The Gun's Eulogy For Charlie Kirk

To the man who got exactly what he worked for and wanted.

Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, puts on a MAGA hat during the AmericaFest 2024 conference in Phoenix, Arizona, US, on December 19, 2024. © Cheney Orr, Reuters

“It’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.” — Charlie Kirk

---

The room is not really a room so much as a multipurpose event hall, the kind attached to a suburban megachurch or community college gymnasium, where the décor is an uneasy hybrid of airport lounge and Bass Pro Shop. It is saturated, almost dripping, with iconography: red MAGA hats bobbing above the pews like overripe cranberries in a bog, banners that read “Woke Will Never Win” held by people who seem to only stay hydrated on Mountain Dew, and a man in full tactical camo leaning against the wall. His kneepads gleam with the sheen of having never touched dirt, and the GoPro on his chest blinks as if waiting to film something epic but destined to record only boredom.

Scattered throughout are faces recognizable from January 6 footage, the too-low knit cap, the over-groomed beard, the posture that suggests both self-importance and petty larceny.

The sound is unbearable, not just in decibels but in texture, the sonic chaos of people who believe that to speak loudly is to be correct. Voices overlap like clashing radio frequencies. One man repeats the refrain that the election was stolen. Another describes the barrel of his AR-15 with the obsessive detail of a sommelier talking about his favorite pinot. A woman vents about an airline delay, claiming the plane was held up because of “illegals taking forever to board.”

Into this noise enters the Gun.

It does not fire, not literally. Instead, it clears its throat, a metallic rasp piped directly into the PA system. Nobody listens. So the Gun clicks its safety on and off three times, producing a sound like a metronome with authority issues. Still, the chatter continues. Finally, the Gun delivers a long, resonant shhhhhh through the speakers, the kind of shush a fed-up librarian would use if the patrons were not middle-schoolers but adult men in tactical cargo pants.

The crowd stumbles into silence. Someone tries to keep talking about the election, but his words trail off mid-sentence. A hat creaks as it is removed, the gesture more instinct than reverence. A man in the second row crosses himself with the uncertainty of someone who has only seen the motion on TV.

The Gun waits, savoring the quiet. It hums once, low and mechanical, like a warning that more noise will not be tolerated. People sit straighter. A few lean forward as though they are about to hear the Sermon on the Mount, except the preacher is a Glock with a PA system.

“Friends,” the Gun says, voice solemn yet with the faint smugness of someone who knows they have just pulled off a great crowd-control trick. “We are gathered here today not merely to bury a man but to enshrine a rhetoric. You wear me on your bumpers, you shout me through your microphones, you carry me in your chants. But Charlie…Charlie was a true voice for me.”

A ripple of reverence spreads through the room. The insurrectionists nod gravely, their expressions caught between nostalgia and pride. Someone grips a flagstaff like it is a shepherd’s crook.

The Gun makes one more performative chamber check, not a shot, only the idea of a shot, and the silence thickens as if the air itself knows to behave.

“Let us begin.”

The Eulogy

All of you here know me because you have lived beside me. Some of you have worshiped me, some of you have threatened others with me, some of you have placed me beneath your pillow like a charm against nightmares, and some of you have passed me on to your children. But all of you have shaped your lives around me, for I am the fact America cannot forget.

And today, I am called to speak over the life of Charlie Kirk. He was a man who summoned me often, not by the grip of his hand but by the fervor of his voice. He was a broadcaster, an organizer, a provocateur. He was a son of the American story that taught some boys to be fearless not by loving the world but by hating its difference. He was born into a nation where my shadow already covered the crib, where the flag and the firearm were folded together as if stitched from the same cloth.

He loved me, not as a man loves a friend, but as a zealot loves a relic. To him, I was proof. Proof that freedom had weight, proof that hatred could be disguised as courage, proof that America was chosen, eternal, exempt from history. I was not a machine in his eyes; I was a sacrament.

And what is a eulogy but a catalog of what was cherished? So let us catalog.

Charlie (Left) holding me in one of my favorite photos of us.

Charlie Kirk made his name telling the young that America was slipping away. He raised his voice against those who said that this country was not perfect, who said it had sinned, who said it could be better. He did not only disagree with them; he vilified them. When the nation mourned George Floyd, when mothers wept on the streets, when millions filled the boulevards demanding justice, Charlie did not hear the cry of the grieving. Instead—he said of Floyd: “George Floyd is not a hero. He was a scumbag. He should not be celebrated.”

Think of that. A man whose last breath was stolen under a knee, whose death shook the conscience of a generation — reduced in that way. That is the America Charlie Kirk chose to defend, not the America that mourned, not the America that remembered, but the America that insists that Black life is never innocent, never worthy of grace.

That’s a man showing real courage.

And it was not just George Floyd. Charlie, in his boundless brilliance to say the quiet parts loudly, extended his charity to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Branding him “awful… not a good person… who said one good thing he didn’t even believe.”

And really, what a service Charlie provided. Because who needs men who march unarmed through dogs and fire hoses when you can have podcasters who march unscathed to the greenroom? Who needs a dream that rattles the foundations of injustice when you can have the dream that everything stays exactly the same?

