The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Such is the power of social media that I learned of the shooting of Charlie Kirk almost immediately. My feed blew up. I saw a live feed of him shot and bleeding that I will find hard to forget.

Then my feed blew up again with leftists celebrating his death. The death of a young father, a gentle man who advanced traditional views in a calm and reasoned way. A man whose conduct was shaped by his belief that:-

When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens because you start to think the other side is so evil and they lose their humanity.

Charlie never did stop talking. He didn’t sit at home like me bemoaning the world’s wrongs. He went out and engaged with his political and moral opponents for hours at a time. He was invariably courteous, calm and patient – often in the face of revolting crudity.

His religious faith gave him confidence and composure as leftists came at him with everything from condescension to foul-mouthed abuse. I’ve watched a lot of his content in recent years. I was impressed not just by his skills but his erudition. He dropped out of college to become a full-time activist, but had read widely and deeply. He expressed his views carefully and calmly and didn’t set out to make his opponents seem stupid. They did that for themselves.

If you’re not familiar with his work, here’s a video of him debating students at Cambridge University recently

It’s not even as though those celebrating Charlie being shot were far removed from the spirit of their more astute, press-savvy leaders. In Congress, Democrat members booed a call for prayer for him while he was fighting for his life.

I understand Charlie’s call to keep talking – to engage with people of different views so that they don’t become “other” or “the enemy.” The question we face is how to keep doing that when their response to such calm engagement is first to kill, then to rejoice and finally to go on TV and say that he was asking for it with his “hate speech.”

Perhaps some people really are just evil?

I feel for Charlie’s wife and children right now. She’s lost a good husband and they’ve lost a great father. The civilised world has lost a Christian soldier who was trying to keep us on the right path.

The Left has long relied on our fear of political violence. However great the evil we oppose and however much we’ve endured, we know that when we take up arms we unleash horrors. We also know there’s no guarantee that the outcome will be benign. In all of human history, how many times has political violence led to an overall good outcome? I can think of only one. The American Revolution. Jefferson famously said:-

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure

That may be so but there’s little supporting evidence in history of the reliability of such horticulture. The French Revolution gave us Europe’s first fascist dictator – Napoleon. His war-mongering killed between three and a half to seven million. The Russian revolution gave us Stalin, who made Napoleon seem an amateur. His apparatchiks killed tens of millions. The Chinese Revolution was objectively the greatest catastrophe in human history. It led to deaths under Mao Tse-tung from the mid-twenties of millions to forty-five million. Estimates vary.

The Left keeps calling us Nazis, when they’re the ones banning books, attacking Jews and allying with the Caliphate. They’re violent, they’re hateful and they’re prepared to spill blood to achieve their objectives. They seem determined to provoke us to violence that would justify theirs.

Even our own democratically-elected government in the UK seems to want to provoke us to violence and not just with their “Far Right” smears. Their elevation of the interests of others above us, the people they were elected to serve, is highly provocative. Their shielding of the rapists of young girls and the public officials who protect them seems designed to enrage. They have provoked our usually gentle, inoffensive home nations to raise our flags in defiance. Then sent teams out to tear our flags down and accused us of being racists.

We must make Charlie’s death mean something good. We owe him that. It’s a test of our moral resolve. Yes, we must see the Left for what it is and strengthen attempts to resist. But we must not be provoked into violence ourselves. Yes, they are evil. It’s hard to imagine becoming as bad as them. Sadly, we do have it in us so we must choose to be better.

Rest in peace, Charlie. May your memory be a blessing to those you love. May the world be better because you lived.