Erika Kirk: A Widow Defiant

Charlie Was A Light In The Darkness; The Darkness Did Not Comprehend It

I have cued the above to the moment with Erika Kirk starts speaking. Please sit down and watch it. The courage of this woman is off the charts. Her message is an important one to hear. If you can get through the part at the end where she recounts their three year old daughter running up to her yesterday asking, “Where’s Daddy?” without weeping, you are a stronger person than I.

And there’s this short clip:

Please watch it. This is what love looks like, sounds like, is.

I knew next to nothing about Charlie Kirk before all this. I knew he was a happy and open man and an extraordinary political organizer. But watching clips of him in action, I really had no idea what kind of man he was. He was way more into politics than I am, but I wish that whatever God has given me to do with my life, I can do it with at least half the passion, confidence, and good cheer that Charlie Kirk did.

In her address, Erika Kirk urged people to find a “Bible-believing church” — for those not familiar with the phrase, it means a church that takes the faith seriously — because “spiritual warfare” is real, and we are in a spiritual battle above all.

I think Noam Blum has a point:

I know what he means. Look at this image Tyler Robinson’s mother posted 12 years ago:

Look, I’m not really blaming her. She and her husband did what so many millions of parents did, and do every day. We ought to have known, but we didn’t know, not back then. Everybody told you that getting your kid a computer and getting him online was giving him an advantage in the world.

Now we know. We know. What are we going to do about it?

The problem is not really that he held left-wing views. The problem is they became ever more extreme, and he would “always just be ranting and arguing about them.”

In the days to come, I guess, we will find out more about how Tyler Robinson was radicalized. A lot of people online are jumping to the conclusion that college radicalized him. I doubt that very much. He dropped out after a short time — this, though he had excellent grades in high school, and earned a big scholarship — and was at the time of his murder going to trade school. My guess is that he was radicalized entirely online. The bullets police found with his discarded rifle had pro-trans and Antifa messaging scrawled on them, and dialect associated with the online gaming community.

He apparently thought online was real life. There are tens of millions of people just like him. Very many of them are on the Right too. I’ve told y’all about the rise of right-wing extremists among young white males, something I’ve been hearing about from conservative Christian college professors, high school teachers, and personal friends who are seeing it happen to their own sons. I’m not talking about young men who become more conservative, and more politically engaged. That’s fine! I’m talking about young men who give themselves over to race hatred and Jew hatred. According to every single one of my sources, these demons are entering into them through deep exposure to online haters.

A young man who says he went to high school with Robinson describes him as a “Reddit kid” — as a teenager who spent all his time online. It broke him.

Y’all think about this too:

Can you imagine knowing you have a moral duty to turn your own son in to police, knowing that he is going to spend the rest of his life in jail, and then be executed for his crime — and then doing what you must? He raised that young man from a tiny baby, and this is how the boy’s life is going to end. God bless Mark Robinson for his courage. His heart is surely broken.

This moment in the life of our nation — of the Western world, really — has been an apocalypse in the strictest sense of the term. It has been an unveiling. We are discovering how evil many, many people are. For example:

And this, from a priest of my own church who, I am told, runs a Facebook group called “Progressive Orthodox”:

This one, over on BlueSky, where all the gentle leftists who couldn’t bear Elon’s X went to pass the peace pipe, was personal to me:

That brought to mind the letter I received in 2000, from one of my oldest friends, a high school teacher-mentor who, upon learning that I had voted with reluctance for George W. Bush, wrote to say the state should seize my toddler so he could be raised away from people like me, with such hateful views.

I wrote her back and cut loose on her. To her credit, she responded with an apology. Our friendship was never quite the same … but it ended for good in 2021, when she saw a letter to the editor I wrote to our local paper, defending the pro-impeachment vote of my friend Sen. Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, who was disgusted over the way President Trump behaved in the wake of January 6. In my letter, I noted that Trump had done some good things for the country, but his actions that day were unacceptable.

She texted me after reading that letter to say that our friendship was over. “Didn’t you understand that I was defending the impeachment?” I responded. Yes, she said, but the fact that I had credited Trump with some good meant that we could no longer be friends. Good riddance, say I. We had been friends for forty years, but her mind is poisoned by ideology.

That woman, now in her seventies, is not online, I’m pretty sure. But I have no doubt, no doubt at all, that she is celebrating in her heart the murder of Charlie Kirk.

This is true and important. You might not be doomscrolling social media these days — congratulations, you sane and healthy person! — but we who are see exactly this:

I agree, I think — I have no interest in sharing a society with people who celebrate the execution of a man who was peacefully practicing the duty of all of us in a democracy: public exchange and debate of ideas. I have fairly strong convictions on free speech, but I do support exposing them, even if it causes them to lose their jobs. There have to be serious consequences for normalizing political murder in society.

And let me be clear: if some right-wing lunatic murders a liberal or progressive like this, and right-wing people celebrate it online, I think they should also be exposed and fired. Enough is enough.

Yet let’s consider the point that John Podhoretz makes in this important thread. Here’s how it starts:

Read it all. Reminded me of the time back in 2002, when we were all still trying to figure out how to communicate on the Internet, and I was working at National Review. The Corner was new, and I, then a Catholic, posted obsessively about the sex abuse scandal, which had just exploded out of Boston. News broke that a teenage boy who claimed to have been raped by a particular priest in Baltimore had confronted the priest, and shot him in the knee. I said on The Corner that this was right and just.

Of course I repented, and took it down. If I had given it a moment’s thought, I would never have posted anything like that, even though I thought it. It shocked me that, in a moment of rage, I made that kind of public statement. It happened again a few times over the past 23 years, I’m sorry to say, but not nearly as often as it could have, had I not reflected on where my instant anger, and access to a global audience on the Internet, took me.

Nowadays, all of us live in a culture of No Unexpressed Thoughts. We parade our pathologies for a global audience. If we knew what people we pass on the streets are thinking at any given moment, we would probably never leave our houses for fear. Social media makes that largely possible.

Anyway, we now know that no small number of the people with whom we share a city and a country are the kind of people who would cheer if one of us were shot down in cold blood because we hold the same views as Charlie Kirk. I don’t know how we un-see that. I really don’t.

It has been extremely heartening to see all the people going out in public to pray in the wake of Kirk’s murder. To pray, not to burn down and loot. That’s what the other side does. And it has been heartening to see some liberals expressing sorrow and even anger over Kirk’s murder (Sen. Bernie Sanders made a great video). I don’t share his politics, but men like Bernie Sanders are not like Them either. And it is even better to see clips on social media of people renouncing their allegiance to the Left over the despicable display by many online leftists.

But the best thing of all is seeing people on social media saying they are now going to start going to church. Glory to God! But find a good church, one whose pastoral leadership is not mealy-mouthed and MTD, but is rather not afraid to teach the truth. It should be one that will prepare your soul for the difficult days ahead for our country. There are some prominent online far-right preachers who practice hatred, especially, like Joel Webbon, for Jews and non-white people. Avoid them — they are just as filled with the demons of hatred as their left-wing doppelgängers.

I am going to visit a monastery here in Hungary today. I plan to pray for the Kirk family, and for all of us. Please join me in prayer, wherever you are. I thought prior to this week that Charlie Kirk was nothing more than a political activist. I have learned that he was actually a light that shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it. So a dark man shot him in the throat in front of his wife and children.

As Erika Kirk put it well: this war is above all spiritual. Put on the full armor of God.