The murder of Charlie Kirk

A tragic waste of a young life.

I am not one for hot takes or commenting quickly on events. But I wanted to mention something about Charlie Kirk. At the time of writing it has been confirmed he was killed by an unknown assassin while at an event in Utah.

No one yet knows who the shooter was, what their grievance with Kirk might be, or whether they acted alone or with others. They seem to have apprehended no one after initially arresting an older man at the scene then releasing him.

At this stage it is easy to jump to conclusions about who or what might be going on. A disgruntled transgender activist perhaps? A mentally ill progressive convinced Kirk was part of the fascist takeover of America the traditional media insist is happening? Or maybe some crank spending too much time online and losing contact with reality?

Time will tell. And it would be wise to wait until all the facts are in before coming to firm conclusions.

But it is worth noting where casual references to violence tend to come from. We have all seen it. The tweets from unhinged academics that would get a conservative jailed. Intemperate comments from prominent members of the traditional media calling for insurrections, the use of force and worse. Radical feminists condemning men and boys as surplus to requirements and sometimes musing over their eradication. There is a distinct lack of emotional regulation emanating from one part of the political spectrum.

After the Luigi Mangione incident, where he allegedly shot and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York, it became apparent to me the progressive left seemed to have zero moral compass, only a series of burning issues they emotionally react to. Increasingly they don’t seem to have any coherent or considered position with which to navigate the world. Instead they have causes. They have protests condemning things other people are doing or making. They seem to hate how the world actually works. It is all reactionary.

Much of it reflects black and white thinking, some of it quite extreme. It lacks nuance. Reality, if acknowledged at all, is used as a mechanism on which to compare a more pleasing fantasy. Mangione was taking on capitalism, economic oppressors, patriarchal white men etc. He has become something of a celebrity to many progressives.

The supposed causes he represents are inventions, imagined motivations projected onto visible behaviour. Many commentators lionizing Mangione’s actions seem in the thrall of such ideas. There is no pause to reflect on what actually happened. A senior figure in a legitimate business was murdered in cold blood. A premeditated act of violence in response to frustration and personal issues faced by the alleged killer. An act that cannot be easily justified in a civilized society.

And yet I have seen this championed many times by progressives. The reality is glossed over. A romantic sheen obscures the inconvenient details. Unknowable motivations, personality traits and even aspirational ideals are superimposed onto Mangione. His actions become heroic.

I have never known a conservative to do this with murderers. Not even centrists. Normal people view cold-blooded murder as wrong in most cases. Especially some distant CEO of a company. No doubt if we scour social media we may find some right-wing commentators saying unsound things. But there is no conservative equivalent to the emotional incontinence that often animates the progressive left, especially turning a blind eye to violence and death. He had it coming seems to be the idea that is accepted.

In our midst are those who are quite happy to skim over reality to get to the emotion. This may be an insight into what is going on. Emotional thinkers operating in a world of hard reality that does not respond to mental fantasies, so they come unstuck. This does not make them pause to think. It makes them dig in. Being thwarted is not understood as feedback from real life, it is seen as an impediment to utopia. Why isn’t the world playing along with the ideas in my head? Why are we tolerating the people preventing true equality? Why are they arresting Luigi? He is doing God’s work.

Anti-reality is a hard path to be on. An impossible one, and yet we see it everywhere. The steep decline of the hard left is nothing more than reality asserting itself. Men aren’t women, mixing cultures causes endless friction, and targeting children with adult sexual mores deprives them of an innocent childhood. The confusion of the progressive left is because their grand causes are unmoored from reality. They are fantasy. They don’t work.

We don’t yet know who pulled the trigger and killed Charlie Kirk, or what their cause may have been, if any. But we do understand the landscape we are in. Utopian schemes demand a kind of mental distortion to survive, so they are only attractive to the mentally distorted. We used to have better methods of identifying people like this and keeping them away from anything important. Rather less so now.

I would find it difficult to believe at this point Charlie Kirk’s murderer is a church-going Christian with a wife and kids. I doubt it is a successful businessman or successful anything. I doubt it is anyone normal with a normal life and a normal outlook on things. That means it will be someone who is not normal, which makes them abnormal. And it is the abnormal we have been told to embrace for decades, our instinct to keep them in check berated as hate or discrimination. Look how that is working out.

How much longer will we allow the emotional and the sentimental to dictate terms in society? How many unhinged lunatics will we tolerate? How many prominent people will need to die before we recognize some people cannot cope with the demands of civilization?

Kirk was 31 years old, and by conservative terms a moderate. No rational person would think him an extremist, except an actual extremist of course, someone willing to embrace extreme ideas and become unstable when they do not manifest in real life. Time will tell.

Charles James Kirk, 1993-2025. Rest in peace.

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