On Force & Fire

 

"Martyrdom is an amazing force to behold. In my lifetime, I've never seen it, until now. I've read about it, but I've never seen it in action. Truly, an eye-opening event. Millions of hearts changed in a short amount of time. Evil exposed that has lurked in the shadows for decades. Hearts opened in prayer. It's a force unto itself that catches like kindling but can burn for decades."  as posted by Unseen on X.

And this, from Josh Trevino's post at the American Mind (linked here and at Insty) entitled, "Charlie Kirk, Martyr", in which he likens Kirk's death to the killing of Socrates:

"In this way, Charlie Kirk was perhaps the closest thing to Socrates in the American public square. The leftist intellectuals who sneered at him—the rube peddling his simple lines, his crass sophistry, his heartland aw-shucks certainties—would guffaw at the parallel, but it is no less true. He argued—amiably, fairly, relentlessly—until they couldn’t stand it any longer. And like Socrates, they had him killed.

Also like Socrates, his students will now do more for his cause after his martyrdom than they ever did during his life. The Socratic vindication was in his deification through literature at the pens of Plato and Xenophon. Millennia later, everyone remembers the philosopher, but vanishingly few know who ended his life.

The armies of Charlie Kirk, martyr, will be much more vast: not a handful of Athenians but millions of Americans. Their work will not be in philosophical literature but in the politics of the years to come. Whatever benefit accrues to the Republican Party is merely incidental. We are now in the realm of fundamental politics, which is concerned with the nature of the nation and the wielding of power for the common good. The generation of Americans that Charlie Kirk molded will be drawing conclusions about both from his life and his death alike."