Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk, a man of clarity and kindness, rose from being a college dropout to becoming a well-known right-wing activist and entrepreneur. He was an important figure for America, as he helped shape a conservative force for a new generation with his program, Turning Point USA. It is pure evil and downright wrong for someone to think that taking his life is right or is to be celebrated. The trial for the alleged shooter hasn’t begun, and so this writing is in no way meant to characterize Kirk’s death as being done by one who represents a group. Furthermore, there are many concerned citizens who are following the evidence about this assassination, and the facts are not yet clear about who is behind it. That being said, his appearances on campus did spark major confrontations with the LGBTQ+ and the anti-racist crowd, and he did stand for values that they hated. This is an important part of the discussion of my essay, and so while we are not clear on his murderer or murderers, we can be clear on the issues he died defending. Besides, he never hated people who decided to support or be involved in the LGBTQ+ community. He saw college culture today as a troublesome mess: a manipulation of young people’s desires and natures, a clouding of classical education with intersection-driven degrees, and he wanted to help. Furthermore, he advocated for gun rights and stood firmly for cultural conservatism. 

Charlie Kirk saw the truth that would heal and clear young peoples’ minds. He challenged sexual/gender identity theories that were forced on youth without parental consent, and he wanted to help by spreading what he called the “Word of God”, the Bible. He openly argued with students and reasoned with them about controversial beliefs and practices. Even his tours were called “Prove Me Wrong”. He welcomed kids to question and argue and would seem to relish jeers coming from the audience when he exposed the illusion covering reality. He fought stupidity with patience but also with focused ferocity.

The meaning of Charlie Kirk’s death should be that a legacy of robust debate and of fearless engagement has been cemented as part of the American ethos. His death extends a responsibility to those who can still keep a calm head in this chaos, to peacefully fight back in this unofficial war. It’s borderline insanity for someone to hate a man who’s simply trying to help young people, so much so that they feel the need to end his life. The woke LGBTQ+ crowd demands respect and freedom for their so-called rights (being called whatever pronoun they want, or walking into any bathroom they want, playing in their biological opposite-gender sports, etc), and yet they don’t feel the need to treat people who simply don’t choose to support their choices, respectfully. It’s not freedom that they want, it’s power and privilege through twisted reasoning: it’s barbaric. 

After reading the news and seeing the videos, one can’t help but wonder, did the killer or killers even stop for a single second to think about Kirk’s wife and two kids? The alleged killer and his friends evidently advocate and fight for love, and yet he (allegedly) just destroyed a loving family. Personally, this isn’t exactly being biased or argumentative, it’s just stating the facts: a father and husband is dead. Stepping back from the investigation (which many are saying involved not only foreign governments, but also military intelligence), many on the Left celebrated Kirk’s death this just made their community look really bad, so they should at least think about this for themselves. It can possibly prove that all this poison has twisted their critical thinking so terribly that they no longer have the ability to think properly. Again, the investigation is pending, and part of the concern is that perhaps this public execution was planned to frame the narrative by other nefarious parties.

I am going through dark and rough days, especially as an anti-woke resident of San Francisco. It is important to remember Charlie Kirk and his powerful, influential work, and to believe that this remembering creates a driving force for more people to stand up just like he did. In fact, we ourselves can stand up in our own small ways. For starters, not participating in grooming activities: when teachers ask for us to state our pronouns, it is NOT REQUIRED. And when they ask for your gender or sexuality when filling out forms, you do not need to fill it out. However, I was just forced to! When I was filling out an application for a college prep program here in San Francisco, they wouldn’t let me submit it just because I chose “prefer not to say” – which was an option on the form – my gender. This emphasizes how poisoned the City by the Bay is, because when you fail to support LGBTQ+ or reject anti-racism by refusing to tick a box or agree with something, you can get left out, or judged, and occasionally hated on. Isn’t that ironic?

Let’s now look at specifics. Why was Kirk hated? Part of the reason is that he saw through a popular social philosophy, identifying it as a corrosive agent on American values.

Kirk argued that if you obsess about race then you are more likely to become racist. He probed his listeners: do they even know that they are influenced by CRT? Can they define it, or do they just feel it and spout it? Charlie Kirk stated that Critical Race Theory destroys a society and that we should reject it.

