The other tragedy in Charlie Kirk’s assassination

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Sep 12, 2025

At 55 years old, I’m just young enough to have missed the 1960s. That makes Charlie Kirk’s the first high-profile political assassination of my lifetime. I can’t recall any others. Plenty of attempts but no actual assassinations. Unless you count John Lennon in 1980. But that doesn’t even come close to this. To what we are all feeling this week.

Much commentary is being written about what has been lost with Charlie’s assassination. He was a conservative in the classical liberal mode. He wanted to debate you. He believed in American ideals and wanted to inspire the next generation to fight for them—peacefully, democratically. What does it say about the state of our nation that a man like that was cut down?

There are other levels of tragedy regarding Charlie’s murder. The loss to his family. The corrupted hearts of some of the leftist media, leftist politicians, and even some of our leftist friends and neighbors, who seem to be celebrating his assassination. And more.

But I have seen very little commentary on one dimension of the tragedy. It is that the Charlie Kirk who was assassinated this week was a much better Charlie Kirk than the one who first burst onto the scene many years ago. And the conservatism for which Charlie was a pied piper to the young was a much better conservatism than the one for which he was initially advocating.

I got into it with Charlie about all this the one time I met him. It was a chance encounter on a street corner in Washington, DC about five or six years ago. Fortunately, I was with a personal friend of Charlie’s when we bumped into him and he introduced us. I had never seen Charlie before and would not have recognized him but for our mutual friend introducing us. I recognized the name and quizzed Charlie immediately about Nick Fuentes and the Groypers.

This is ancient history now but in late 2019 Fuentes and his people were invading Turning Points USA’s events to accuse Charlie of being a fake conservative, a plant for “Conservatism, Inc.” This was covered at the time in The American Conservative, Crisis Magazine and American Greatness. I was no partisan for Fuentes, whom I had never heard of until then. But I had my antenna up for social liberal skullduggery in the Republican Party, having dealt with it for so long in Connecticut.

The thing I remember about Charlie was how polite and patient he was. I hadn’t realized it but I had accidentally intruded on a promo video he was shooting for his organization at the time. Like, literally. He asked the camera person, who I hadn’t seen, to turn off the camera as our conversation went on. Eventually our mutual friend made some embarrassed apology for me, I think, and we went on our way.

But Charlie was on his way too. Here is how the Baptist commentator Al Mohler describes it:

I first met Charlie Kirk several years ago when we were both addressing a major conference of conservatives. Backstage, I was impressed by his gifts but turned off by his demeanor. That was during Charlie’s years of bare-fisted libertarianism and personal assertion. Back then, he saw Christianity as a huge drag on conservative progress. He was pretty clear in calling for a new young conservatism of liberty and resistance. At the time, he didn’t have a lot of use for conservative Christians, and he wasn’t subtle.

Not long thereafter, Charlie embraced two things that had been missing from his earlier approach. He openly and boldly claimed the gospel of Christ and courageously identified himself as a Christian believer. He also began to argue with consistency that a recovery of Christian truth was essential for a lasting conservatism. He was right.

That was the Charlie Kirk who was tragically murdered this week. That is the Turning Points USA conservatism that, thanks be to God, will live on.

Charlie went from what seemed a libertarian-only philosophy to being a committed Evangelical and an advocate of Christian conservatism. He was only 31 years old. Had he lived, might he also have become Catholic?

There are tantalizing hints all over the internet. His wife’s Catholic background and its influence on their family. His positive statements about Catholicism and his criticism of his fellow Evangelicals for not honoring Mary enough.

Charlie was a man on a journey. Where it might have ended we will never know. But we Catholics must pray for our nation, Charlie’s family, and Charlie himself. RIP, Charlie Kirk.