Thoughts on the Charlie Kirk Shooting

Update: as of 2:45 pm Mountain Time, Mr. Kirk has been reported to have died.  
I'd like to share my thoughts and perspective on the Charlie Kirk shooting today in Orem, Utah. Back in the early 1990s, I worked at a radio station located in the old Osmond Studios in Orem, just a stone’s throw from Provo, home of Brigham Young University. (I later crossed over to Provo to program KOVO-AM, a nostalgia station). My nephew also graduated from Utah Valley University—where Kirk was shot. As of now, Kirk remains in critical condition.

Surprisingly, I might have become some type of Charlie Kirk myself. I was once uber-conservative: a member of the John Birch Society and the New American Club at BYU. I often sparred in debates with Louis Midgley, my philosophy professor, who had a unique gift for mental gymnastics with his LDS apologetics. I’ll never forget the time I filled in on KTKK for a weekend show—a show Midgley apparently heard. In front of a packed auditorium, he sneered, “Why don’t you get a real job? You’re a pathetic sophist!” I responded that he ought to look in the mirror and find a “real job” that didn’t involve boot-licking the administration. My classmates applauded, but I ended up with an “F” because I couldn’t finish the coursework after a three-week hospital stay. That was the old Benjamin Reed. My politics, religion, and worldview are the polar opposite today, more than 30 years later.

The reason I mention this background is because you have to understand just how conservative and “red” the Provo-Orem area truly is. It’s a natural seedbed for breeding MAGA sycophants. The culture ingrains the belief that if you question the system, you’ll be shunned. Hence the hesitance to buck it. I imagine Kirk wasn’t there to debate in his usual style but rather to bask in adulation and “shore up the troops.”

For as much as I dislike Kirk’s rhetoric and the positions of Turning Point USA, I find it reprehensible that someone, for whatever motive, would try to silence him with violence. That is cowardice of the highest order. In the spirit of Kirk—though we may not agree—I’m pretty sure he himself would say the better path is to “make a better argument.” Any dumbass can pull a trigger. It takes pride, discipline, and a few neurons to craft an argument and present it to the masses. I constantly remind my young son that a brain cell is a far superior weapon to a firearm.

I condemn this calculated attack and wish Mr. Kirk a full recovery. This is not a proud moment for anyone in our region or in the United States. We may not agree with Kirk, but it is incumbent upon us to defend his right to speak and debate. To quote Noam Chomsky: “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”