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31 years: The hero we needed

Charlie Kirk accomplished more in 31 years than most people will in eight or nine decades.

Social media is a dangerous place.

Disaffected, isolated, and angry young men who retreat to the tenebrous corners of the internet will find an endless buffet of cheap rage bait, manufactured by professional agitators to engender an emotional response.

An emotional response, of course, the latter can convert into clicks, attention, and notoriety.

It’s a dangerous game, in no small part because social media is so often disconnected from the “real world.” Spend too much time online — a place where the worst of humanity is almost compulsively elevated — and you will begin to lose sight of reality.

But that’s where Charlie Kirk came into play.

Charlie Kirk drew people out into the real world. His events at college campuses, which were routinely well-attended, broke the routines of post-COVID online basement dogfights, creating a space for humans to debate face-to-face. To be clear, those exchanges were often heated. But Kirk served as a much-needed reminder that, in the real world, we inevitably have to dialogue with people who disagree with us.

Kirk, though he personified many of the populist tendencies of the Trump-era Right, also represented a return to “the old way” of debating. Sure, he had an online presence, but he went above and beyond to ensure his ideas transcended the right-wing social media echo chamber. He invited a generation increasingly prone to searching for “community” in the company of less-than-savory internet characters back into a truly public marketplace of ideas.

As the New York Times noted, Kirk resonated “particularly for young men coming of age at a time of social isolation when lives are increasingly lived online.”

“It’s kind of scary to say what you believe in, especially in this cancel culture,” said one such young man who was present at the event on Wednesday, where Kirk was killed. “Charlie Kirk seemed like he just went totally above that. He kind of gave a voice to the people that were maybe a little bit scared.”

“He gave me the confidence to be able to believe what I believe,” he added.

Regardless of one’s views on Kirk, he should have been welcomed as a meaningful, timely, and indispensable plea for conversation in an age fraught with seclusion, radicalism, and careless demonization. He carved out a place for his opponents to speak, actively encouraging them to come to the front of the line. As liberal columnist Ezra Klein aptly observed, “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.”

And yet, he was murdered by a man too cowardly to hash out his differences via conversation.

Charlie Kirk’s tragic, appalling, nation-rocking assassination symbolized the very thing he was fighting against: the distinctly un-American idea that free speech might endanger you; the previously unthinkable notion that someone — in America, of all places — might strike you down rather than hear you out.

Of course, his death may have symbolized those things, but it does not have to mark their triumph. We can either choose to respond by further withdrawing into our social media echo chambers, or we can continue, bravely, to step out into the public square and dialogue with our opponents.

You’d be surprised by how many semi-normal people still exist. You won’t find many of them on social media. You certainly won’t find them if you recoil to the dark recesses and cesspools of an algorithmic pseudo-reality. If you want to get to know them (and perhaps lead a few more to “the light”), you will have to have conversations. Period. There’s no other way.

Should we feel angry? Absolutely. A young man with a wife and two kids was murdered for what he believed. That should infuriate us. In fact, something is probably wrong if we don’t feel righteously indignant. But what we do with that anger is everything.

Kirk would have wanted us to fight. No doubt about it. But here’s what made Kirk different. Unlike other political commentators and internet personalities, he was not doing it because he coveted likes, craved attention, or wanted to go viral. He had something more important — far more important — on his mind.

He wanted to save the country.

The first kind of commentator revels in cheap rage bait. The second seeks to change minds. Kirk, of course, was the latter.

Hatred is working overtime to silence free speech. We must not give it what it wants. In moments like these, the coward will slink back into screaming uselessly on social media. The man who acts with true courage — courage like Kirk exemplified — will march defiantly back into the public square and pick up the conversation he left off.

Charlie Kirk lived more in 31 years than most people will live in eight or nine decades. Why? Because he actually accomplished something. He accomplished something massive. Something monumental. Something historic. Much like the man who turned his five talents into ten, he maximized the time God had given him to tremendous effect. His legacy will forever be more than a few viral tweets or videos; his legacy is an army of activists, an energized bloc of young voters, and more than a few hearts and minds changed. His legacy is a life of explosive faith, unwavering conviction, and a counter-cultural bid to carry one’s beliefs into the real world.

We may not have realized it at the time, but in retrospect, it has become clear: he was the hero we needed.

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Created:	2025-09-12 18:18 GMT
Updated:	2025-09-19 07:00 GMT
Published:	2025-09-12 18:00 GMT
Converted:	2025-11-11 12:06 GMT
Change Author:	Jakob Fay
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