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DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican - 💔
Parent Post:
James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames
It has been a year since Charlie Kirk was murdered before the eyes of the world, not for no reason but for all the worst reasons a civilized man can think of. A year. In some ways it remains unreal, but its reality is as clear and present as every other fact of waking life.
On that damned evening one year ago, I sat down to write an essay about my friend that I still go back to read from time to time. "Catharsis or Civilization?" I asked. We have a choice, I said. That choice is stark, and it is everything. Will we pursue the delicious ruin of catharsis, or will we eat our bitter and stand for civilization? Of course, we still have this choice and still face it. This choice is eternal for all men. We all face it constantly.
A year has passed, though, and we haven't answered. I'm not sure we could. I don't think we got the chance, even to face the question.
In the immediate wake of Charlie's murder, an unmistakable light shone out of the darkness of that day like a ray of grief-heavy hope from some corner of Heaven. There was this incredible moment of irreducible complexity in which tragedy and possibility lit the faces of a movement, a nation, and the world. Revival appeared around the corner. Awakening perched over the horizon like sunrise. There was a moment in time when many of us thought this horrific tragedy, this robbery of one of our very best, could wake more people up, create a movement towards truth, justice, and saving the West.
It wasn't to be so. In place of opportunity, we got horror.
Almost as suddenly as the moment of noble legacy arose, it was consumed by a willful catastrophe of darkness and malicious fire. I, like so many others, have never witnessed anything like it and still cannot process how it unfolded. I stare to this day in shocked awe and grief, not just for my lost friend but also for the wanton destruction of what almost might have been.
I'm not talking about the completely debased Left, which in far too many corners celebrated and still celebrates, mocks, and desecrates not just this but everything. Theirs is precisely the darkness that the light of that awful circumstance might have repelled, that its ray threatened to pierce. I'm talking about something else, something far worse, in fact.
This monstrosity demands witness it doesn't deserve. Within hours, shock was fed to conspiracy. Within days, his own "friends" were tarnishing his legacy and using his memory to push evil. Within weeks, the evils of the Left were whipped into a madness and frenzy of fear and hate. Before the end of the year, the whole affair had turned into some kind of revolting spectacle, a sick Saturnalian carnival that consumed almost everything that might have defined his posthumous legacy. Maybe worst of all, more than a few accounted just weeks before among Charlie's friends and colleagues acted in many respects like by his murder its main obstacle had been removed from its path.
That spectacle and the shocking horror of it never seems to end. It's like a year turned into a nightmare and a nightmare conquering a year.
Nothing was, and nothing is, sacred to this frothing monstrosity. Charlie's vision, his hopes, his aspirations, his organization, his friends, his mentors, the men and women who stood by his side in some cases to his dying minute, his legacy, his widow, for God's sake. Nothing sacred. Nothing set aside. Nothing safe. Nothing preserved. Everything devoured. It's simply incomprehensible, like an evil of some debauched underworld unleashed upon something too worthy to exist.
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