These issues on the college campuses are very present in California public schools. I, along with all public school freshmen in the state of California, must take a class called Ethnic Studies. This is a replacement for traditional subjects for freshmen, enacted in 2021 by Governor Gavin Newsom. And recently, I hear more and more frequently this word: “equity”. They teach us that equity is all-important, and they do not speak about equality, which we know is straight from the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”, etc. Equity, when defined within the context of Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality means… redistribution. A few days ago, our Ethnic Studies teacher was talking about how race is just a social construct used to categorize us into classes, to discriminate against us as a class of people. He talked about how the more privileged who do this are generally “white”, and how those who don’t exert this construct (and also don’t have as much privilege) are what he called “people of color”. I am in pure disbelief of this statement. It is very true that out there, no matter what, there are going to be assumptions and stereotypes of people of all types. But he is insinuating that there is a club of people enacting these abstractions. Ludicrous and untrue. If you let this fantasy define you, and you bow down to it, then that is all the more drawing the line, and making a twisted statement true. Whatever happened to “rugged individualism”? Why contemplate these abstractions when you can work hard and build yourself up? If all of us are born with equal rights, then all of us can achieve our goals. Of course, no matter what, there are still going to be individuals out there who are racist and prejudiced. There is no guarantee of the elimination of mindsets and values like these. Furthermore, it is also very true that there are groups of people who are disadvantaged due to their backgrounds and more. But that still doesn’t have to mean a certain group of people are the cause of their misfortunes. 

The Ethnic Studies teacher, a few days later, discussed discriminating against black people. He made a point that assuming anything about them, just because of their race, the way they dress, and their mannerisms, is itself wrong. He showed us a video made back in the 2000s, a social experiment. How would society react to a white kid compared to a black kid dressed in similar ways, pretending to steal a bike? Most people left the white kid alone, and some even helped him, while the outcome for the black actor was the complete opposite. The video concludes how our society is racist. But here’s the catch: the black actor was dressed in a more ghetto way, and yes, people do assume that black youths are more dangerous, based on data, like crime rates. Is it our fault that black people have higher crime rates than the rest of us? We all make assumptions, and we’re all judges – we may not always be the best ones – but it’s part of how we keep ourselves and others safe. If black people have such high crime rates and want people to stop assuming, then maybe they should look into their own community for solutions.

Finally, I can address counter-storytelling. The woke community defines counter-storytelling as a way to magnify the stories, experiences, narratives, and truths of underprivileged communities. Proponents of counter-storytelling are, in short, saying that storytelling is told by those in power, and that under-privileged storytelling must counter the power. 

We recently reviewed Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story” TedTalk, 2019. She talks about how America constantly feeds us one-sided stories, so much so that Americans assume people from Nigeria and Africa are poor and pitiful and don’t know how to speak English. She claimed that if she switched roles with her American roommate in college (who evidently assumed she didn’t know English and listened to only African music) she would’ve assumed the same things about someone from Africa, too. This premise is self-ridiculing. Adichie talks passionately about her childhood memories of reading American books where all the characters were blue-eyed and white-skinned, and that they drank ginger ale and played in the snow. She says, “What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.” This sounds like one of those “aha moments” that we all have as children. In an interview from the podcast “The Stoop”, Adiche proudly states that she tells her children to “identify” as Nigerians. But they were born and raised in the States. Despite their passports being of the US, they can now proudly “counter” this by ignoring it and calling themselves Nigerian. So does that mean someone Chinese born in the US calling themselves Chinese counts as “countering”, too? Personally, I wouldn’t say so. 

Is this just a culture shock to her? Why try to change the world’s perspective about where you came from, when you can improve that place’s image for the world to see better? And if we look even deeper, it signals how African Americans are seen as less-than because of some perception from social hierarchies. But does she say what, exactly? No. She claims that many stories have to do with power (ring a bell?), and that “when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.” It is true that there is no one-sided story to anything, but when used to talk about their presented image, and including the statistics of crime rate and other negatives in America to us, what can they expect us to believe? And by saying that we regain a kind of paradise, she is subtly signaling that all the stories we’ve ever been fed are one-sided and if we don’t know the other side, it is as if we’re being lied to. This is again, splitting us into groups; the more we do this, the less likely we would all ever truly be equal to one another. 

Many people are wowed and amazed by her, thinking she would bring them hope and vision. But in reality, she is just another powerful figure trying to turn values upside down, making readers extremely self-conscious, cultivating anti-racist self-loathing. For what? No matter what, there will always be misunderstandings about the different cultures and the beliefs and practices. This is just taking it to the extreme that everyone should understand fully about African culture and black people before we even connect or communicate with them about anything. If that’s the case, shouldn’t all the other cultures deserve the same treatment, too?

But isn’t she also just telling a single story? In ethnic studies, they claim they are teaching us both sides of the story when they are mainly feeding us what they claim is the other side – there isn’t a huge issue with knowing both sides, but it’s how they feed it to us at such a young age. We’re all still developing high schoolers still unable to judge quite clearly which sides to stand on, or to even stand on any sides at all. So why feed us biased and single sided stories (which they ironically claim they aren’t doing) in such a targeted way?

If Charlie Kirk could raise his hand in my Ethnic Studies class today, what would he say?