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The 36-year-old widow, her infant, and her toddler have not yet buried Charlie Kirk. But already, the scavengers are clawing at the slaughtered corpse of the conservative superstar as fodder for their own conspiracy theories. On one-half of the internet, Kirk’s alleged radical left-wing assassin has been transmogrified into a MAGA strawman, the monster that Kirk, as Dr. Frankenstein, created. On the other half of the internet, Kirk’s life legacy is being contorted in a crusade for clicks, grievances, and to blame his death on, ultimately — you guessed it — the Jews.
Meanwhile, the 31-year-old man recedes further into the past as the internet consumes his celebrity. The teenage college dropout who was debating at the Oxford Union a little more than a decade later is forgotten. The lovestruck husband, still evidently in the honeymoon phase of his marriage to a beauty pageant queen and philanthropist, is as erased as the doting, slightly dorky, 6-foot-5-inch father thrilled to pick out baby dolls with his 3-year-old daughter.
OPINION: CHARLIE KIRK WAS MURDERED FOR WINNING THE WAR OF PUBLIC PERSUASION
The grave of Kirk, the man who built an empire, two campaigns for President Donald Trump, and a family out of nothing but his own sheer grit, has been robbed by scavengers of the alt-Left and alt-Right before his body has even been interred. And the grave robbers, of course, have to steal from Kirk’s corpse, because they are people who have never built anything.
Seeing that Kirk’s murder was an intentional assassination was not up for question for the hundreds of millions of us who saw the video autoplay on social media within minutes of the shooting.
A smiling Kirk on a sunny day at Utah Valley University giddily invited the “best libs that Utah has to offer” to disagree agreeably. The whole scene exemplifies the best of Kirk, and for the same reason, it exemplifies the best of the American political tradition. Unlike the social media silos that encourage us to silence our ideological enemies and telegraph our own worst-faith interpretations of their motives onto them, Kirk’s campus events were a masterclass in political and Christian evangelism as much as they were the sort of free speech salons the Founding Fathers envisioned when they birthed the nation.
And then, from 142 yards away, past some 3,000 people, six police officers, and Kirk’s own personal security team, a bullet severed his neck cleanly in two, a fountain of blood bursting over his white T-shirt, and his head instantaneously falling limp behind him.
The motive, however, took a little over a day to ascertain. The Wall Street Journal was excoriated for reporting the day after Charlie’s murder that the ammunition used was engraved with “transgender and anti-fascist ideology.” But within another day, law enforcement proved the report to be true. The accused assassin, Tyler Robinson, 22, was the recently radicalized left-wing son of Mormon, Trump-supporting parents. Robinson, who had a romantic relationship with his transgender roommate, a biological male who identified as a female, allegedly confessed to the roommate in text messages that he “had enough of Charlie’s ‘hatred,’” claiming “some hate can’t be negotiated out.” The case’s prosecutor confirmed that Robinson was specifically and “increasingly concerned about gay and trans rights,” with Robinson’s relatives corroborating that he had focused his ire on Kirk in recent weeks.
Seems pretty point-blank, right? Evidently, not to the dregs of the Left.
Over on the left-wing containment dome that is Bluesky, top progressive influencers such as “JoJoFromJerz,” a prominent enough figure that she was a White House guest when Joe Biden was president, claim that Robinson didn’t actually write the text message confessions released by law enforcement. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, a left-wing college professor with a quarter-million followers generated over 3 million views on a thread detailing why Robinson was actually “a fringe right-wing Groyper.” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe similarly gloated that “Kirk’s apparent assassin seems to have been ultra-MAGA, exploding the GOP/MAGA attempt to pin the blame for this tragedy on liberals.” Ron Filipkowski, the editor-in-chief of a progressive media organization bankrolled by Reid Hoffman, bragged that “after days of Republicans blaming and vilifying Democrats and trans people for Kirk’s murder despite having no clue who the person was, we find out it’s a white guy from a Republican family in Utah who loved guns.”
The willful idiocy of the Left, even after the overwhelming consensus of forensic evidence and law enforcement, made it to prime time.
Before being yanked off the air by a panicking Disney, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel accused “the MAGA gang” of hitting “new lows” by “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” The ostensibly serious CNN White House correspondent and evening host Kaitlan Collins insisted that “we don’t have a motive yet” for Kirk’s killing, while CBS News’s John Dickerson said that Robinson was “not motivated by an obvious political ideology.”
In a particularly creative contortion of the facts, Montel Williams asserted on CNN that even though Robinson was radicalized by his transgender roommate, his motivation wasn’t exactly political: “I think he was motivated emotionally.”
If only Kirk could be allowed to rest in peace by the friends he thought were on his own side.
After Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy famously lamented that her husband “didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for Civil Rights; it had to be some silly little communist.”
It was an exceedingly weird comment for a supposedly grieving wife to make, a fact that may be influenced by the slain president’s notoriously terrible treatment of her. It is thus unsurprising that Erika Kirk, who has reportedly enjoyed nothing but respect and fidelity from her loving husband, would have no such political strategy to reengineer the story of Charlie Kirk’s murder.
The same is seemingly not true for some of his friends.
Candace Owens, whom Kirk plucked out of political obscurity to help lead Turning Point USA, has now proclaimed there is a “federal conspiracy” and “they are lying about Charlie’s assassination.”
