We were painting a home last Wednesday in an affluent neighborhood that’s been good to our painting company for many years. I’ve gotten to know many of our customers, and Fox News is often on their televisions. They know I’m a Republican, and we touch on the news of the day. There’s some Democrats around too, but either they don’t know my background when they hire me, or are willing to forego cancel-culture in the interest of a reputable contractor.
Sometime after noon on Sept. 10th a long-time customer came out, walked around to the backyard of the house I was working on, and said, “Charlie Kirk is dead.”
I looked up from my primer brush, “What?”
I knew about Kirk, his mission, saw him interviewed on conservative television, and on Bill Mahar’s Club Random. He wasn’t a mainstay political figure in my world. That’s not surprising; his nonprofit advocacy organization Turning Point USA is aimed at a young demographic. Interestingly, my son, in his late-30s, at that moment working on another side of the house, had never heard of him. Anything one might hear about Kirk in his late-millennial orbit in progressive Portland, Oregon would likely be negative.
Later, using the restroom at the home we were working on, I caught a snippet of Fox coverage of the assassination on the tube. All the earmarks of the horror Colonel Kurtz referenced in Apocalypse Now were in rotation, the dire chyrons, the somber talking heads, and that signpost of contemporary dread, the footage.
After work, it was my turn to sample the coverage. I was surprised again by the scope and tone of conservative reporting on the assassination, white-knuckle anger, a burgeoning grief, and first steps in the ugly process of identifying the killer. Kirk was obviously a larger figure in the political sphere than I was aware of.
In the following days, all permutations of the story played out, a musical tribute from Ed Shereen, suggestions from President Trump that there might be a transsexual connection to the perpetrator, and several YouTube posts about the many firings of individuals who celebrated the assassination. Another surprise on Saturday, when reports came of an enormous march in London, inspired by the killing. The cowardly act gave a resonance that transcended borders, and even politics in some case. Yet the vaguely condemnatory reportage coming from far-left channels and sites was no surprise.
The final irony, and the importance of the calling that Kirk made his own, was embodied by my son and myself. A seventysomething who knew about the Turning Point cause—to enter into the entrenched realm of ideological opposition, academia, to challenge the leftist fealty that has been inculcated in the young—and a thirtysomething, Kirk’s intended demographic, who’d never heard of him.
Anyone not off the grid has heard of Charlie Kirk now. The question: who will take his place?
