The Assassination of Charlie Kirk
Dear Friends and Fans of the Three Investigators,
I didn’t write the text that follows for Substack. I wrote it impulsively, as a Twitter post, and (equally impulsively), I’ve decided to share it with you guys. I tend to spend too much time laboriously thinking things like this out, but this time, I won’t. Here goes, then.
My post:
I've never before posted on this platform about anything except The Three Investigators series, but I feel so torn up about what happened Wednesday in Utah that I really have to do so now. We live in an era where right and wrong have been turned inside out. Evil is excused, goodness condemned. Strength of character is sneered at; killers are cheered. The ideology that has been targeting tradition, excellence, and honor for a whole lot of years now ended up targeting a man who lived with courage and conviction, had a beautiful young family, and exhibited great personal kindness.
To see people who appear, on the outside, to be normal American citizens rejoicing in the assassination of a man like Charlie Kirk has been frightening beyond anything I can remember in my lifetime.
When Steven and I set out to write a new Three Investigators series, what we had in mind was giving young readers a long-form series that would help them understand what had always been special about American life. To give them role models who embodied Enlightenment values like reason, liberty, and individualism, but who also had the old-fashioned can-do American spirit. The new Three Investigators series rests on a quiet but clear belief that the best government is the smallest one; that people should be judged on their own merits, not as part of some group; and that a commitment to free speech and free inquiry is the bedrock our country is built on. When we were developing the series, Steven and I hoped the finished books would help young readers learn how to think, not what to think.
Moreover, one of the people I was just starting to admire in the fall of 2018, (when the new series started to push its way into my mind), was the man who was murdered on Wednesday. I started crying the moment I heard he had been shot, but then was briefly lulled by a report that he had been stabilized in the hospital. I have now seen the video of the murder, and I don’t believe he could have survived long enough to get to the hospital at all. He was killed in the middle of teaching 3,000 students that people need to listen hard to discern the difference between good ideas and bad ideas - and he was killed with his wife, his infant son, and his young daughter sitting in the audience watching.
When it comes to conversations with students, no one did it more or better than Charlie Kirk did. At the age of just eighteen, he founded an organization which now has chapters on 850 campuses. He was beloved by millions and millions of young people around the country and the globe. How is it possible that teachers, professors, therapists, nurses—people entrusted with care of the younger generations—can be speaking with gleeful cruelty about something as wrong as the cold-blooded murder of a man who devoted his life to what he considered to be good?
In my own youth, I lived through the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy Sr. They were terrible moments in American history – but the reaction to the assassinations was universal condemnation.
Although Charlie Kirk was a public figure, he was neither a politician nor a preacher. In Turning Point USA, he did found a political organization, but he never forced anyone to join it, and in recent years he has spent a lot of his time simply debating intelligently with those who disagreed with him. He was famous because he reveled in holding respectful conversations on US campuses – and he was killed for being good at using the glorious English language to convince other people that they might have fallen for propaganda.
I had no idea how much a death like this one might upset me until it happened. Charlie Kirk had simply been there, in the background of my life, for seven or eight years by then. While lacking his enviable faith and being unaware of what he was up to most of the time, I was happy that a human being like him was alive, somewhere or other, doing what he did best.
One of my greatest living heroes is Novak Djokovic, and Charlie Kirk was one of the few high-profile people who stood up for Djokovic when he needed it most – after his outrageous deportation from Australia in 2022, and again in 2023 when he was refused entry into the US. From reading testimony after testimony about Charlie Kirk’s dependable outreach to people in need of support, I now understand that his support of Djokovic was no fluke.
Charlie Kirk’s death would have been hard enough to deal with even if it had horrified everyone who learned of it. But the valorizing of the assassin who stole this man’s life is terrifying. He was killed while he was debating. The far-left extremists made the jump from cancel culture to killing culture without batting an eyelid. This is a spiritual struggle. There is no purely political solution to this. We are in a battle for the soul of the world. Everything we love depends on pushing this darkness back.
