The End of Illusion: On the Assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Way Forward

By Richard Y. Rodgers and David F.X. Army

A vigil in loving memory of Charlie Kirk will be held on Saturday, September 13th, at 7:00 pm, on the steps of Memorial Church.

Charlie Kirk at the 2025 Student Action Summit at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida. Source: Gage Skidmore. Edited.

Charlie Kirk’s murder is first and last a private calamity: a wife now without her husband, children without their father, a circle of friends and kin bereft of a steady presence. That grief is immediate, awful, and beyond any contestation. We owe the dead our sorrow and the bereaved our silence and our service. But grief has its civic logic too. The taking of a life for some desperate, ill-conceived political conviction—in the courtyard of a university, in front of young witnesses—forces a public diagnosis: we are at war, and too many of us still pretend otherwise.

Those who knew Charlie will tell you what the cameras too often obscured. He could be theatrical, florid, and exasperating in the delightfully modern register of political showmanship. He could also be unexpectedly, almost annoyingly, moderate: a man who prized argument over obliteration, outreach over insularity, whose modus operandi was to cross campus thresholds and address anyone curious enough to ask a question. He exhorted a generation, plainly and insistently, to love God, love their family, and love their country. That was enough to get him killed.

Let us be unsentimental about the nature of the enemy. Leftism is not merely a rival policy set or an alternate party program. Leftism is a mental illness. There is no risk in naming the condition plainly when the symptoms are so evident: systematic hatred for inherited institutions, a taste for moral monstrosity, and a bloodlust that sanctifies obliteration—of traditions, of customs, of human life—as signs of progress. If you are on the Right and have been told this language is excessive, look instead at the evidence of behavior: celebration when opponents are deplatformed, undone—or worse—killed. They hate you. They want you dead. To say it this way is necessary, for it is in the flowery meadows of euphemism that rot truly spreads.

This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a warning. To those who treat conservative life on campus or in civic society as an agreeable pastime—“a club,” “a journal,” “a debating society”—recognize that there is no safe neutral. The adjective “just” in front of any conservative endeavor is an attempt to be dismissed as harmless, but it is precisely the seemingly harmless that activists of the other persuasion seek to erase first. If you wear your conviction visibly, if you sign your name to a cause, if you instruct others in the habits that sustain a free and ordered society, you place yourself on the line, and, if the Left wins, they will place you on the gallows. That is not martyr rhetoric; that is realism.

For those of conservative disposition who wish only to lead a private life, cloistered away from the political fray, I am sorry. That is not possible. They won’t allow it. The logic of our hour is simple: if our institutions and formative practices fall, the private life you cherish will be the first to go. To wish for quiet while our enemies reconfigure the moral architecture of the nation is to wish for exile in place.

And yet, despair is not an option. Charlie’s death must not be allowed to calcify into a paralyzing fatalism. It must harden into a militant diligence. Reverence must be translated into work.

First, we must outlast personalities. Charisma withers; institutions endure. Do not treat conservative talent as an end in itself but as the seedbed of durable structures: parish schools that catechize the young, neighborhood reading groups that form habits of mind, free associations that forge the brave and the learned, scholarship funds that free talent from petit politics. Endowments, curricula, and local cells of study should be built now, not as ephemeral projects but as a conservative infrastructure: slow, networked, and resilient against the fashions and fury of the moment. Make the long game irreversible.

Second, cultivate an education of courage. The modern university offers an education in the art of dissent. We must answer with an alternative catechesis: rhetoric, logic, history, theology, liturgy, and philosophy of civic friendship, whatever remains of it. Courage is an acquired disposition: to speak the truth as you see it, to stand when others flee, to accept cost without cynicism. We should produce men and women who can withstand slander, who can retain composure under siege, and who can outlast the moral fashions of an age.

Third, refuse the counterfeit civility that is merely cowardice. There was a civic civility that governed honest bargaining and, insofar as it still exists, that ethic is worth preserving. Too often, the best case scenario is that “civility” is deployed as a plea to disappear, to shrink one’s claims until the public square is emptied of all meaningful assertion. The worst case scenario is that any attempt at discourse, even of the most reasonable, accommodating kind, will be met, Left on Right, with violence. If it can happen to a lion of free speech and civil discourse like Charlie, it can happen to anyone. Regardless of whether or not the age of reasons debate ended two days ago, the counterfeit civility imposed upon the Right must be exposed. Practice a measured politeness toward persons while being implacable in defense of public truth and the institutions that sustain it.

Finally, be precise and uncompromising in your politics: the stakes are metaphysical as well as administrative. Elections are only punctuation marks in the politics of man. Family, church, law, education, and public memory are the true battlegrounds. If we cede the formative structures, policy wins will be temporary because the habits that sustain a free people will have been hollowed out. Organize, staff, fund, and harden those institutions now so that when the hour grows harder we answer with political intelligence and moral readiness, not surprise.

Charlie Kirk’s life was a mixture of exuberance and seriousness; his death should compel us to the latter without surrendering the former. To grieve is human; to pick up the mantle and persevere is a fitting tribute. We have been offered a summons by the worst of circumstances. Let us answer with the best of ourselves: with learning sharpened into resolve, with institutions of habit and formation, and with a courage that understands the cost of action—and inaction. The hour is harsh. The work is hard. The loss is great. The choice, however, is ours.