We need people like Charlie Kirk

Political thought needs thinkers, logicians, scholars and philosophers. Political movements need activists, organisers, ideologues and propagandists.

This isn’t to say that no cross-pollination between the two categories is possible. In his spare time a philosopher may well dabble in activism or an activist in philosophy.

But such pastimes will come at the expense of efficacy in their day jobs, or at least so I’d like to believe. After all, though not utterly hopeless as a political thinker, I’m constitutionally incapable of doing activism, organisation, ideology and propaganda.

Moreover, in my weaker moments I look down on those who excel where I fail. Such snobbery is a mistake though, and whenever I sense that knee-jerk reaction coming up I should nip it in the bud. People capable of turning thought into action deserve respect.

This is a realisation I reached after spending an hour or so listening to Charlie Kirk take on all comers in campus debates. Having done so, I now feel even sadder that this young man is no longer with us.

I can’t even begin to comprehend the immensity of the effort and perseverance it must have taken to found Turning Point USA and build it into a political force. Charlie understood something essential about political debates: they are ultimately won not by arguments but by slogans.

Choose the mantras that appeal to your audience and you’re 90 per cent there. The rest is just the gift of the gab, the ability to deliver every word with eloquence and conviction. Charlie had eloquence and conviction to burn, and he knew how to pare ideas down to their kernels, slogans.

Unfortunately, when it came to Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine, he went even further than his idol Trump in preaching pro-Russian views and regurgitating pro-Putin propaganda.

Zelensky was to Kirk a “CIA puppet” and “gangster” who “sent his own people to a senseless massacre”. And Crimea couldn’t be returned to the Ukraine because “it has always been part of Russia”.

That’s where the propagandist ought to have been helped by the scholar: the Crimea hasn’t always been part of Russia. It was that from 1783, when Grigory Potemkin annexed the Crimean Khanate, to 1954, when Nikita Khrushchev transferred it to the Ukraine. That was almost exactly the period when India was part of the British Empire, which still doesn’t give us the right to send the Royal Marines to take over, say, Goa.

But I did tell you that Charlie was no intellectual. His job was to win debates and drum up support, not to delve deep into issues and come up with serious arguments.

Watching those videos I was envious: I couldn’t do what Charlie did day in, day out. Even at his age, I never quite had the energy. I’m not sure he could do what I do either, but we’ll never know because he never tried. He was too good at what he did to want to veer into other areas.

Several of his opponents brought up the issue of abortion, trying to punch holes in Charlie’s staunch pro-life stance. He argued his corner from the evangelical Christian standpoint, referring to abortion as murder of babies.

That’s good Christianity but not so good rhetoric. To borrow a phrase from Laplace, the anti-abortion argument doesn’t “need the hypothesis” of Christianity.

In fact, Charlie’s statement was a rhetorical fallacy known as petitio principii, begging the question. That means using the desired outcome of an argument as the argument itself. (It doesn’t, however, mean ‘raising the question’, which is how some people misuse the expression.)

For, unfamiliar with Aristotle’s concept of potentiality, fans of abortion deny that a foetus is actually an autonomous being. They see it as an annoying part of a woman’s body, sort of like an in-grown toenail, which the woman can get rid of without being impaled on the horns of moral dilemmas.

Calling an abortionist a baby murderer may be true, but rather than winning the debate that statement turns it into a yes-it-is, no-it-isn’t shouting match. And appealing to Christian rectitude rings hollow with atheists, which most of Charlie’s listeners were.

When against my better judgement I find myself arguing this issue with Leftists, I use the Socratic methodology of sequential questions based on my ‘minus-one-day’ argument.

First, I ask if my opponent believes it’s wrong to take a human life without due process. If he does, then the only way he can support abortion morally is by claiming that no human life has yet begun.

When does it start then? At birth. What about at birth minus one day? How is abortion at birth minus one day morally different from killing a baby at birth plus one day? It’s a moot argument, goes the usual reply. In England abortion is only allowed up to 23 weeks and six days of pregnancy.

Fine. So this means that, according to our law, human life starts at exactly 24 weeks, which makes abortion illegal at that point. What about 23 weeks and five days? Or four? Or three? Exactly what is that miracle that occurs at precisely 23 weeks and six days?

How can you say that human life starts at that moment and not a day earlier? It’s purely arbitrary, as is any point in pregnancy to which we can backtrack other than one: conception. Any other moment gives at least grounds for doubt, and surely any doubt should be interpreted in favour of saving a human life?

But what about pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, asked Charlie’s opponents. Surely that entitles the victim to abort? No, answered Charlie. That would be committing an evil act to correct another evil act. But since he hadn’t yet proved logically that abortion is an evil act, that argument fell flat.

Incidentally, it’s estimated that out of some 200,000 abortions performed in Britain every year, less than one per cent result from rape or incest. And yet those crimes inevitably come up whenever a fan of abortion wants to deliver a QED.

Another question came from a chap from India who questioned Charlie’s statement that Christian moral dicta are objectively true. How could he say that if there are many different religions in the world, each with an equally valid claim to objective truth?

Charlie skirted around that issue, instead citing Josephus’s and Tacitus’s books as testimony of the Resurrection. Even if the references were unimpeachable, that didn’t answer the question. But they weren’t unimpeachable, not quite.

Tacitus only mentions that there once was a man named Jesus crucified in Judaea by Pontius Pilate and worshipped by his hideous followers as God (“All kinds of riffraff gather in Rome.”). Josephus, in his book The Jewish Antiquities, does talk about Jesus rising the third day, but only as something Christians believe, not as historical fact.

Had his student audience been educated rather than indoctrinated, Charlie could have found himself in an embarrassing situation.

He should have talked about the role specifically Christian faith played in our civilisation, which is after all called Judaeo-Christian, not Hinduist, Islamic or Zoroastrian. No disrespect to other religions and all that, but our civilisation (along with our jurisprudence) was founded on the Scripture and church tradition, not the Vedas.

Still, by now you must have realised why Charlie Kirk claimed more followers than I have.

He is a great loss for the MAGA movement, which is what Americans see as conservatism. I have my reservations about it, but I suppose MAGA quasi-conservatism is better than none, which is roughly what we have in Europe.

Charlie was to Trump what Tommy Robinson is to Nigel Farage, and what a difference. Trump had in his corner a genial, civilised man capable of coherent speech and looking forward to a bright political future.

Whereas Farage has a violent thug with a long list of criminal convictions to his name, spewing hatred and looking forward to another stint in prison. It’s a macabre coincidence that Charlie Kirk’s murderer is also named Robinson.