OPINION: Reverse cancel culture doesn't honor Kirk's legacy

I didn’t know Charlie Kirk and I wasn’t a friend of his, but I sure wish I had and had been.

I emailed Kirk, appropriately at freedom@charliekirk.com from my personal email account, a couple of times in November 2022, after the midterm elections, encouraging him and Republicans to embrace absentee voting so that GOP candidates didn’t enter election nights with huge deficits.

“Voters like it and we’re probably never going back, at least in New Mexico, to a preponderance of in-person voting,” I wrote. “Like your show on RAV, Jeff.”

I didn’t hear back from Kirk, and unfortunately that’s as close as I got to knowing him. I should have made a Chicago Cubs reference to snag his attention.

Kirk and I had a few things in common: We’re both natives of Chicagoland, both diehard Cubs fans, both Christians and conservatives, both unapologetic owners of Trump apparel, and both ardent believers in free speech and open debate. And we both had people who wanted us deplatformed because of our political beliefs.

Kirk handled the hostility and hatred far better than I. He was the best debater I’ve ever seen, a spectacular communicator well-versed in social media soundbites, the conservative voice of his generation and a self-described “happy warrior.” He always maintained patience, dignity and even empathy, hearing the other person out; just listen to the recordings of his shows and campus debates, not the mainstream media’s summations of them.

As heated as his campus appearances got, I don’t recall Kirk ever getting dragged into the gutter of insults and counter-insults. He stood above that, with a tall, statesmanlike aura that may have propelled him to the presidency one day, and a vice presidential pick as early as 2028.

Kirk was on the cusp of being a worldwide political leader when he was gunned down on a Utah college campus at age 31. He died doing what he loved doing, a martyr of free speech and open dialogue, and his Christian faith. His untimely slaughter will rank among the most notable assassinations in American history, and we’ve had far too many.

The large public vigils we’re witnessing from Utah Valley University to London to South Korea to his memorial service Sunday in Phoenix demonstrate Sept. 10 was another shot in America heard around the world.

More than a week after his jarring assassination, my heart is still heavy for his wife and toddler-age children. Nothing Kirk said or did justified the calculated and coldblooded murder of those kids’ father.

My heart is also heavy for the tens, even hundreds, of thousands of college students Kirk interacted with on campuses across the nation — at least two appearances in every state, he would boast — including here at the University of New Mexico where Kirk was always met by a small crowd of boisterous protesters who loathed him.

My heart is also heavy for the family of the alleged killer, who has two younger brothers. They likely wonder what drove their older brother into the mortal grip of the assassination culture and to commit a broad daylight brutal homicide in front of thousands of young adults and children.

Last month, Kirk was at Legacy Church’s Central Campus in Albuquerque, an appropriate final New Mexico venue for a man driven by his Christian faith. He spoke to a packed crowd of several thousand people, many in their teens and 20s. After he was introduced, a female guest told Kirk to go “expletive” himself.

Kirk handled it with grace, as he always did, saying he hoped she would give her life to Jesus Christ. Outside the church, almost 100 people protested, carrying posters saying, “What church welcomes hate” and “There is no hate like Christian love.”

“(W)e want to make it known that we don’t want him in our city,” protester Gillian Labe told the Journal.

“We’re going to continue to be here to oppose him and the kind of pain that he is doing and everything that he’s standing for,” added protester Zoey Craft.

I watched Kirk’s career blossom over the past decade, catching his daily podcasts that gave me insight into MAGA initiatives and thinking, and a distinct advantage over my competitors who wouldn’t be caught dead watching “The Charlie Kirk Show.” If they’d had a heart attack watching it, they’d have probably struggled up, found the remote and changed the channel before letting paramedics inside.

In the past week, I’ve been poring over news stories and programs about Kirk’s life and death. The social media celebrations of his death have been similar to those in December after the coldblooded slaughter of a health care CEO on a New York City sidewalk.

Although vile and disgusting, they’re also legal expressions of free speech in a free society.

TV pundits, newspaper columnists, airline workers, comic book writers, hundreds of public school teachers and others are losing their jobs for their celebratory online comments in the wake of Kirk’s assassination. But how would Kirk have felt about that? I’m pretty sure he would have said “No, let them speak. Let them get it out.”

That’s because Kirk was a true believer in free speech, especially controversial speech that other people might call hate speech, things like biblical verses, for example.

Hosting Kirk’s show Monday, Vice President JD Vance called on Americans to report offensive online posts about Kirk to their employers. I can try and understand the vice president’s personal grief, but Vance should remember the words of his friend, and the T-shirt Kirk was wearing at the time of his assassination simply saying, “Freedom.”

The best way to honor the legacy of Kirk is to embrace free speech, no matter how much it may offend.

We, as Americans, have been the world’s foremost guardians of free speech for a quarter millennium. Firing people for their gleefully stupid and ghoulish comments about Kirk’s death doesn’t honor his legacy or American values, it distorts and degrades them.