James Lindsay, anti-Communist
It has been a year since Charlie Kirk was murdered before the eyes of the world, not for no reason but for all the worst reasons a civilized man can think of. A year. In some ways it remains unreal, but its reality is as clear and present as every other fact of waking life. On that damned evening one year ago, I sat down to write an essay about my friend that I still go back to read from time to time. “
” I asked. We have a choice, I said. That choice is stark, and it is everything. Will we pursue the delicious ruin of catharsis, or will we eat our bitter and stand for civilization? Of course, we still have this choice and still face it. This choice is eternal for all men. We all face it constantly.
A year has passed, though, and we haven’t answered. I’m not sure we could. I don’t think we got the chance, even to face the question.
In the immediate wake of Charlie’s murder, an unmistakable light shone out of the darkness of that day like a ray of grief-heavy hope from some corner of Heaven. There was this incredible moment of irreducible complexity in which tragedy and possibility lit the faces of a movement, a nation, and the world. Revival appeared around the corner. Awakening perched over the horizon like sunrise. There was a moment in time when many of us thought this horrific tragedy, this robbery of one of our very best, could wake more people up, create a movement towards truth, justice, and saving the West. It wasn’t to be so. In place of opportunity, we got horror. Almost as suddenly as the moment of noble legacy arose, it was consumed by a willful catastrophe of darkness and malicious fire. I, like so many others, have never witnessed anything like it and still cannot process how it unfolded. I stare to this day in shocked awe and grief, not just for my lost friend but also for the wanton destruction of what almost might have been.
I’m not talking about the completely debased Left, which in far too many corners celebrated and still celebrates, mocks, and desecrates not just this but everything. Theirs is precisely the darkness that the light of that awful circumstance might have repelled, that its ray threatened to pierce. I’m talking about something else, something far worse, in fact.
This monstrosity demands witness it doesn’t deserve. Within hours, shock was fed to conspiracy. Within days, his own “friends” were tarnishing his legacy and using his memory to push evil. Within weeks, the evils of the Left were whipped into a madness and frenzy of fear and hate. Before the end of the year, the whole affair had turned into some kind of revolting spectacle, a sick Saturnalian carnival that consumed almost everything that might have defined his posthumous legacy. Maybe worst of all, more than a few accounted just weeks before among Charlie’s friends and colleagues acted in many respects like by his murder its main obstacle had been removed from its path.
That spectacle and the shocking horror of it never seems to end. It’s like a year turned into a nightmare and a nightmare conquering a year.
Nothing was, and nothing is, sacred to this frothing monstrosity. Charlie’s vision, his hopes, his aspirations, his organization, his friends, his mentors, the men and women who stood by his side in some cases to his dying minute, his legacy, his widow, for God’s sake. Nothing sacred. Nothing set aside. Nothing safe. Nothing preserved. Everything devoured. It’s simply incomprehensible, like an evil of some debauched underworld unleashed upon something too worthy to exist.
Most of us who care most are condemned to watch the cruel miscreation while so many others, Charlie’s closest friends and confidantes in so many cases, sat and still sit in execrable silence, or its politically craven near-facsimile. Another multiplying horror. Another revolting spectacle, not on the stage but from the crowd all around us, a crowd we thought we were a part of and then realized we cannot escape now that we see it for what it is.
The whole damned thing deserves curses and retribution, but that’s where we come to the point.
A year ago, on the very evening of Charlie’s murder, I asked: Catharsis or Civilization? Today, I ask a baser question: Men or Monsters? That is, which are we? Are we men, or are we monsters? Since time immemorial, human beings have asked and wondered what kind of being, in fact, we are. What about our being makes us human? Is it our intellect? H. sapiens might flatter himself that way. Is it our economy? H. economicus leaves something to be desired. Is it our sociality? H. sozialismus can’t be it. What is it that makes us men rather than rude beasts?
They might be cruder than ours, but beasts have many faculties in common with us. Beasts have emotions. Beasts have language. Beasts have memories. Beasts have friends and relations they recognize and trust. Beasts in some cases even care deeply about their dead, more perhaps even than we do.
Beasts, however, do not recognize what is sacred. What is set apart. What demands to be honored and not spoiled. A bird, as anyone who has seen them knows, will shit where it eats, and everywhere else. Nothing, to a beast, is sacred. That sets us apart from them.
One way to put this might be to say that the right Homo from among them all is not the wise sapiens or whatever else but that we are, in fact, H. religiosus. We are religious beings, not necessarily because we recognize God, but because we organize ourselves around what we recognize to be sacred. We can conceive of the set-apart and honor it, and we can do so, so profoundly that it forms the basis of civilizations.
