What Kirk Got Right

Charlie taught millions how to almost think. Flawed, brilliant, and gone too soon.

I WILL SAY THIS: I only ever agreed with maybe 7.4% of the things Charlie Kirk said. But that’s not the point. I agreed with 100% of how he lived his life and I’m 100% heartbroken.

Much will be written about this killing and what led up to it. That it was inevitable, indicative of a rot on this side or that, blah blah blah, and it’s all true for the most part.

I speak for those of us for whom it’s a lot simpler: don’t fucking kill people. Period. Sure, sometimes you have to meet violence with physical self defense. But words should be met with words.

For me this is more than just a point of law or morality. It is a point of honor. As a child of the 80s I was taught the difference between sticks and stones and mere words. Can words do harm? Of course. Which is why we must meet words with even better words, fiercely, deeply and often.

Whoever killed Kirk did us all a grave disservice. Especially the writers, famous or unknown alike. It’s a slap in the face to the ministry of the pen.

But it’s also a call to action. We must do better. Always better. Because we are losing.

The sad fact is, it’s always easier to distort, tear down, and indoctrinate scared, selfish, ignorant fools than it is to clarify, build up and inspire those same fools to embrace nuance, to remember their blood and feelings, and to interpret those feelings bravely, without cognitive dissonance.

It’s easier to gin up shallow madness than to stand bravely and honestly in an uncertain world. So naturally, we, the true people of the word, are facing an unfair advantage and having a tough time.

Kirk was likely killed because someone was sick of the talk from both sides. Someone convinced that help wasn’t coming in some other form. Convinced you and I weren’t going to show, and if we did, we wouldn’t be enough. We wouldn’t have the words.

That’s devastatingly important: Words lead to belief, beliefs lead to action, and action often determines who suffers and who thrives. There’s no avoiding this dreaded calculus. Which is why we have to do better; we people of the word.

We must start by saying a few choice words about Kirk. Because he’s a fellow of this beautiful, tragic human family of Earth, and whoever you are, wherever you stand on the spectrum, there’s no avoiding that Charlie was one of our own, and that this murder is something we all have to contemplate from a place of humility. And hopefully love. (Love is something that AI can’t do. If you can love, you’re in grave demand these days. Not all demand is market-driven financial.)

In the coming weeks I’ll be taking the gloves off and telling you what I’m seeing, where the words are failing and what we can do about it.

It involves stopping with the damn LLMs. I have abused them, too. But our entries have become bloated and nutrient-free. We need to put the spots back on the apples. Fast.

Just tell it straight and don’t worry about pruning and primping. Somehow the blood and snot and tears are being sanitized out of our writing. That’s not love. That’s absenteeism and your readers feel it. This is happening to ALL of us. We need to just stop. Now. If this quick draft has typos or feels a little cringe or melodramatic, so be it. It’s a better direction to fail in than the alternative.

Charlie showed up in the flesh. His presence was undeniable, visceral. We need to do better than Kirk, whose failings were done out loud. He made “better-sounding arguments” without making actual correct ones. That’s not a trivial problem. History shows that when bad ideas are argued with sophistication, preparation and rigor, they create a full-court press against better ideas expressed lazily without depth or preparation.

That’s how religion won over the ages, by pitting tenaciously-prepared brilliant wisemen juggling prolix architecture against common people who lacked the knowledge or vocabulary to rebut without looking stupid. The result is defeat by humiliation and exhaustion, while the opposition flourishes and dominates.

That’s Kirk, and he had every right to do it. The rebuttal should not be a bullet to the carotid. It should be better words. Clearer arguments, and wisdom that can be seen without squinting, by normal people, so they can find permission to dissent without looking like complete dunces, and without having to live their lives in Destiny-like rabbit-hole porn. (As much as I respect Destiny, he’s too rigorous for the middle majority. He’s a smart person’s smart person, whereas Kirk was a populist provocateur, well marketed to a massive swath of Americans. Do listen to Destiny, and listen deeply, but don’t BE him. The answer to Kirk is not Destiny. It’s us.)

Every time Kirk made a student look stupid, that’s partly our fault. It means those of us who see thru the bullshit have failed miserably in helping others see through it, and find a safe place to park their minds and words that isn’t so defenseless against clever deconstruction.

We writers who know better, we don’t show up, we spin in place, we live in the cathedrals of our minds. We talk way too much to our friends and family, and way too little to those outside our comfort zone.

We drug ourselves to survive the agony and toil of our obscurity and responsibilities.

And we publish gorgeous, symmetrical, blameless, soulless prompt vomit. We think we add our touch around the edges, but all we’re doing is trying to look good without doing the real work. We forgot that writing is not work. It’s the joy of opening a vein and bleeding on the keys.

Kirk knew that. And he knew it better than us. He beat us at our own game. And because we had no way to answer back with the same jagged, hard-won, self-evident badassery he brought to every discussion, he was perceived as a problem that needed stopping with a bullet.

It must have been believed that the people with the right words just weren’t showing. So, matters were taken into the hands of savages.

For now I’ll just say: Stop outsourcing that sacred process to AI. We owe our readers more. We owe ourselves more. We owed Charlie more.

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Charlie Kirk was brilliant, riveting, maddening, always entertaining.

Sure, he very often only showed the clips where he came off best, talking only to the most ignorant-meets-arrogant college-campus kids. (So much of what makes people appear brilliant is in the editing.)

He was an odd bird: a big man with a large, imposing head, strangely small face, piercing dark eyes, and a low, smooth, fast-talking confidence that’s hard to turn off, even as it causes your jaw to clench and stomach to tighten with irritation.

While he was wickedly good at reflecting rigorous “common sense” in public, he never really taught people how to truly think. He instead modeled how to appear as if you’re thinking critically.

