When Words Aren't Enough

It is hard to convey my sense of shock, grief, and anger this morning. Charlie Kirk was a decent guy, a family man, brutally murdered doing what he loved doing. And what was that?

He talked to people, argued with them, so that the ideas he had could be held up to scrutiny. He invited debate and always seemed to be respectful - even in the face of hostility.

What he represented to me was a living embodiment of how this should be done.

He was very good at it - and for the ‘left’, perhaps too good at it.

There were many who disagreed with him - and that’s fine. That was fine for Charlie Kirk too. All he wanted was to thrash it out. If his ideas were wrong, all you had to do was to argue your case with better ideas, better thinking.

In times like these people often tell us that we shouldn’t make political capital out of such a tragedy - and yet this was a political assassination of someone they could not control or silence in any other way.

And who are ‘they’?

‘They’ are the people who for the last couple of decades have essentially controlled the ‘narrative’. The people who have ramped up emotionality to extreme levels. The people who tell you that words are ‘violence’, that people are fascists and bigots and racists. The people who eschew debate on the flimsiest of pretexts such as not platforming ‘hateful’ views. In reality we all know why they attempt to throttle debate - it’s because they cannot win those debates. And they know it. If they had confidence in their words, confidence in the intellectual superiority of their arguments and positions, why would they not demonstrate that?

Yet time and time and time and time again we have seen the methodology in action. How many more examples of it do we need by now? The immediate attempt to shut down a debate, to control the narrative, by what is, essentially, name-calling.

In the US, because of Trump’s win, the power they once had to do that has lessened. This is for me, in a nutshell, why I thought it so important for both the US and the world that Trump won in 2024. It’s because Trump represented a different culture - and for too long we had been under the control of a very different kind of culture in which certain ideas were verboten - and I use that word with all its connotations deliberately.

All else follows from the culture that is dominant. We haven’t quite caught up with that culture shift here in the UK being still in the grip of the ‘left’ in its modern and twisted form, but we will, and there are signs it is happening. The institutions, now almost wholly dominated by the ‘left’, are losing their moral legitimacy - which was only a false and manufactured legitimacy anyway, because they lost any intellectual legitimacy, and replaced it with only emotion. Their ‘moral’ legitimacy, such as it was, was only a mantle they claimed for themselves, but we could all see how false and manufactured it was.

This, then, is what I think Charlie Kirk represented, and represented so well. A return to intellectual honesty, a rejection of purely emotional arguments. All the ‘left’ needed to do to lessen his influence, to put a damper on his popularity, was to meet him on his own terms and to demonstrate, publicly, that he was wrong.

This they could not do. In the fevered emotionality that they created as the way society should operate they never had an answer except violence of some form or another. They never had any intellectual answers. Emotions were all they ever had. Violence, suppression, scolding, authoritarian censorship, are the only answers they’ve ever given us. Tyranny, in other words.

Many of us are grieving today - none of us as deeply or painfully as his family. His kids have lost their father, his wife her husband. Words will never be enough to heal those wounds.

And to the left, particularly those sick and twisted individuals who are celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, we see you. Your words weren’t enough and so you have to support murder. We see you - we know the true quality of your hearts now - and we know your fake morality and fake tolerance and fake empathy for what it truly is.

I do not wish the same fate as Charlie Kirk’s upon you, even though I utterly despise you. No, I wish that his death represents a turning point where you sink into the irrelevance you so richly deserve.

Charlie Kirk’s legacy will endure. Yours will not.