Charlie Kirk understood this. He didn’t know it. He didn’t think it. He understood it. He lived it, breathed it, walked it, taught it, and embodied and exemplified it. I know he did; not just because it’s obvious but because it was Charlie Kirk more than any other human being ever to walk this Earth who taught it to me, to my lasting gratitude.
Put otherwise, Charlie Kirk was a man.
But there’s more. Not only was he was no rude beast; he knew and called others not to be bestial. He sought to raise up men out of the masses of humanity, whom he knew it was his obligation to serve. But there’s even more than this.
While we might fear them, and they might often be fearsome, the beasts are never monsters. Monsters require something else that goes beyond rude brutality. Monsters are defined by something else that only H. religiosus can exhibit among the many kinds that fill and cover the Earth. Monsters are anti-sacred.
Monsters look at what is to be set apart and venerated, kept holy and not desecrated, and they profane and desecrate it. They do evil to that which is good because it is good. They spoil that which is worthy because it is worthy. They are not beasts, though. They don’t shit where they eat; they pour filth and excrement where others recognize their own humanity. They sully what ought never to be soiled. They ruin what is meant to be set beyond ruination, and they do it because they cannot abide it being that which it is: holy.
Charlie was a man. He was not holy, at least not beyond mortal limits. He was not set aside or beyond criticism. The dignity of his memory, of what he represented and meant to so many, both in life and after, and particularly of his loving widow, however, are another matter. These ought not be soiled. They should not be ruined. They are exactly the kind of thing men who are men must set apart from the profanity of the world and the ravages of its monsters.
The revolting horror of the last year was brought to us a legion of monsters who did lasting evil to everything Charlie Kirk stood for and much that he loved, to say nothing of to those who loved him. So much that is (not should be, but is) sacred was wantonly defiled, not just by Charlie’s enemies, for whom he always prayed, but by people we all thought to be his friends, who he also trusted.
Monsters. They are monsters. Homo religiosus at its most perverse and inverted.
So, a year ago, I said we faced the question of catharsis or civilization and urged us to choose civilization. Now I see we face that baser but, I hope, easier question of whether we’re men or monsters. So, who, or what, are we, men?
I argued then, and stand by to this day, that Charlie always was a man of civilization and not only would have chosen it but would have urged and wanted us all to choose it (even though I know he would have been really pissed off about what happened too). He made the right sacrifices and from that authority asked us to make them too, quite rightly.
I argue today with the same conviction that Charlie Kirk would be standing at the front of the charge today to cast out monsters from our midst. He would call each and every life he touched to be a Man and to repudiate the Monsters. Maybe, in that sense, he was exactly what they’ve acted like he was ever since, like cowards in his absence: an obstacle they needed out of their way.
Charlie Kirk was not perfect. He was a man. He was, in fact, as we too often forget, a young man. He got emotional. He made mistakes. He succeeded often but also sometimes failed. But he was an enemy to all Monsters, or, once having recognized them, would have been, and among their fiercest and worst.
He was Homo religiosus, the sworn enemy of the anti-sacred and rightful defender of truth, justice, goodness, and peace.
He’s not here anymore, though, and, painful as it is, it’s been long enough for us to realize that reality. He cannot be our champion against the monsters of this world any longer. That is for us to do, and we must do it; but to do so, we must be men, not monsters, too. To do that, we must do what he did throughout his heroic life. We must choose to be Men, not Monsters.
We cannot lose hope. The thing is, we should not lose hope either. As men, as Homo religiosus, we understand something not just about the sacred but about the Light, something monsters simply do not.
Darkness cannot consume light.
Light drives out darkness. Darkness, or that which produces it, can only occlude and obscure; it cannot consume or destroy light. It isn’t in its nature. It doesn’t have the capacity. It isn’t what it is, or, more accurately, what it isn’t.
Darkness prevails where light isn’t, so men must do what monsters will not: carry light into the shadows, as well as the darker places, and make them shine. It is men bearing Light that set things apart, holy and sacred. This activity is constitutive of what makes us human. Salt and light purify. That which is purified can be set apart and honored for what it represents. Perhaps it is above man’s station to truly sanctify, but by being salt and light, we can preserve and protect that which deserves it and honor it for what we recognize it to mean.
I have said many times in the last year that Charlie Kirk was, above more than anything, salt and light in this world, imperfect as anyone is. That is, he was a man, not a monster, and was so by active choice and deliberate decision day after day. He honored what was holy to the best of his ability, and he fought against those who would dishonor it at every turn.
As we begin this second year without him, may we make the same right choice. May we choose to be men, fallible but never monsters, and choose it again against all temptations day after day after day.