You spotted this early on. But did nothing new to counter it. You carried on posting LLM-ridden counters that were right but soulless and unseen.

In almost every case, his arguments were prefab and motivated, caroming into fallacy, smuggling in quasi-religious values disguised as logic. Whereas someone like Steven Bonnell (aka Destiny) shows his work in real time and self-corrects in real time, Kirk found the sweet spot for captivating in large numbers, while advancing internally incoherent rhetoric that cheats subtly on framing and context.

Many conservatives are holding up the legacy of Kirk as if he’s a Bonnell type and he’s just not. He lacks Bonnell’s commitment to truth and rigor, while appearing to many as if he had double.

(As a hideous aside: My secret shame is that I like Nick Fuentes more than any of them. I hate what he stands for, of course. I despise racism, sexism, antisemitism, etc. But I do like watching him and laughing. He’s just so dang charismatic. I disagree with everything he says, but I love how he says it. Reminds me of my Andrew Dice Clay fascination from decades ago. Not sure what to do with this guilty secret, just don’t yuck my yum, I suppose, and also please don’t take what he says seriously. Unless he’s bashing Trump, which he does a lot.)

When you consider how young these guys — Kirk, Bonnell, Fuentes —all are who hold our attention and raise our hackles with diatribes about our politics, values, and the human condition itself, it’s really quite remarkable.

The framers of our Constitution and Federalist papers were men in their early 20s in many cases, young punks in powdered wigs. Kirk, at 31, would have done well in such rooms, until a Destiny-like Jefferson called bullshit.

Beyond all that, we have to admire a guy like Kirk who takes to the wild streets, the campuses, the public squares, and performs daringly ornate “thought structures,” for lack of a better phrase, committing the tree diagrams to memory, methodically diminishing the opposition to the thinnest herd imaginable.

Structure with logical scaffolding several layers deeper than your average blue-haired sophomore, on abortion, gun laws, trans rights, economics, war, et al, adeptly whizzing around clumsy surface attacks and the confidently spoken subterfuge of his naive interlocutors. With the well-worn confidence of a circus act, he makes fools of nearly all of them.

His message seems to amount to: “humble yourselves, folks, because whether I’m right or wrong, I’m showing you that this stuff is way more complicated than you think.” That’s a great message for these times.

We like to think it’s deeply American, in that old-timey way that we don’t see much anymore. Conjures a bit of Mark Twain, Will Rogers, et al.

And then there’s the right-wing bullshit part of his shtick. Not everyone’s perfect; he’s entitled to have a value system — we all do. His value system sinks to masquerading as the light of pure reason, and it’s resoundingly not that, and that’s one of the troubling downsides of his body of work. A downside that ought to have been dealt with peacefully.

More than a downside, it was a challenge to think deeper, do the research, engage, clear your head, rise to the occasion, earn your beliefs in the forge of true, disciplined contemplation. That’s a beautiful challenge to American society in these muddled times, and so his tragic loss, for me, counts as a historic tragedy.

It also, of course, is an absolutely gut-wrenching personal tragedy. I still haven’t watched the video. I doubt I will. There’s something so massively alive about Charlie Kirk, so oddly confident and comforting, and to see him cut down in his prime by a bullet to his thick, imposing neck, with his piercing presence, while locked in that defiantly well-meaning Kirkian stance at the podium, is too much for me.

That he will never have a chance to rebut such a cowardly ad hominem as a fucking bullet, from 200 meters away, by some as-yet-unknown jackass, is beyond heartbreaking, unjust, ugly.

I cried when I heard, and I’m a progressive, economically left-wing free-will skeptic. That says something about me, but says more about him.

The video? Just no. I can’t. I abhor real-world violence, and also want to afford him his dignity and privacy. If I spin up a Charlie Kirk vid it’ll be to watch him do what he does best: carry on a fiercely intellectual argument with preternatural consistency and forward motion, while his naive interlocutors slowly realize they’re publicly a bit screwed for the moment. One imagines they skulk away for some soul-searching, forever changed for the better.

While not quite ever showing us what real critical thinking is, he succeeded at doing such a good parody of it that it did more good than harm.

Let’s all for now on dig a little deeper and remember what Charlie said: that when you stop talking, stop debating the heated stuff, that’s when the violence starts.

I disagree with something like 80% of his views, and our values clash enormously. Where he seemed committed to the Randian ideal, the economic conservative angle, the theist angle, meritocratic myths and austerity, provincial views of tradition and gender issues, I tend toward compassionate capitalism with guaranteed dignity concerning the basics, and a decidedly liberal view on sex, gender, marriage, live and let live. I don’t think taxes are theft or that social services encourage laziness.

I don’t think we’re better off in some laissez-faire libertarian fantasy. The facts don’t suggest that, regardless of how dazzlingly he spins it.

When Charlie waxed conservative, I saw the flaws and quietly seethed, taking note of where the argument went off the rails or where our values diverge.

And yet he was never boring and I still weep for him and his family. Beautiful man, beautiful short life. I have such vast admiration for his courage, talent, and persistent intellectual bent.

Join me in carrying the torch to the best of our ability. Let’s not forget the example he set. Let’s do our parts to make his life and death mean something. He showed us that peaceful, penetrating discourse asks a lot of us, and that to preserve our dignity around our views, we really need to work to earn it.

The quality of our conversations may very well determine whether our species lives or dies in the years ahead. So his message means everything. Let’s keep it alive.

I’ll end how I began: I only ever agreed with maybe 7.4% of the things Charlie Kirk said. But that’s not the point. I agreed with 100% of how he lived his life and I’m 100% heartbroken. today we grieve. Tomorrow we write. And in a new way. We can do this, guys. Talk soon.