The Second Death of Charlie Kirk

A life ends once, but a legacy ends when memory is stolen. If Charlie Kirk’s story is rewritten, it will mean the death of all he stood for

A mural in Israel by artist Dudi Shoval

There is something profoundly sinister happening right now in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. It is not just that we’ve lost a husband, a father, a leader, a friend. It’s that his very memory is now being put on trial. And if you pay attention to the online currents, on both the left and the right, you’ll see the attempt unfolding in real time to rewrite who Charlie Kirk was, what he believed, and what he fought for.

You see it in the whispers and the outright lies. They say Charlie was “waking up” to the supposed evils of Israel, that he was beginning to notice “the Jews this” and “the Jews that.” They try to twist him into the image of a man who was slowly inching toward their conspiratorial worldview.

Charlie’s record could not be clearer. He said, plainly, that antisemitism is from the pit of hell. He called it demonic. He warned that it rots your brain. Again and again, he defended Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas. He spoke with joy about one of his greatest callings as a Christian: to advocate for Israel and to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish people. He pushed back against the conspiracism festering in parts of the right. He knew the danger of it. He called it out.

And now some of the very people he was warning against — people like Candace Owens and her ilk — are rushing in to claim him as their own. They are trying to fold him into the very movement he resisted, to tarnish his memory with their poison, to pretend that he was quietly “coming around” to their side.

When do people truly die? Yes, there is the physical death, the awful finality we are all grieving now. But there is also the second death — the death that comes when a person’s memory is extinguished, when their legacy is distorted beyond recognition, when the truth of their life is buried under lies. That second death is what these fiends are attempting to inflict on Charlie Kirk right now.

He hasn’t even been laid to rest. His wife and children are still processing the unbearable reality of losing him. And yet here are the grifters and the ideologues, already at work, trying to kill him again. Not in flesh, but in spirit.

It is one of the most vile things I have ever witnessed. And it cannot go unchallenged.

Charlie Kirk was an extraordinary friend to Israel and to the Jewish people. He was consistent. He was clear. He was courageous. And for anyone to twist his legacy into something it never was, to drag his name into the muck of antisemitic conspiracism, is not only obscene. It is demonic.

And it is our responsibility to stop it.