Not a video - [PLAY] won't work.

The last time I wrote about Charlie Kirk, it was in a tone of blistering criticism. Charlie Kirk was my White Renegade of 2019. “His organization Turning Point USA could have been a real force for American nationalism, but he has led it up yet another Conservatism Inc. blind alley,” I said. I concluded:

[Young whites] need a group that puts America First. They need young people who declare, without apology, not only that It’s OK to Be White, but that it’s OK for America to stay white. They don’t need Charlie Kirk or TPUSA.

Many of Kirk’s critics [Did he mean "colleagues" here?] on the Right are engaging in such historical revisionism, even to the point of speculating that Zionists may have killed him because he was about to “turn” on them. Alternatively, some of his other colleagues are claiming that Kirk’s top priority at the end of his life was combating anti-Semitism. Both seem unlikely.

Still, what someone “would” have done is ultimately unknowable. Cloaking one’s own beliefs in the blood of martyrdom is inevitable in politics. Yet what really lives on is the fame of a dead man’s deeds. Charlie Kirk’s deeds and words speak for themselves. What he said since 2019 in many ways effectively rebuts much of what I said then.

This one was from over 2 years ago, keep in mind:

It seems extremely likely that he could have been elected president in his own right one day. This wide appeal combined with lost promise is one reason why almost everyone on the American Right has reacted to his death with genuine sorrow, like we had lost a prince.

Conservatives have begun searching out progressives on social media who expressed jubilation at Kirk’s slaying or who suggested that more right-wingers should follow. Leftist caution about expressing such opinions seems nonexistent, perhaps because they have never experienced the climate we have existed under our entire lives.

Such tactics raise questions about free speech and precedents, but many conservatives are uninterested in such debates after living for decades under the reign of “cancel culture” and the career-ending decrees of commissars and watchdogs from groups like the SPLC and the ADL. In addition, many on the Right have experienced official repression, including travel restrictions, deplatforming, and debanking from elite institutions and the federal government itself.

Free speech is perhaps the one thing that can allow for productive communication across the political divide, but that too may prove a casualty of the events in Utah. Kirk’s entire approach was to set up a tent on college campuses and welcome progressives to a productive debate. He was killed despite this approach, in front of the entire world, including his wife and children. Many will feel, perhaps accurately, that there is nothing more to discuss.