Conservatives aren’t learning the right lesson from Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
That’s my conclusion after watching Kirk’s funeral service on Sunday. It was a moving event, a powerful tribute to a young conservative who inspired millions of people with American ideals. If there was a common thread among the many speakers, it was that conservatives must do as Charlie did, and redouble our commitment to open, honest, and respectful debate.
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But that’s not the most important thing. It’s even more essential that conservatives redouble our commitment to reclaiming the commanding heights of American culture. Why? Because the Left has corrupted our culture to such an extent that it cost Charlie Kirk his life.
Don’t get me wrong: Conservatives should absolutely engage in debate. We have the benefit of believing the right things. Freedom. Family. Faith in God and in America. Our ideas are inherently better than the Left’s. All they have is faith in the power of government — and it’s diametrically opposed to individual freedom and family life. In a fair debate, conservatives win.
But we don’t have a fair debate — not even close. To the contrary, the deck is so far stacked against conservatives that we have little chance of winning in the public square.
Every conservative knows this deep down. We know the Left controls the levers of cultural power and influence. This was true when I was growing up in the 1970s, and it’s even more true today. The legacy media is uniformly controlled by leftists. Higher education is proof that while the Soviet Union fell, communism won. Ditto K-12 education. And going back decades — even under Republican administrations — the vast apparatus of the federal government has steadily advanced a far-left line.
At every level of society, leftists have indoctrinated people to believe that power is the only thing that matters. So it’s no surprise that, in pursuit of total power, liberals are increasingly stooping to violence.
We saw it in the riots and wreckage of the post-George Floyd Black Lives Matter madness. We saw it in the assassination attempts against President Donald Trump last year. Now we’ve seen it in the successful killing of Charlie Kirk. And we’ve even seen it in the leftist reaction to that awful, evil, immoral act.
In the days since Kirk’s murder, liberals have fallen over themselves to denounce not only his killing, but also his views. In Congress, nearly 100 Democrats — including party bigwigs such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — refused to vote for a resolution honoring him. They say he was filled with hate and did horrible things, and true to form, the media and cultural institutions parrot the leftist line. By attacking Kirk even in death, the Left is tacitly encouraging those who target conservatives with violence.
No open, honest, respectful debate can truly challenge this far-left dominance of our culture. Only one thing can: defeating their institutions while building new ones of our own.
This is the truth that conservatives must learn — now more than ever. The good news is that some on the right are waking up. Trump is shredding leftist control in parts of D.C., while a growing number of conservatives are investing in institutions such as movie studios, new universities and education models, and media outlets and social media. But as exciting as Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was, the truth is that conservatives need orders of magnitude more action and investment.
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It’s not enough to purge federal agencies of leftist radicals; they must be co-opted to advance American ideals. It’s not enough to drive Stephen Colbert or Jimmy Kimmel off the air; they must be replaced with conservatives or, failing that, faced with conservative competition that blows them out of the water. It’s not enough to move Hollywood to the center-left or even the middle; we need an entertainment juggernaut that’s fully on the right. Put simply, we need the dominant cultural institutions in America.
Charlie Kirk’s murder should give us an unprecedented sense of urgency. The Left is increasingly violent — and it will keep getting worse so long as leftists control the cultural levers. By all means, let’s debate with the Left about the superiority of our ideas and the failure of theirs. But the best thing we can do to honor Charlie Kirk is rebuild the America he believed in.
John Tillman is CEO of the American Culture Project.
