Several days ago, the conservative movement lost one of its most outspoken, innovative, and game-changing defenders in Charlie Kirk, slain during a speech on a Utah college campus by an assassin’s bullet. For those of you who don’t know (and there aren’t many, I’d guess), Charlie Kirk was the founder of Turning Point USA, one of the most recognizable brands of right-of-center political outreach, especially to college students. He was a 31-year-old husband and father, and because of the diabolical nature of social media algorithms, most of you have (unintentionally) watched the gruesome video of him being murdered in front of thousands of people, multiple times at this point.
To say that Kirk’s murder has changed the energy for American conservatives would be a grievous understatement. Let me put this as plainly as I can: for conservatives under 25, this has been a catalyst for more fear, sadness, anger, rage, and soul-searching than any other event I can think of. In the past 2 days alone, I have had more conversations with young conservatives & Christians about entering the political ideas space than I’ve ever had before. At this point, the best summary I can offer is this:
Charlie was someone possessing qualities many young conservatives saw as aspirational: a successful movement leader, an incredibly effective style of cultural engagement, a wife and kids, and someone who was undoubtedly only growing in aptitude, knowledge, and ability. To watch all that be taken away for no reason, simply because one radicalized barbarian decided that civilization & peace aren’t as important as imposing your ideological will with steel and firepower, changes people. It forms part of their worldview. It forms part of our worldview.
Let’s be clear: at the end of the day, this isn’t about ‘us.’ It’s about a wife, two children, and countless family & friends whose world has cruelly become one light darker. But, it’d be an abject failure at reading the room to pretend like this isn’t a formative moment for the under-30 right (and probably, a good portion of the over-30 right too).
What can we take away from that? Well, let me give you one more story that I found helpful.
The Coroner of Shanksville
If you’re not overly familiar with the details of the September 11th attacks (especially if you, as I was, weren’t born yet), the name Wally Miller probably doesn’t mean all that much to you.
Wally grew up running the family business with his father, Wilbur, which would probably have been an entirely routine childhood except for the part where the ‘family business’ was a funeral home. While not a routine upbringing, it would, however, be an instrumental one. Wally Miller would go on from the family business to become coroner of Somerset County, Pennsylvania, a position he assumed in 1997.
Less than 5 years later, that job would change his life forever.
When the aftermath of Flight 93 dumped 120,000 pounds of steel, plastic, and carnage into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Wally Miller was one of the first called. Arriving on the scene to the sight of countless federal responders already on the ground, Miller would describe the feeling of seeing what was visible at the crash site in Shanksville.
“Pieces of plastic from the main body of the plane hung eerily in the trees burning and melting. I’ll never forget the constant sizzling sound the dripping plastic made in the leaves on the ground.”
Miller’s task immediately shifted from the duties of a small town coroner to one of the most high-profile disaster response jobs in the nation. And, as with so many notable men and women from that day, Miller would rise to the occasion. Wally not only worked ceaselessly to identify victims but became a fierce advocate for victims’ families seeking both answers and closure, with many families describing Wally as a true hero amidst the horror of one of our nation’s darkest days.
I don’t bring Wally Miller’s story up because I’ve known about it for years. I actually bring it up because I found out about his story relatively recently, on a visit to Shanksville last year. And if I’m honest? I’d never thought about that sort of thing particularly closely. No one signs up to be a small-town undertaker for the glory. Because what happened to Wally wasn’t glory. It was work - not only a tremendous amount in the physical sense, but in the intangible sense too. Every day in the office meant feeling the emotional weight of a nation grappling with the anger and fear caused by assaults on our way of peaceful, civilized life. And that seems to me to be its own form of courage - the fortitude to knuckle down and keep doing your job even when it’s arguably easier to remain numb and disconnected.
Trying Times
I wasn’t alive for that period of American history, but I’ve read enough about it to know that, against the backdrop of stories like that, our times now (as you know, Gen-Z history starts in 2005 at YouTube and everything before then is pretty shaky) aren’t as unprecedented as some of us might like to believe. And if our times are not unprecedented, the courage necessary to confront such times probably isn’t either.
It has been an incredibly dark week for America. Even as we look back at the horror of weaponized hatred almost 25 years ago, we look at countless reminders that such anti-civilizational hatred is still all too alive and well. The reality is, they stem from the same place. The people who flew planes into the symbols of freedom in 2001 and the people who attempt to shoot and stab their way through freedom in 2025 are operating off the same philosophy.
It’s not scorn for the idea of freedom. It’s a deep, inescapable fear of what freedom is capable of creating. And it’s a hatred of the God that created us to love freedom.
May those people always, always, be afraid.
N c mm
As a mother who prays for children who were young, or yet to be born, during 9/11 this is a helpful perspective and seems to be what my kids (regardless of age or height) are dealing with. Thank you.