The Day the Conservative Movement Lost Its Innocence

On Wednesday, the MAGA movement lost one of its most influential and admirable leaders – the happy warrior Charlie Kirk.

On Wednesday, the MAGA movement lost one of its most influential and admirable leaders – the happy warrior Charlie Kirk. In founding Turning Point USA and turning the organization into a national juggernaut, Kirk did more to convert young minds to the cause of conservatism than anyone of his era.

Kirk was assassinated in broad daylight during an open discussion event at Utah Valley University. He regularly did campus tours, going into the belly of the beast to dispel myths and address concerns from students being aggressively indoctrinated by Marxist professors and organizers. Kirk was an exemplar of freedom of speech, understanding that rights fade when they are not boldly exercised, and for that very reason, he is no longer with us today. He will be remembered among the greatest patriots this nation has ever known.

The anger and disenfranchisement being experienced on the right wing is ubiquitous and is aided by the cavalier and even celebratory response from the Left. Some, like California Governor Gavin Newsom, have offered their perfunctory and disingenuous condolences, but many do not hide their true feelings of joy. They are ecstatic that Kirk is dead and hope all others with his ideology join him sooner rather than later.

Those who refer to the individual or individuals who assassinated Kirk and cheer the behavior on as “radical leftists” are sorely misguided. To refer to them as radical implies that they are some kind of fringe movement when that is not the case. This is exactly who they are. This is the core of the movement, the “new normal” amongst Democrats who have gotten high on their own supply. They bought their own propaganda about President Trump so thoroughly that they now believe that anyone to the right of Karl Marx is a threat who must be eliminated.

When the Democrats claim earnestly that President Trump and his supporters are Nazis, fascists and white supremacists, they are implying that it is not only permissible but laudable to use violence to neutralize these threats. When they boast about “making racists afraid” or “punching a Nazi,” they do not mean the buffoon wearing the Ku Klux Klan robe or the morbidly obese Hitler enthusiast goose-stepping in the street. They are deathly serious about their intentions to impose violence upon Christians with traditional patriotic values, the sort who have been the overwhelming majority in America from its founding until very recently.

Their ideology is about breaking down the social order from pillar to post, targeting religion, gender, the market, the rule of law, the nuclear family and so on. The Left has been wildly successful in their aims. Faith in God has waned considerably in recent years with LGBT becoming the new national religion as toddlers are encouraged to exercise gender creativity. The family unit is decaying with the rise of single-parent households subsidized by the government with careerism presented as the highest of goals. Criminal scum, like George Floyd, Luigi Mangione and Michael Brown, are made into false idols with whole cities burned in effigy to honor them as the pagans once did.

Until President Trump came down the golden escalator, the public was demoralized and conditioned foolhardily to accept that they would “merely…be the spectators and not the victims of the drama to come,” as Russian White Army commander Pyotr Wrangel eloquently wrote in his memoirs, Always With Honor. President Trump’s rise galvanized the forgotten men and women of America, dubbed the “silent majority” by the great Richard Nixon, and gave them the means to fight back – not to take the rights away from women or minorities or go back to the 1950s, as the crude caricature created by the Left infers, but just to allow the common people of this country to be able to live their lives away from the cavalcade of degeneracy that was so close to devouring us all.

With Charlie Kirk’s murder, we are forced to come to the stark realization that we will never be able to turn the dial back. The comforting libertarian fantasy that we can live our lives in a bubble isolated from cultural factors is a ruse. The ephemeral notion of America that we have loved and held dear is a phantom. Now, we are locked into a war for our very civilization, one that we cannot turn and hide away from. Charlie Kirk was not an extremist. He was always polite. He was never overly abrasive or offensive. He did not wish to impose his beliefs onto others through coercion. Kirk believed earnestly and perhaps naively that conservatives would win the debate, but the Left has set the terms of the battlefield and the free exchange of ideas is no part of it.

The modern Left dwarfs any Islamic terrorist, Latin American drug cartel or Chinese interloper as an existential threat to the tattered remains of the American nation. Believing that sense can be talked into the Left will mean Americans inevitably suffer the same fate as the Bolshevist Russia, Maoist China or any of the worst communist despotisms that have inflicted misery and damnation upon the world. The rot is too deep to reverse our course with mere rhetoric. Sept. 10, 2025 was the day we crossed the Rubicon, lost our innocence and realized only one path remains to ensure humanity’s survival. The time for American renewal is at hand, and the tree of liberty shall germinate in warp speed with Charlie Kirk serving as the martyr of our glorious refounding.