everything that the West stands for even while the suckle at its teat. Born into a world in which they are told to spot a micro-aggression at 20 feet, they think nothing of screaming hatred to Jews in the streets, or shouting abuse at Charlie Kirk on campuses. Are our halls of learning proud of these folk?  Will they have any legacy other than their hatred to hand on to the next generation?

When I read these verses in 2 Timothy 3, I think of that cohort:

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.  People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.

And the very universities in the USA which were established to bring praise to God are now the very universities where these vices are taught as virtues, where professors who hold to such vices are granted tenure, and from where such sick minds are unleashed on the world.

Which means that while I am sad and angry that Charlie Kirk has been killed, many of these students will not be sad and angry. They will be gleeful. Just as gleeful as many of them, along with their professors, were gleeful on October 7 2023.

We have become inured to the lust for death among the post-Christian pagan West. We have become inured about their almost slavish apology for radical Islam, which draws them like so many naive moths to a hot flame. And the great and the good in the mainstream media will excuse it. Again.

Politically I am not as conservative as Charlie was, though I agree with the direction of many of his positions, but his ability to argue with someone and not lose his cool, was legendary. He never got rattled. And the behaviour of his interlocuters raised the question: If they – as they believe – are on the side of love and virtue and righteousness, why are they such abusive, disgusting people?

Can they not even raise an argument with their opponent without swearing and demeaning him? No they can’t, because they have been taught at every university across the West, that the position they disagree with has no validity and therefore neither do those who hold that position. As we now know, the hatred of the Left for its opponents is not a bug, it’s a feature.

Charlie could sit at a table and smile  as rabid university students ranting and “F-bombing” him, abusing his lack of university education, yelling at him that he shouldn’t be on campus (all the stuff that the left have in lieu of intellectual rigour these days).

He could take all of the aggression and cursing out, and then stop and ask “Yes, but what argument are you presenting?”

And usually – mostly – it was no argument at all.  The Left has no cogent argument left these days. The fall of communism left the Left scratching around for a purpose. If Marxism could not work at the economic level – if the haters could not divide the people on the basis of scratchy economics – then let’s therapeutise Marxism.

And so, for the past fifty years or so we have had a successively more outrageous conquer and divide program by the Left, in which the only way to engage with someone is to tear them down personally. The world is divided between victims and oppressors.

And in an age when you lack the common virtues of decency, civility or humility, then what better way to show that you are noble than by claiming every intersectional piece of victimhood for yourself that you can.

Never mind that you’re an elite, well-protected, cosseted and indulged young adult. When Charlie Kirk comes on campus let’s abuse his ideas. And all with the approval of their mealy-mouthed liberal professors, who are more scared of their students than they could ever be of Charle Kirk.

Charlie Kirk would listen to them, rebuff their ideas, and ask for evidence. Their students? They would have their professors cancelled for misgendering them by mistake.

And now Charlie Kirk is dead, leaving a grieving widow and two young children. And the self-declared noble and good of the Left, and the likes of the New York Times, will ensure that when the narrative is played out in their publications and conversations, that they will big up words like “divisive”, “right-wing”, “MAGA”, “Trump”, whatever.

It’s sickening. If the stabbing to death of a white woman by a black man who declares he “killed the white lady” is to be suppressed by the mainstream media, then the very public death of Charle Kirk must be reframed in order to make it, you know, “his fault” for being so….whatever.

The collapse of the Twin Towers heralded a deep existential crisis in the United States, because America realised it was no longer impregnable. Today with the death of Charlie Kirk, we realise – if we ever needed convincing given what we have seen in the USA over the past few years – that the crisis comes from within.

What can we do? Pray for Charlie’s family at this terrible time.  Be grateful that he is with Jesus his Lord and Saviour (though no doubt there will be some deconstructing exangelical who believes otherwise).

Don’t seek vengeance. God says that vengeance is his and he will repay. It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, that the generation that kicked God to the kerb because they didn’t like the idea of “judgey judgey God”, simply outsourced vengeance and judgement to themselves.

And lastly, hope in our God.

In two weeks times, that same little girl who was sitting in the lounge with us as we watched the Twin Towers fall, will walk down the aisle on my arm on her wedding day. She has lived through these tumultuous decades in the West and is about to affirm her believe that hope and faith and truth and beauty still remain.

As followers of Jesus in a time more complex than it was in my own youth, she and her future husband, are undertaking one of the last truly subversive acts left to us in the West, standing before the covenant making God and making covenant with each other before him.

So Charlie Kirk is dead. And I am sad. Sad and angry. But my hope is still firmly placed in the covenant making God of Israel, who in the person of Jesus, went to the cross, took on the wrath of God on himself (yep, PSA is alive and real), forgave his enemies, conquered death and now reigns on high.

He will shortly come to put to the sword all violence. He will sit upon a much grander seat than Charlie Kirk ever sat on at one of those universities, and all of the haters and hate mongers, all of the proud and cursing, all of the self-declared intellectuals will be silenced forever.

Vale Charlie Kirk. Now you await that resurrection day.