On 9/10/25 a giant fell. The thunder he created, I believe, will resonate for a long time for many.
I followed Charlie Kirk for years, occasionally watching his on-campus debates with college students under the banner "Prove Me Wrong". I recognized him as a force for peaceful change, but alas, he did not change me enough. I remained stuck in the mental maze that typified my adult mode of political interaction.
I believe the vast majority of conservative thinkers in America checked in their mode of political interaction at the "Political Correctness Desk" beginning in the early 1980s.
The term Political Correctness came into use in the 1970s by the left to define what their leaders defined as the correct way to think progressively about feminism, gay marriage, education, and political action.
In the 1980s, Conservatives adopted the term as a snide, ridiculing description of Progressive-mandated party-think. It was a Trojan horse. Most Conservatives gradually came to accept it as a rule to follow to be "Correct" in political discourse. Most would see it as a call to avoid inconclusive debate, do not let politics impact friendships and social occasions. Either say something agreeable or nothing at all - Correctness was conflict avoidance.
The result was that a silent majority became evermore silent.
During the Reagan years, many of us saw a return to a political and economic normality that had been lost in the 1965-1975 decade. We were in the early years of family formation, entering the beginning of career formation in a society and economy that were active, productive, and becoming unconcerned with politics that mostly appeared to work.
The 90s and 2000s brought sudden changes: the fall of Communism, the Internet, the WTO, globalization, NAFTA, Dot-Com, and the myth of Hope-and-Change. Through that turmoil, Conservatives focused on work, productivity, law & order, too busy or uncaring to focus on politics; Correctness was repackaged as polite conflict avoidance.
The 2010s to 2020s were dominated by endless wars, government propaganda, the independent media capture by government, industries, and NGOs, the dressing-up of global warming from a fact into an anthropogenic threat, the pharmaceutical industry capture, and the military-industrial complex.
Each period brought increasing consolidation of corporate power, government expansion, and corruption enabled by permissive morality and cultural/social disruption. Conservatives largely accommodated rather than actively resisted interpreting "political correctness as conflict avoidance," thus ceding the debate stage to Progressives, emboldened by a mantra of "the more radical, the better."
Like Jeremiah in the wilderness, voices like Charlie Kirk's were beginning to ring warning bells, but again, Political Correctness was conflict avoidance - "agree or keep it to yourself for the sake of smooth relations, no matter how preposterous the argument."
Conservatives, by tradition since the American Revolution, most want to be left alone. The less government, the less turmoil, the less interference, the better, because we are busy building whatever for our families and lives. Conversely, Progressives seek change, government mandates, direction, activism that in all historical experiences, became bureaucratic social control of the individual by the collective, driven by redistributive envy.
Free speech is the last defense, our First Constitutional Amendment. It was made possible and remains so only by the Second, and by the Defenders like Charlie Kirk's (Turning Point USA) and Elon Musk's (Twitter/X), who put their lives and pocketbooks at risk for the cause.
Thanks to Charlie, I have found my Turning Point. I will refuse all calls to violence, but I will no longer cede the debate stage by agreeing that costumes and reality are equivalent. They are not. Destructive delusions that men can be women and vice versa. That socialism in a 'democratic' costume can be a lasting freedom despite all historical experience. That government is not the enemy of the individual. That critical theory is not an intellectual scam. I will not debate to convince, but I will no longer agree to fashionable delusions and nonsense just to be agreeable. Now I will rather walk away.