Who is “they”? To anyone familiar with the Owens of the last three years, “they” are the Jews.
“You don’t think they wanted Charlie silenced because he wouldn’t fall in line on Israel?” Owens asked during a livestream. She similarly accused billionaire donor Bill Ackman of blackmailing Charlie with “threats” during a “pro-Israel” intervention, a claim that Ackman dispelled by releasing exonerating text messages and was further undermined by pushback from every other living witness to the meeting in question.
In her claims that Kirk actually reviled the Israeli government, Owens has been joined by Tucker Carlson.
“I was shocked and sickened by the reaction of the ghoulish and really repulsive reaction of the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Charlie’s death,” Carlson said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything lower than his attempt to hijack Charlie’s memory and use it for his own political ends, particularly because what he said was completely untrue.”
For reference, Netanyahu commemorated Kirk as “a lion-hearted friend of Israel” who “fought the lies and stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization.” Hardly a radical eulogy if there ever was one.
Israeli donors, according to Carlson, “tormented [Kirk] until the day he died.” Owens insisted that Kirk, a proud Protestant, was on the verge of converting to Catholicism, while Carlson said he was actually “very interested” in Eastern Orthodoxy.
No matter that Kirk’s pastor has begged Owens and company to stop telling lies about his faith or his willful support for Israel. Owens has insisted that nobody except for her husband or Kirk’s grieving widow “has the power to shut me up.”
After the great Ben Shapiro, himself a progenitor of the campus crusade that Kirk perfected, announced the Daily Wire would give $1 million to TPUSA in honor of his late friend, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) quickly responded with an attack on Jewish Trump supporters.
“Do not allow a foreign country, foreign agents, and another religion tell you about Charlie Kirk,” Greene said. “And I hope a foreign country and foreign agents and another religion does not take over Christian Patriotic Turning Point USA.”
From Ackman to Seth Dillon to Shapiro to Kirk’s pastor, the notion that Kirk was becoming a quiet crypto-Nazi has been decidedly debunked. But perhaps we have to consider some of his last words when asked whether he was still friends with Owens in light of her recent embrace of the dark side.
“There is a corner of the internet that wants to point and blame the Jews for all their problems,” Kirk said in a rhetorical masterclass of the nondenial denial. “Everybody, this is demonic, and it’s from the pit of hell, and it should not be tolerated, period.”
Jackie Kennedy might have wanted Oswald to be a segregationist the same way the Left wants Robinson to be an alt-right groyper and Owens wants Kirk’s killer not to be Robinson at all but rather an Israeli agent instead.
But sometimes the assassin really is a silly little communist.
As they grow more ubiquitous and powerful, some stars are subsumed into their own celebrity. As their public images dominate their lives, their inner personas shrink and become obscure. It is not uncommon to hear of harrowing tales of business moguls or A-list actors, who, at the apex of their fame, are devoid of real, life-long friends or any semblance of actual family. It is no mistake that just a few months before legendary Zappos founder Tony Hsieh died in a drug-fueled house fire, his good friend Jewel warned the billionaire that every single person around him was on his payroll.
By the time he died, Kirk was not a billionaire, but he had gotten a president elected the leader of the free world once in 2016, helped resurrect his reputation from political exile, and then won back the White House again in 2024. He managed to become a household name to the extent almost universally reserved for a top tier of elected officials ready to throw their names into the next presidential primary.
Yet at the pinnacle of his power, Kirk was more grounded than ever. He was a great man who remained a good one, a self-made man who built his world in the image of what he believed would best serve the Lord and blamed nobody else for his shortcomings.
And those grifting off of his death hate him for it.
In Shapiro’s new book, Lions and Scavengers, which was written well before Kirk’s murder but only released this month, he almost prophetically defined the difference between Kirk and those, well, scavenging his death for political gain.
The lion, in the spirit of Machiavellian virtue, “thrills in his capacity to choose,” and in the face of adversity, a lion such as Kirk “does not complain about the unfairness of life: He seeks an answer.”
By contrast, Shapiro defines the spirit of the scavenger as “the spirit of envy,” driven by “the impulse to escape his own failures and shortcomings by blaming others.” Indeed, the left-wing liars and alt-right grifters all trying to telegraph Robinson as a member of their preferred oppressor class are the same as the scavenger who “believes that his own failure is the fault of the stars, and of the fates, but mostly, of the Lion.”
OPINION: CHARLIE KIRK’S HONORABLE LEGACY OF CIVIL DISCOURSE
On Saturday, throngs of some of the most important people on the planet will join to lay Kirk to rest, including Trump and Kirk’s similarly close friend, Vice President JD Vance. They can and should speak to Kirk, the political savant, the young man who evolved from a slightly awkward campus activists to one of the most effective conservative operatives and communicators since William F. Buckley himself. But if Kirk’s friends can do anything, let it be to remember him, the person who loved a daughter he will never walk down the aisle, the person who found his other half to run with him in a journey most of us will never understand, the person who left behind an infant son who will never have a living memory of his father.
Lying about Kirk’s mission on earth and how his success is why a radical leftist allegedly killed him would be a disgrace to his memory. But worst of all, every conspiracy theory woven around his celebrity buries the legacy of the very real man and the very good one who deserves to be remembered as a lion among scavengers.