JOSH HAMMER: The Martyrdom Of My Friend Charlie Kirk

It is difficult enough to write about the most high-profile political assassination in this country since the Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy killings of 1968.

It is considerably more difficult to do so when the victim was a personal friend. The pain is profound. Charlie Kirk and I had gotten close, and we had spoken less than 24 hours before the fatal bullet struck to discuss his upcoming campus tour. But if there is one thing that I know about Charlie, the quintessential public square warrior, it is that he would not have wanted us to sit on the sidelines.

The stakes are too high. We have a nation — and a civilization — to save. So, we fight back our tears, and we summon the fortitude to plow ahead. We do so not because it is easy but because it is right. An assassin may have permanently silenced Charlie, but we won’t let him silence us too. As it says in the Book of Psalms, one of Charlie’s favorite books of the Bible: “Hope for the Lord, be strong and He will give your heart courage, and hope for the Lord.” We must all now channel that courage — Charlie’s signature trait.

Charlie Kirk died, as so often seems to happen to the greats, doing what he loved: modeling civil discourse in the public battle of ideas. The living embodiment of the First Amendment in his tragically truncated life, Charlie died as a (literal) martyr for free speech. He was murdered one day after the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released a discomfiting survey showing that one-third of university students believe violence is an appropriate response to speech. The celebratory reaction to Charlie’s assassination across swaths of left-wing social media was also positively chilling.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but: This is how republics die. A people that loses the ability to engage in civil debate and instead resorts to violence is a people no longer capable of republican self-governance. It is a people that has ceased to be human and has instead become indistinguishable from the animals. It is a people that has renounced the fundamental uniqueness of mankind, rooted in another one of Charlie’s favorite books of the Bible, the Book of Genesis: “And God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him.”

There is nothing good down that road. There can only be chaos and anarchy. There can be no civilization or human flourishing.