Anyone who has listened to Charlie Kirk’s presentations at colleges understands his brilliance, not just in his rhetorical speaking events but because of where and how he platformed them. Charlie knew from his own experience that colleges were eclipsing rather than amplifying critical thinking. He schooled socialist college professors at their own institutions and demonstrated to students the gross shortcomings of their academic experience. Kirk was popular and influential because he told young people the truth.
Traditional Thinking
Charlie’s core truths were once widely accepted as norms. Some of his trademark maxims included: “Truth is not determined by the loudest voice, but by reality itself”; “Without free speech, there is no such thing as truth”; “The moment you silence opposing voices, you destroy the foundation of democracy”; and “Courage is telling the truth even when it’s unpopular.” These common-sense propositions would have been obvious to the liberal US college campuses of the Vietnam War era. But today, they are a threat to the single-minded Marxist collective controlling most of today’s universities.
The proof was in the Kirk pudding – he said things that shocked audiences. Yet these were often truths that were shocking because they were verboten on campus, and he said them anyway: “The transgender thing happening in America right now is a throbbing middle finger to God,” he said. “Liberty is not a gift from government; it is a right bestowed upon us by our Creator.” And who could forget: “Faith is not just a belief – it’s the moral compass that guides a society toward goodness and order.”
These are all ideas once generally accepted as the simple truth, and certainly a student or speaker should be allowed to say them on campus. But in saying them, the young Kirk was holding a mirror up to the morally sterilized college edifices that frowned down on such radical utterances. Marxist professors pontificated in math and history classes about the evils of capitalism: Charlie championed the free market and its opportunities. Elite faculty called for the government to do more to control citizens’ lives and reallocate wealth: Kirk called for individual liberties and a shrinking of statist domination. The professorial class embraced secular humanism and demeaned people of faith: Charlie unashamedly shared his faith in God with a young generation starved for hope and decency.
Professor Charlie Kirk
Kirk lived his life in pursuit of others’ happiness. He had experienced the dead thinking of college, so he dropped out and taught himself. He embraced a vibrant traditional education, which he then strove to share with a generation growing discontented with colleges that feigned liberty and tolerance but exhibited neither. In the very showing of alternative thought, Charlie planted seeds of intellectual liberation that thrived as he moved on to sow at the next vapid state-funded campus on his tour.
In his seminal work, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom warned of the darkening gloom of modern colleges and counseled the prescription that Charlie Kirk dispensed at his free speech events:
“Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.”
Once Charlie Kirk had visited a campus and unveiled the alternative possibilities, the thought-throttling tyranny that otherwise dominated college culture with Onethink was disrupted. Charlie routinely spoke to that point, stating things like “Education should focus on teaching students how to think, not what to think”; “Colleges should be places of debate and discussion, not indoctrination”; and “College campuses should be marketplaces of ideas, not safe spaces from them.”
Seeding Critical Thought
Following his controversial events, students might not immediately question gender theory, but they couldn’t help noticing that questioning it was prohibited. They might not suddenly embrace capitalism or climate change skepticism, but they were more likely to observe that to do so required the courage Kirk counseled. The seeds took root, and more and more young minds truly awakened to free, critical thought. Charlie targeted colleges because he knew where best to strike the evil in our midst and to stimulate a revolution that was not counter to, but grateful for, America’s intellectual and faith traditions. Said Kirk, “If we lose our cultural values, we will lose our country.” Free speech and respectful discourse with one’s opponents were once an American cultural value. Charlie proved the truth of his teachings in the very doing.
This was the man’s brilliant contribution to a return to academic sanity: He saw that the front line of the battle was in our youth and that Marxists and disconnected intellectuals had usurped and sabotaged the educational institutions. Charlie criticized these institutional biases under the noses of the university, sneered at progressive ideologies, recited facts in logical rebuttals, and preached the virtues of capitalism and traditional values. He challenged the entrenched intellectual stagnation enunciated by Allan Bloom: “Where the purpose of higher education once was to enable the student to find truth, the modern university teaches that there is no truth, only 'lifestyle.’” Charlie was on a mission to pry open the closed American mind.
Kirk was equally brave in evangelizing his faith in a creator and the moral values ingrained in the nation’s founding principles. He scoffed at stale anti-Christian prejudices. Young men are now flocking to orthodox denominations, fleeing the chaos and moral decadence of social justice ideologies. Young Charlie outsmarted the wisest of secular elders.
This will be Kirk’s legacy – he spoke truth to institutional power, arming young people to think outside of the Big Brother box. This made him an enemy to those who relied on hate and falsehoods to control others. He knew the risks and stood up defiantly nonetheless. He exposed the cultish falsehoods of the woke left, and he was martyred for it.
