How We Failed The Test Charlie Kirk Left Behind

One year ago today, our friend Charlie Kirk was brutally murdered live on camera while debating public policy at a public university. 

He was shot in the neck; he bled out in front of all of us. We all remember it. His murderer was a militant gay man in a relationship with a trans furry. The motives were perfectly clear, and the evidence was perfectly clear.

What should have happened next was just as clear. Political reunification on the Right around core principles. United opposition to left-wing violence, maybe a religious revival. 

None of that happened.

Whatever expectations we all had for what would happen next were largely thwarted. What’s truly incredible is that what wrecked those expectations was a campaign against Erika Kirk, his wife, because people decided it was imperative to destroy Erika as a human being and destroy TPUSA as an organization for their own nefarious political purposes.

The fact that Erika has had to go through all of this while simultaneously heading up TPUSA — and by all of this I don’t just mean the grief; I mean the insane desire by some to destroy her or to destroy TPUSA — demonstrates the moral limits of many people in the so-called conservative movement who were never really part of the conservative movement, who are out for themselves and wish to tear down rather than to build it up again.

It was perfectly obvious almost immediately, the minute that I had heard that Charlie had been shot, that the person who shot him was likely to be a part of the radical trans movement. Charlie was not wildly offensive to a huge variety of people — he said some controversial things from time to time on matters ranging from criminal justice to the nature of Islam.

But the people who were the most agitated about Charlie Kirk were radical trans activists because, as I said at the time, there’s a permission structure for violence that is implicit in the trans radical ideology. The basic idea is that if you say a man is a man and a woman is a woman, you are “erasing” them.

Thus it was not a tremendous shock that Tyler Robinson ended up being the murderer; it was perfectly obvious who was behind this from the very beginning.

But what should have happened here? There should have been a political coming-together — at the very least — around basic principles of free speech. That is what Charlie was famous for. He was best known for his debates on college campuses and for being a free-speech advocate. 

Some people try to portray Charlie as some sort of radical, insane, nasty person. That never came from him. So what should have happened was for people to come together against those who wish to destroy the body politic. 

What also should have happened was a religious revival. Charlie openly talked about the importance of his faith. 

After Charlie’s assassination, there was what can best be termed a gigantic religious revival tent meeting for his memorial. I was privileged to be there. 

If what you were looking for was some level of political reunification against political violence, against permission structures for violence, or even on the Right more broadly, a religious revival, people returning to church, a principled rebuilding of the social fabric that Charlie actually cared about — what that did require was borders. 

That’s because people who tear apart that social fabric, or people who were not part of that movement, or people who took advantage of that movement from the inside, needed to be stopped.

But not long after this, things started to fall apart. A couple of months after his death, I spoke at the TPUSA event where I said that personal feeling is not a substitute for moral judgment, that politics is not the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; politics is about principle. That if you’re willing to sacrifice basic truth and simple principle in favor of emotional solidarity, you have betrayed your fundamental duty to the American people. 

TPUSA is alive and well. There are lots of great things happening, but the promise of the moment was destroyed by people like Candace Owens, who has spent literally the entire year since the tragedy going after TPUSA and Erika Kirk and promoting wild, insane conspiracies with regard to pretty much everybody. Megyn Kelly defended her and still defends her. 

Tucker Carlson, of course, engaged in precisely the same sort of stuff. He laughed with Jimmy Dore about conspiracy theories surrounding Charlie Kirk, then went on to mock Erika Kirk for her incorrect grieving. 

This gave the Left permission to do the same. For a brief moment in time, the Left had to denounce political violence and say they were upset about Charlie’s death. That all went away because members of the Right decided to make it okay. 

And so now what do we get? We get comedian Druski mocking Erika Kirk in a clip that had almost 200 million views on X alone. Candace Owens then did a clip laughing about how wonderful this was.

This is what happened in America. Political unity was never part of this either, because it turned out that the exact same people who were promoting insane, hideous conspiracies are the ones who have openly declared that they’re not part of the conservative movement.

It wasn’t a matter of people like me saying they weren’t part of the movement and pointing out the truth. It was they themselves saying they were not part of the movement. Since that day, Tucker Carlson has declared himself no longer part of the GOP and called Trump the Antichrist. Candace Owens suggested that satanic Zionists were occupying the White House, and Congress needs to move to have the mad king Trump removed. 

Megyn Kelly declared with podcast host Sean Ryan that the GOP had betrayed the American people and that all it had left were Epstein fans. 

If you wanted the unity to last, if you wanted a spiritual revival, if you wanted all those things, it required you to draw borders, because it turns out those borders will be drawn for you in any case.

But here is the primary issue as we move forward: In the end, if you want a conservative future, you need a set of conservative principles. And those must be built on basic truth and decency. 

If you don’t have truth and decency, you can’t build a conservative movement. You can’t build such a movement around anything else.

You cannot. 

It is not possible.