Charlie Kirk died doing what he did best — talking with, debating and encouraging his fellow Americans.
He died with a microphone in his hand.
He had spent the hours before his own death commenting on the brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska on a train in Charlotte.
As a result he was also being misrepresented — as so often — over what he had said.
The evening before Kirk was killed CNN’s Van Jones claimed that Kirk was “race-mongering” over the Zarutska killing.
Jones and his CNN colleagues continued to pretend to be mystified about why the Charlotte killing happened.
But Kirk wasn’t race mongering, he was highlighting a horrible act of random crime that CNN wanted to ignore and cover up.
Any healthy society would be able to contend with an issue like that. Any healthy society would be able to discuss it.
It would not need to gloss over such facts.
It would have them out and discuss them in the clear light of day.
But our society is not a healthy society.
It is a society where much of the media and others want to cover over uncomfortable facts — or facts that do not support their personal political narrative.
Charlie Kirk didn’t believe in that.
He believed strongly in the clash of ideas.
He believed and lived his life in the understanding that civilized discussion and debate is the most healthy and American thing of all.
That Americans who disagree with each other should bring their best arguments together and hash them out.
He was absolutely right in that belief — and it is a signal of his patriotism and his belief in this country that he did so.
Not least because as he always said, debate is not just the best way, but the only way, to avert political violence.
Others have observed this about America in centuries past.
When the great Alexis de Tocqueville came to America, almost two centuries ago, he marveled about the way in which American society operated.
One of the things that he was most impressed by was the willingness of America’s citizenry, as well as its politicians, to have discussions out in face-to-face exchanges.
While seemingly obvious to Americans, de Tocqueville knew that it was very different from the way in which people in France or Europe behaved in his day.
And de Tocqueville saw this fact as being enormously to the advantage of Americans.
He saw that face-to-face exchanges allow for something special to happen.
If two people are in disagreement but are looking into each others’ faces then the other person is a human being in front of them — like them, just with different views.
The nature of face-to-face exchanges is that they do not allow for, or at least minimize, any efforts to dehumanize people with whom we disagree.
We are more likely to extend empathy, compassion and courtesy when we see someone face-to-face.
How different that is from our online age.
An age in which videos of brutal killings crop up all the time in our X timelines.
An age in which TikTokkers and others “LOL” at violence if it suits their own viewpoints.
An age in which online influencers moon over the killer of a healthcare executive and father if the man’s killer seems “hot” to them.
An age in which Netflix and other streaming services offer up endless dramas and documentaries in which perpetrators of savage acts of violence are “explained” and “understood”.
In our age face-to-face interactions seem to be the last thing anyone is thinking about.
And fewer and fewer people practice it.
People online rage at public figures anonymously or behind made-up identities.
There — faceless as they themselves are — they can make the people they rage against equally faceless.
They can treat real, living people, as though they are players in some kind of computer game.
Some kind of simulation.
When a Presidential candidate is shot in the head, they can question whether what happened even happened.
Or they can pretend that a real event was fake even while at the same time praising the shooter.
Or asking that the shooter aims better next time.
Or that other shooters emerge and teach the same “lesson” to other people with whom they disagree.
All of this — this online world in which everything is front of you and nothing is real — is the opposite of the value-system that built America.
And it is the opposite of the value system that Charlie Kirk, like so many Americans before him, believed in and admired.
Charlie believed in going out and debating with people.
He literally set up tables on campuses and gave a microphone to anybody who wanted to come and debate him.
You might say that anybody could have done that.
But anybody didn’t, and anybody doesn’t.
And in any case, Charlie Kirk was not just anybody.
He didn’t just give people a platform and debate his ideas and theirs.
He listened.
As anyone can see from his thousands of exchanges he had over the years — especially with young people — he treated his interlocutors with respect.
People could often be savagely rude and ungracious towards him.
But he treated his fellow Americans — even those he was in passionate disagreement with — with courtesy.
That value — “courtesy” — stood out because it has become so rare in American society.
It is increasingly rare among the online and offline left and right.
But Charlie Kirk knew that it was vital.
That there is no point in two people simply screaming at each other.
That Americans should instead bring their best arguments to the table and have them out in a civilized manner, respecting the other person as a citizen and as an American.
Of course many people turn out not just to dislike that idea but have an active desire to kill it.
They do so while claiming that words — like the words Charlie Kirk used — are “violence.”
That speech they don’t agree with is “hate-speech.”
That people who speak “hate speech” have to be “shut down.”
And that if that doesn’t happen then the people exercising their right to free speech are “literally killing people.”
There is one other age-old truth which needs to be inserted into this mix.
Which is the truth that many people on the conservative side have noted for many years: that we live in a political culture but one in which there is a key difference between the two sides.
For while the right tends to believe that the left is simply wrong, large portions of the left in this country believe that their opponents are not just “wrong” but “evil.”
Charlie was one of a number of prominent American conservatives who suffered from this mismatch in attitudes.
When he said that there are only two biological sexes, his opponents accused him not of having a different view from themselves but of trying to eradicate an entire community.
When he defended the traditional Christian idea of marriage they said that he was engaging in “hate” against all gay people.
And when he said that race might be a factor in a killing like that of a beautiful young Ukrainian woman in Charlotte, they suggested that was evilly trying to whip up hatred and violence against all black Americans.
None of these, or a hundred other things, said about Charlie were true.
But with enough repetition and enough dehumanization of him, you will always find someone who will take that “argument” to its own illogical conclusion.
Stay up to date on the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk
If you say for long enough that someone is guilty of “literally killing people” then in a large country with a lot of excitable people you will eventually find someone is willing to take the shot.
Sometimes that person will be someone who believes that they are inserting themselves into the history books.
That by their act of violence they are going to change the course of history.
Or — in the case of too many attempted and actual political assassinations in this country — you will find someone who believes that they can enact the fantasy scenario of going back in time and killing Hitler.
People who think that are delusional of course — and badly, badly misinformed about their opponents. But there are many deluded people around.
That could be seen yesterday in the aftermath of Kirk´s murder.
If contributors on CNN and MSNBC were bad, it was nothing compared to the slew of online hateful rejoicing and “LOL”-ing and mem-ing about Kirk’s fate.
It is so easy for these people not to look into Charlie’s eyes, or the eyes of the young wife and children that he leaves behind.
It is so much easier to treat it all like a computer game.
But this isn’t a game.
This is real life.
And the stakes are sometimes so wildly high and dangerous that we need to remind ourselves of that.
Charlie Kirk believed in face-to-face dialogue. He died not just doing it, but demonstrating it and embodying it.
If any good can come from this terrible act it should be that many more of us in American do it too.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
