“The best lack of all convictions, while the worst fullest is full of passionate intensity.”
William Butler Yeats wrote those words about Europe after the Great War, but they sound terrible this week while we are buried Charlie Kirk, murdered on 31 for the crime of public arguments. The young man who has made a discourse of a garage in the suburbs, was silenced by someone who apparently found bullets more convincing than words.
But this is what strikes me when I think about this tragedy: Charlie Kirk is perhaps the last American who really believed that you could change someone’s thoughts with a good argument. Think about that. When did you last saw that someone actually turned position during a debate? When did you last witness that someone said three of the most cherished words in the English language: “I was wrong?”
‘Fearless’ Tour takes the freedom mission from Charlie Kirk to colleges nationwide
My younger son understood this faith. He called me after the death of Kirk and shared something that possibly caught our national descent. “Dad,” he said, “I was always like Charlie Kirk – I always thought people with reason could be convinced.”
My son learned differently during the 2016 elections, while he was at the Graduate School. He started to get several phone calls a day from classmates who wanted to understand how he could support someone they really believed was the modern equivalent of Hitler. These graduated students – trained, intelligent people who pursue MBAs – literally thought Trump on the same footing with Hitler and called my son because they could not reconcile how someone like him could support such evil.
So in good faith, he has called in everyone who contacted him. From his own account: “I came to the Business School to learn things such as accounting, not to practice defending myself against mentioning a Nazi. I lost friends during this period, and it became one of the most difficult times of my life.”
Live Updates: Memorial services for Charlie Kirk
Let me promote an unconventional position: Charlie Kirk died because we have forgotten how we can hate well. GK Chesterton noted that “the true soldier is not fighting because he hates what is for him, but because he likes what is behind [or next to] It. ‘We are not fighting for hatred of our enemies, but love for our colleague soldiers and the ideals of our country. We have reversed this wisdom. We teach our young people to hate their opponents instead of keeping their own principles. We have made politics a challenge of the only thing you are in nothing to destroy that your certainty is destroying.
While my son lost friends, he did something very understandable. Shortly after Trump’s elections, he actively stopped participating in politics – turning the news, talking about talking to friends and reading the articles he read every day. “I noticed that I felt physically uncomfortable when the news came up,” he told me. “Defending yourself against being called a Nazi, racist, sexist, endlessly only for communicating relatively common sense ideas such as boys go to the bathroom of the boys and girls go to the girl’s bathroom, or that throwing Molotov cocktails in police cars is a bad idea (something that a classmate of his actually did a time during the George Floyd-Protest.”
Charlie Kirk (L) and his wife Erika Lane Frantzve (C) during the Turning Point USA Inaugural-Eeve Ball in the Salamander Hotel on January 19, 2025 in Washington, DC (Samuel Corum/Getty images)
My son has learned a hard, unfortunate lesson during the Graduate School, a countless other students have learned in recent years. Modern university, where Kirk met his end, has become the opposite of what John Henry Newman had in mind when he wrote ‘the idea of a university’. Newman suggested institutions that “a habit of the Spirit is formed through life, the attributes of which are freedom, fairness, calmness, moderation and wisdom.” Instead, we have created fragility factories, whereby students pay $ 70,000 a year to confirm their prejudices and avoid their triggers.
The founders would have recognized Charlie immediately. Franklin with his Junto, Hamilton with his newspapers, Jefferson with his correspondence, they all understood that democracy is an argument, not an answer. In Federalist 10, Madison wrote about the dangers of faction, but he never thought we would solve the problem of faction with murder.
Here is another unconventional thought: the problem is not that our universities are too political. They are not political in the classical sense of ‘politics’ that Aristotle meant when he called man a political animal. The university problem is that they are factories for indoctrination, especially in the free arts. Real politics requires involvement in the difference, the ability to live alongside those with whom you do not agree, the skill of conviction instead of coercion. Our campuses have replaced politics with theology and a particularly intolerant theology.
We have made the costs of conviction so high that capable, principle people completely withdraw from public involvement.
My son concluded his mirror image with words that chase me: “At those moments, after I have made the wrong choice before at that time, I hope that I have the conviction and courage to live it like Charlie and to live as Bill.” He of course meant Charlie Kirk. The other bill he referred was his father – me. I was humiliated by the comparison but worried by his confession. While he threw his hat out of the ring and entered the non-political world of finance, he found his comfort and happiness. But at what costs for our society?
This is what we have done to our young people. We have made the costs of conviction so high that capable, principle people completely withdraw from public involvement. We have created a world where it is safer to remain silent than to speak, safer to conform than to ask, safer to hide than to stand. There is a certain relief. But it doesn’t come without costs.
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The question that is for us is not whether we will have more Charlie Kirks – anyone who are willing to encourage hostility to their beliefs. We will. The question is whether we will look more like my son – composite people who withdraw from public involvement because the costs have become too high. Little of the smartest people I know, dream of entering politics – they dream of venture capital, private equity, the places where talent can still flourish without ideological inquisition. It is brutal logical: earn enough money, and maybe you can influence the change that you want to see in society, safely isolated from the crowd.
If we cannot protect America again for a fight – not only civil argument, but powerful, passionate, even angry argument – then we have to stop pretending to be living in a democracy. In his literal etymological sense, democracy means “power of the people” – it feels more like the power of the constantly hurt. If you are not consumed on anger, you are at home to raise your family and go to work. So radical political movements naturally attract the most angry among us, not necessarily the wisest.
Charlie Kirk is dead at the age of 31, but the idea that he represented – that Americans can argue their way to the truth instead of shooting his way to silence – does not die with him. My son’s generation deserves better than the choice between silence and death. They deserve what Charlie Kirk tried to give them: a place at the table, a voice in the conversation and the right to speak without being killed. Our children and grandchildren deserve it.
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