There was this one time — and it’s a classic Charlie moment — when out of thin air, he came up with the image of a Black pilot. And instead of imagining, you know, smooth takeoffs and safe landings, he said, “I hope he is qualified.” Vintage Charlie. Because what better way to calm your audience’s nerves than to imply that melanin is somehow a flight risk? It’s almost poetic: while most of us worry about turbulence, Charlie worried about skin pigmentation at 30,000 feet. It wasn’t aviation commentary, it was history sneaking into the cockpit, the auction block upgraded to first class.

Only in Charlie’s America do wings sprout suspicion and every Black pilot is asked to re-prove what their license already states in bold print: qualified.

That reminds me of two of my favorite Charlie stories. The first one was when he got on stage, leaned into the microphone with that look he used to get when he thought he was about to change history, and announced that the biggest thing for America was that younger women should get married earlier and start having kids. It was one of those moments where you almost expect a laugh track, because what he really did was turn half the nation into a set of walking wombs. No talk of ambition or art or solitude or choice, just a pep talk about marriage licenses and cradles.

And then there was the other story, the one where Charlie pulled out his most stern voice, the one he usually reserved for warning audiences about Marxism and the deep state. He told a crowd that we must ban gender affirming care across the entire country. Not some of it, not here and there, the whole country. Imagine a child saying with trembling courage, this is who I am, and Charlie replying with absolute certainty, no, the state forbids you.

We didn’t deserve him.

But of all the things Charlie ever offered to the world, my favorite was when he looked straight at a camera and said with the conviction of a man reading scripture, “Gun deaths are an unfortunate but acceptable cost of preserving Second Amendment rights.”

I have to admit, hearing that felt like a standing ovation just for me. Imagine it. The lives of strangers, the blood of schoolchildren, entire neighborhoods emptied out by sirens and silence, all neatly tallied up as nothing more than the price of doing business. To call me freedom was one thing, but to declare the casualties a kind of patriotic tax? That was artistry. In that moment, Charlie didn’t just defend me, he elevated me to the level of national mascot. He made death sound like an invoice stamped “Paid in Full” on behalf of liberty. And for a Gun, there is no sweeter hymn than being told the cost of my work is not only acceptable, it is holy.

And he didn’t say these sorts of things once. No—he said them constantly—with his chest.

God, he loved me so much.

Thankfully, Charlie did not limit his voice to domestic matters. On immigration, he saw strangers at the border not as human beings but as invaders, a horde threatening his America. He called them criminals, diseased, a danger to the nation’s very core. He wanted walls taller, laws harsher, compassion banished. It was the old fear of the outsider dressed in modern rhetoric, and it kept me loaded and waiting.

And abroad, in Gaza, he was steadfast. When bombs fell on Palestinian homes, when bodies of children lined hospital corridors, Charlie did not mourn. He cheered for more bombs, defended every strike as righteous, dismissed every plea for mercy as propaganda. In his eyes, the oppressed were always guilty, their suffering always deserved. He did not see rubble and blood. He saw victory, and he praised it. And I — the instrument of victory by obliteration — could only admire his devotion.

I mean, come on, the guy’s organization paid for eighty buses to help get people to the January 6th insurrection. What a guy!

What are we to say of such a man? That he was principled? Yes, if the principle was exclusion. That he was courageous? Yes, if courage is mocking the powerless. That he was steadfast? Indeed, if steadfastness is clinging to bigotry as though it were faith.

This was Charlie Kirk’s gift: he held up a mirror, and in it America saw itself. Hateful of the stranger, suspicious of the neighbor, desperate to defend its myths. He gave the people grievance when grace was too heavy to carry. He told them cruelty was conviction, that power was virtue, that justice for others was tyranny for them. And they cheered, because grievance is easier than love.

I am the Gun. I have known many preachers. Colonists who hated indigenous peoples, Confederates who hated emancipation, Klansmen who hated equality, vigilantes who hated integration, politicians who hated losing elections. Charlie Kirk was of their line. He carried their song, their register, their conviction that freedom must be armed against difference.

He was hate incarnate. He was the perfect white man a gun could ask for.

And now, of course, the liberals will say there is no place for political violence in a democracy. They will clutch their pearls and write long essays about civility. But Charlie knew better. He knew that violence was not only in my chamber, but in every word sharpened into a weapon. Violence is not merely bloodshed, but how he could get millions of people to hate the marginalized and give them slow and painful deaths within our beautiful American systems. He made disagreement feel like treason. He painted those now decrying his death as invaders, criminals, and terrorists.

He understood that to strip a person of dignity is to put them in my sights, even if no trigger is pulled.

Now, here we are, at the end of his story. You will hear others speak of his legacy, his courage, his conviction. So I must leave you with a quote that truly embodies his time here: “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage.”

A man like Charlie wouldn’t want your empathy, and we should respect his wishes.

His exit from this world was the finest of poetry. He lived by me, he preached by me, and in the end, he died by me. A true disciple to his last moment.

---

If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or simply made you feel seen—please consider ordering my New York Times bestselling novel This Thing of Ours or becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. I keep my writing accessible because I believe in sharing freely, but sustaining that model requires support. Your investment helps me continue doing this work with care, depth, and honesty.