Sheela Clary

I knew Charlie Kirk’s name prior to September 10, but I would have been hard-pressed to pick him out of a lineup. This is, I imagine, because I am a woman. American teenage boys and men are served up clips and reels of him on repeat, like McDonald’s French fries. Lots of young boys and men I know, even my own sporty 14-year-old son, are somewhat familiar with the arguments for which he was most famous. He made them mostly in informal, outdoor debates on college campuses, debates much like the one he was engaged in when he died. It seems you need not have identified yourself online in any particular political way in order to have signed up for Charlie Kirk, and I did not understand until the past two days just how influential he was in reelecting Trump.

In the hours since his awful public death I have watched about a dozen of his videos, read a bunch of articles, and heard various takes, and it is at least obvious that Kirk earned his genuine, widespread appeal and that the millions who found him appealing cannot all be dismissed as fascists. Charlie Kirk’s wild popularity and Trump’s reelection do not indict men and boys. They point to the left’s forfeiture of respectful, honest, and vigorous argument.

I partly agree with Ezra Klein’s September 11 Opinion piece for The New York Times, in which his key point was:

You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it.

If American higher education had not long ago abandoned the debate stage and left it empty, Charlie Kirk would not have had such easy access to it. His success was predicated on higher education growing ideologically one-sided, intellectually lazy, and extraordinarily arrogant. If college campuses are islands, then Kirk was like an intruder sailing ashore to pitch his tent on the sands, having emerged from the vast oceans that take up most of the real estate on Earth. In this analogy, he came in as a representative of the people living on rough seas, people who resent the islanders strolling unhurriedly about under palm trees and the mistaken impression that everyone, if only they were more fortunate and educated like them, would think the right way.

Charlie Kirk has now vacated the debate stage. It is empty once again. Who will fill it? Who should it be, and how?

I really value disagreement. I crave it. I miss it like I miss my father. I never served on a school debate team, but my childhood dinner table served the purpose. My Dad was the one who taught me the pleasure and importance of an animated, well-researched, respectful conversation. But I can mourn and appreciate the loss of those conversations while also acknowledging that Dad, like Charlie Kirk, used his skills to bully people, which is why I don’t agree with Ezra Klein’s positive characterization of his approach to politics. The blessings of verbal acuity, keen intellect, and personal authority can be used to beat down ill-equipped adversaries, which is ugly stuff.

When it came to Kirk, the opportunistic imperatives of influencer life exacerbated the unfairness. He called his college campus conversations “Prove Me Wrong,” but he was never proven wrong, at least not in the most widely seen clips, because the confrontations were unevenly matched. A speaker picking on someone his own verbal size would never get as many likes and shares, but a mismatched argument can satisfy us only for the length of a TikTok video. The satisfaction scratches a base and petty itch.

So can people now, embodying higher aims, step into the void left by Charlie Kirk? Can we—those of us who see the need for patient, messy, and un-Instagram-able disagreement—take up the cause? Before we establish our differences, we would need to first establish what we have in common. This, I have no doubt, we can do. We do it all the time. We would also, however, need to work toward really unsexy goals, like understanding one another. It is slow, painful, enervating, and essential. We have been granted this one precious life to connect with people.

So let’s reconnect, in real time, without cameras or microphones on. Let’s talk to the people we don’t agree with, who think differently about the world and whose differences we have been tiptoeing around. Establish common ground. Good and bad still mean more or less the same to all people. Very few people celebrate assassinations, and I bet most of those who did celebrate Kirk’s murder could be made to feel sympathy for his widow and children.

But I do understand the impulse to gloat. I once gloated, too, in response to the shooting of a conservative. When Steve Scalise, a Republican who had voted against gun control measures, was shot, I wrote a quick and awful comment on a Facebook news story about it to the tune of, “Karma’s a bitch.” I was ashamed of the words as soon as I typed them. I deleted them. I regret typing them still. The sentiment was born of powerlessness and rage, and I do not want to live in powerlessness and rage. Today I feel only sympathy for Steve Scalise, just as I feel only sympathy for Charlie Kirk’s family, and for his legions of fans who felt that he spoke for them.

We are so soft, fragile, and vulnerable. Think of the thousands of people of every possible opinion and life experience whose bodies turned instantly and as one to ashes 24 years ago when planes hit buildings. Strip away the makeup, the empty performative speech, the painfully effortful “Hello, how are yous,” and all the other interferences we set up between ourselves and other people, and what you have left are uncomplicated creatures. We need to be fed, to belong, to be loved, to be seen and heard. In the black hole created by the slow, vast, tidal retreat of actual community—of civic, religious, familial and professional belonging—we scrounge around in the virtual world for inadequate substitutes. But the real thing is still available. There is a vacant stage, an empty tent, and it awaits only our energy, our broadened imaginations and our collective “Yes.”

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