The other tragedy in Charlie Kirk’s assassination

At 55 years old, I’m just young enough to have missed the 1960s. That makes Charlie Kirk’s the first high-profile political assassination of my lifetime. I can’t recall any others. Plenty of attempts but no actual assassinations. Unless you count John Lennon in 1980. But that doesn’t even come close to this. To what we are all feeling this week.

Much commentary is being written about what has been lost with Charlie’s assassination. He was a conservative in the classical liberal mode. He wanted to debate you. He believed in American ideals and wanted to inspire the next generation to fight for them—peacefully, democratically. What does it say about the state of our nation that a man like that was cut down?

There are other levels of tragedy regarding Charlie’s murder. The loss to his family. The corrupted hearts of some of the leftist media, leftist politicians, and even some of our leftist friends and neighbors, who seem to be celebrating his assassination. And more.

But I have seen very little commentary on one dimension of the tragedy. It is that the Charlie Kirk who was assassinated this week was a much better Charlie Kirk than the one who first burst onto the scene many years ago. And the conservatism for which Charlie was a pied piper to the young was a much betterconservatism than the one for which he was initially advocating.

I got into it with Charlie about all this the one time I met him. It was a chance encounter on a street corner in Washington, DC about five or six years ago. Fortunately, I was with a personal friend of Charlie’s when we bumped into him and he introduced us. I had never seen Charlie before and would not have recognized him but for our mutual friend introducing us. I recognized the name and quizzed Charlie immediately about Nick Fuentes and the Groypers.

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