A year gone. Charlie partnered with G-d to make this world a better place. He earned his wings.
It still doesn't feel real: someone that alive, that young, cut down by a hatred that cannot tolerate decency. A year later, the question hasn't moved. How does someone so needed simply vanish?
It is the fate of heroes who take up the quest to return society to its values to often find a path destined for martyrdom.
His oft-cited warning, "When discourse ends, violence begins," proved more than rhetoric. It became his epitaph.
Fighting for the soul of America, Charlie stood on the ramparts of our time. He defended family values, principles and integrity, free speech and the unborn child forming in the womb, while confronting the antisemitism incubating within a soft and gullible generation. Charlie spoke forcefully against communist and Islamist encroachment, political infiltration and hijra, or stealth migration. Mamdani, then running for mayor of New York City, particularly drew his ire.
It was obvious to the discerning that Mamdani embodied the "Red-Green Alliance," the unholy union of far-left radicals and Islamist apologists. When he was still an aspiring rapper, he had already chosen his heroes: in a 2017 song recorded under the stage name Mr. Cardamom, he proclaimed, "My love to the Holy Land Five. You better look 'em up." Look them up, and you'll find five men convicted of funding Hamas. Under normal circumstances, that record disqualifies a man from public office. In New York, it helped elect him mayor.
Days before the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, Mamdani signed two executive orders honoring the day, then turned to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, held out the ceremonial pen, and whispered, "Can you pass this?" She passed it to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, former attorney for admitted al-Qaeda operative Ahmed al-Darbi, who stepped forward to accept it. Tisch became an unwitting prop in a ceremony meant for the victims alone.
A city councilman who spent years telling us he was innocent. A mayor sworn in on a promise of "for all New Yorkers." And the imam who stood up in federal court to call the "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel-Rahman a "respected scholar" at the 1995 trial for the plot to bomb New York City landmarks
Gen Z has shown a precipitous decline in core values and national pride. Academics peddle moral equivalency, shifting students from universal truth to power dynamics, where identity is restructured around collectivism rather than self, G-d, home and country.
Charlie Kirk entered the campuses and taught young Americans to question the institutions that had taught them never to question. He finessed rather than attacked, speaking with kindness, drawing on his well-honed knowledge of civics, theology and American history. He grew TPUSA into a wellspring of patriots, adding promise to the American future.
"If all cultures are equal, then cannibalism is merely a matter of culinary taste." - Leo Strauss
The concentric circles surrounding Charlie Kirk extend like the rings of a redwood. He shattered the youthful illusion that all cultures are equal, and warned that civilizations unable to distinguish virtue from barbarism invite their own destruction.
er to question.
Charlie's killer, Tyler Robinson, was an ordinary hometown boy from a respectable American family before campus indoctrination rewrote him: his ties to family loosened, his belief in G-d withered, his morals rewritten in the language of relativism, truth as opinion, righteousness as oppression. He is a product of an ideology built over a century, from the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Edward Said's Orientalism, that recast the Jew and the West alike as history's designated villains and turned the university into the machine that does the recasting.
Charlie's wholesomeness is what Tyler's professors taught him to despise. Disdain curdled into contempt, contempt into a deathly hatred, and Charlie's life became Tyler's sacrifice on the altar of the anarchy now enthroned on nearly every American campus.
"One begins by killing others only to massacre one's own in the end." - Elie Wiesel
Charlie carried the battle to the youth of America, calling them back to G-d, family, country and the biblical foundations of liberty. He defended Israel not as a Jew but as a believing Christian.
"The re-articulation of Christian attitudes toward Judaism, and the determination to end the teaching of contempt, already constitute one of the great moral cleansing revolutions of all time, in any religion." - Rabbi Irving Greenberg, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth
Charlie was well versed in scripture, drawn to the prophecies of Isaiah, Ezekiel and Zephaniah and their vision of a reunification of G-d and mankind through the restitution of Zion. He was patient, kind and respectful even when it wasn't deserved. By the time he entered public life, Charlie stood against the accumulated force of millennia of Jew hatred, armed with nothing but common sense, scripture and American decency.
I carry an old family grief that makes his stand feel personal. The story of my grandmother's holy father, a scholarly and spiritual man who, with his wife and four sons, was buried alive, set a fire in me from my earliest years. I think about our place in the world and what will become of my children. Will they, G-d forbid, face the same hatred my great-grandfather faced decades before Hitler?
In this burden, Charlie brought me comfort. Among the Christians who in the eleventh hour stood shoulder to shoulder with Israel, Charlie became one of the great pillars of my upcoming book, The Twelve Apostles of Zion, where he is designated the 11th Apostle.
Charlie was self-possessed, his insight and moral strength drawn from the soul of a man of G-d, sent to restore us to a more wholesome time. The tragedy is magnified: Charlie, the interrupter and defender of the American way, is gone. His followers mourn him, but his wife and children are bound to a loss for life.
The fate of Israel and the fate of America are bound together through the covenantal faith of righteous Christians. Those who bless Israel partake in the blessings bestowed upon America.
Charlie shone his light upon an unsure generation, adrift in a mirage cast by media and politicized academics. Yet the smug, the self-complacent and the hopelessly hypnotized had no answer to his gracious attempts to awaken them. They laughed, dismissing him. Irony carries its own grim justice.
"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." - Elie Wiesel
Many will praise Charlie. Far fewer will bear the cost of following his example. To call a nation back to G-d, home and country demands sacrifice, and the path of sacrifice often leads to martyrdom. Charlie was a torchbearer in a generation groping through shadow.
The gates are before us once again. The horses cannot make the charge for us. Either men like Charlie awaken even those who ridicule them, or the forces those scoffers enable will have the last laugh, not only at our expense but at theirs.
Randy Yisroel Settenbrino is a writer, artist and public intellectual whose work bridges theology, philosophy and psychology. He is a passionate advocate for Israel and Jewish-Christian solidarity, founder of the Historic Blue Moon Hotel, and founder of Ohr Chodosh L’Zion, a cultural and spiritual initiative dedicated to restoring Jewish identity, courage and creativity through art, history and living faith. His newest book, Between the Altar and the Sanctuary: The Life, Faith, and Fire of Rabbi Meir Kahane, is available on Amazon.
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