By Aunt America
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinions on ScoonTV
I needed to be among the living, so I walked in a nearby park. It was Wednesday afternoon. I saw trees and ducks and grass and flowers, but, back in our apartment, my news-avoidant husband was in front of the TV, waiting for a death.
He sat on the living room couch, staring somehow simultaneously into space and at the screen to find out if Charlie Kirk was alive or dead. When I came home and the news still hadn’t updated, I wandered around our tiny balcony in a state of… wandering around our balcony. I now had to think in a way I never had in my entire GenX life: considering the world in terms of multiple assassinations. Was it a professional? A team working together? Was it a message he was shot in the voice? Or had the gunman studied Trump’s survival and realized that a man can turn his head at the last nanosecond and survive, but not his neck?
I flicked through X and found I wasn’t the only one lost and suspended in a small concrete space: “This is going to be Archduke Ferdinand-level bad, isn’t it?” “I can’t stop thinking about it.” “We need a second miracle.“
“Why can’t I stop thinking about it?”
When it was confirmed, I braced both hands flat against our little outdoor table for what felt like quite a few minutes, staring at the newly fallen leaves on the plastic. Then I came inside, shaking my head as my husband looked up. “He’s gone.”
He… deflated. He barely ever mentioned Charlie Kirk, maybe rolled past a video now and then, and he was gutted. I hugged him, both of us struck through all four chambers of the heart, and with no idea why.
Behind us, the television stayed on, where Kirk was over and over again called a “happy warrior.” But as the news spread and hundreds of leftists took to their social media platforms of choice to inadvertently end their careers, what I remembered was Charlie Kirk’s tears. That’s the way I saw him last– misting over and wiping his eyes as Pennsylvania was called for Donald Trump. I chose Kirk’s Election Night coverage because I knew he would stay frosty, no matter the news, and feed in granular returns on a precinct level.
“You did it,” one of his co-podcasters said as Kirk sat silent, eyes filled, slightly shaking his head. It’s quite possible he did: the big difference-maker for Trump was an overwhelming preference from young men. At that moment, young people were running throughout college campuses, screaming, carrying flags– all to celebrate a 78-year-old man they’d seen before. But part of what made Trump acceptable to these Zoomers was their respected elder, 30-year-old Charlie Kirk.
What Kirk did differently from their professors to cause this devotion was the inverse of college education since at least the late ‘80s: he invited. He sat, ceding his adversaries the strategic high ground of standing. He didn’t attempt to educate via shaming. The signs around campuses advertising his “Change My Mind” programs said “Debate Charlie Kirk,” not “sit there and listen while Charlie Kirk yells at you about everything your ancestors did wrong and then demands an apology.” And boy, did it work. A little too well, for some tastes.
I suppose I would’ve listened to Kirk more often if he didn’t always sound like he’d just poured his seventeenth cup of coffee. But now I understood why he spoke so fast: he didn’t have a lot of time.
Perhaps the last straw for the assassins was, of all things, Kirk’s open-hearted reaction to getting the business on South Park. He changed his profile picture to a Kirkified Eric Cartman, then went on the air to gleefully play each scene in which he was mocked: “I do exactly that, with the water bottle!” You cannot disquiet the man who simply refuses to take offense, and being offended is the left’s main strategy. Charlie Kirk left his enemies completely without options by wielding nothing more than a cafeteria table and a sense of detached amusement. They had no further options.
Except, perhaps, one.
Charlie Kirk was a Millennial, and yet the anti-Millennial. He was educated in the Chicago school system and yet came out of it advising his contemporaries to make a family, believe in God, and refuse to act the victim. The same women who call Kirk a misogynist probably don’t know that he met his wife while she interviewed for a job at his organization, Turning Point. At the end of a three-hour dinner, he said, “I can’t hire you because I want to date you.” Charlie Kirk was so well aligned with MeToo that he didn’t want to even chance holding a position of power over a girl he liked. How many in Hollywood or DC would do the same?
Charlie Kirk died speaking, but he’d put the mic down just before the bullet flew. A political cartoon showed him looking back over his shoulder at it, saying, “Do you think someone will pick it up, Lord?” Well, of course, Jesus replies that someone will– but the problem is, God made one of one. And yes, the aftermath showed young students setting up their own cafeteria tables. In North Carolina, 700 teenagers stayed home because one of their teachers decided it was a wise career move to dance on their hero’s grave. In South Korea, Germany, London, and New Hampshire, there were vigils, bagpipe tributes, hymns, bedsheet signs on dorms, requiem masses, jackets, and ties in high school hallways. Yes, they will take up the fight.
But there is no other Charlie.
The Vice-President of the United States put his own hands on the young father’s coffin to help carry his body home, and the Pope sent sympathies, but these peaceful people were his heirs. It is impossible to replicate Kirk’s intelligence and seemingly endless reservoir of stats and references. They have already begun to stand in the gap anyway. The left struck down the conservatives’ most effective moderate, and he shall become more powerful than they could imagine.
If you don’t agree, let’s talk about it. Come to the front of the line. Change my mind.
Curtis Scoon is the founder of ScoonTv.com Download the ScoonTv App to join our weekly livestream every Tuesday @ 8pm EST! Support true independent media. Become a VIP member www.scoontv.com/vip-signup/ and download the ScoonTv App from your App Store.
