Conservatives are People Too

It’s been 8 days since Charlie was assassinated and I still feel like a walking shell.  The world feels empty whenever I think that he’s not in it anymore.  I’ve gone through the grief cycle.  At first I was furious, then I was sad, now I just feel numb.  I’m here but I’m not.  I’m like a walking version of myself, who is in there somewhere behind all the clouds and fog.

Why did he have to die?  Why are people celebrating his death?

Who celebrates when people die? What has to happen in your soul for you to do that?

In moments throughout the day, as I am reminded of what happened, there is a piece of me that somehow hopes to find out that he will be like Trump, emerging from the bullet triumphant with his fist raised and a flowing flag in the background.  But that isn’t what happens.  No.  The shot rings out, the crowd gasps and the children in the audience all run to their daddies because they’re afraid.  But when the chaos clears, there’s now two kids who don’t have a daddy to run to.  Who don’t have a daddy to call when they are scared at night.

Who celebrates that?

I understand now why David said “Tell it not in Gath, proclaim it not in the streets of Askelon” (2 Samuel 1:20) when he heard that King Saul had died.  I know why the men of Jabesh-Gilead risked their lives to retrieve Saul’s decapitated body from the wall of Beth-Sham (1 Samuel 31:12).  They could not bear the thought of people rejoicing over the dead body of their beloved king.

I also understand David’s lament in Psalm 12.  “Help us oh Lord, for the godly man has come to an end.” An end, David goes on, that was due to lies.  These enemies of the righteous told themselves that “with our tongue we will prevail” (Psalm 12:4) and used their words to destroy their enemies’ lives.

Charlie was no stranger to being lied about.  Scripture often connects lying to violence (see Psalm 10:7-8).  I’ve always found this connection odd and wondered how that worked.  I think I felt this way because I had a happy childhood and only associated lying with trying to get something I wanted, I never imagined that people would lie about others for the purpose of harming them.  But as I’ve gotten older, I see how lying and violence are linked.  When you slander someone, you are intentionally framing them in a negative light, so that others will think of them in that way.  This causes them to reap something that they didn’t sow and to have a reputation that they haven’t earned.  Bad people deserve to be treated poorly, it’s the way the world has been designed to work; but it is a man-made injustice when good people are mistreated because people have been led to believe that they are bad.

Charlie was a center-right normie conservative.  He believed pretty much what I believe and what most conservatives believe.  He got his sexual ethics from the Bible, he believed in the sanctity of life, he stood for family values and loved his country the way patriotic people have for our entire history.  Yet he lived in a time where these beliefs have been so demonized that he was shunned for speaking them with courage and clarity.  As such he was called (not in any particular order) a sexist, racist, bigot, homophobe, transphobe, Christian nationalist, fascist, nazi.  Oh and they threw white supremacist in there too because why not?*

Most conservatives roll our eyes when we hear these labels because they are attached to everybody that departs even slightly from Leftist orthodoxy.  If you’re a conservative (or even center-left nowadays) you’ve probably been called one of those things by someone in your life, even though they aren’t true and even if you protest about it.  If the Left has a Label-printer, we can be sure that that little device never runs out of paper and is always stocked full of ink.

But how can we roll our eyes when the labels become targets on our backs?  And how can we live in a country with people who will so flippantly slander us and then celebrate when we are murdered?  If you have an answer to that let me know, because I don’t have one.

So tonight, I sit here contemplating the vacuous hole that I feel within myself now that Charlie has left this world.  Why does this bother me so much?

I think its because I, like Charlie, am a conservative in my 30s with 2 kids.  Like Charlie, I’m not a politician.  Like Charlie, I’m just a normal guy.  When I see people laughing at his death, slandering him after he has died and defacing his memorials, I recognize that they would do it to me too.  I am Charlie Kirk.  And, even though the Left refuses to acknowledge it in the midst of their endless grandstanding for human rights, conservatives are people too.

 

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*For those who still haven’t come to realize the extent that the Left lies about its opponents see the below links that explain why Charlie was not any of those things

‘Do You Really Want To Defend Him?’ Algorithms, Outrage, And The Death Of Charlie Kirk

Smearing The Dead: The Left Lies About Charlie Kirk

Stephen King Walks Back Lie About Charlie Kirk With Half-Hearted Apology