Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk

In response, the US is frantically retooling, refinancing, and resupplying Fortress America while reinvigorating alliances and countering fifth columns and internal rebels with a rate of change not seen since FDR ferociously implemented the New Deal. The question is whether those efforts will relieve pressure or merely intensify it. Which brings us back to free speech and Charlie Kirk.

Can you ensure a civil polity and its capacity to withstand foreign enemies by imposing legal or coercive measures after winning elections? Or is that to play by the opponents' game and entrench fractures?

I guess I'm in the more martial camp – if it takes a kind of civil war, with Executive Orders rather than cannon fusillades, so be it. The alternative is to see the world that I thought we had - no Garden of Eden, but close as any we've ever seen – lost because those who oppose this civilisation will see no downside to pursuing their repression of opposing opinion. I guess we could call that the Lincolnian position.

What would the Kirkian position be? I think he'd lean on persuasion - that's how Christianity mostly spread so that by 380 AD it had enough adherents to become the official religion of Rome. It spread through the convictions and actions of martyrs like him: of Jesus' twelve disciples, only one is said to have died of old age. That inspired people to believe, as Kirk's death appears to have inspired many.

At the ARC conference earlier this year, public intellectuals such as Sir Niall Ferguson professed Christian conversion, and Christianity ran as an undertone through the event. I suspect that is because resistance in the West to neo-Marxism comes disproportionately from people of Christian faith, and because it is hard to dispute relativist moral positions if you do not believe in absolutes.

Maybe what we need is not strictly a Christian revival, but rather a revival of high-Pagan virtues: Stoicism and the classical virtues of Wisdom, Justice, Courage, and Temperance don't require a Christian God - Wisdom, which relies on truth, might be the antidote to postmodernism.

What is certain to me is that without a change in people's souls, the world I treasure is more vulnerable than ever. Whatever your faith, let us agree we can honour Charlie by fighting the fight. We might not know him, but he's one of the best friends we could have at the moment.