Charlie Kirk fought a progressive ideology that punishes truth

His fight wasn’t against the left or right. It was against a system that silences dissent and enforces ideological conformity

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Charlie Kirk’s assassination wasn’t just a tragedy—it was a chilling reminder of what happens when postmodern orthodoxy becomes power. I didn’t know him personally, but I know the battle he was fighting—and why it matters now more than ever.

The closest I came to a connection with the prolific activist is that I work with his family doctor—a reformist Muslim from Arizona—as a member of the Clarity Coalition, an organization that brings together Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, atheists and humanists united by a common purpose: defending liberal values and free speech.

When I saw my medical friend last Friday on a Zoom meeting, it was clear he was heartbroken by Kirk’s death. There’s some irony in the fact that a man who has devoted his life to bridging the Muslim and Western worlds so deeply mourns his patient and friend, an unwavering and devout Christian.

And yet, when it comes to Charlie Kirk, I’m not only interested in a life needlessly lost but in who he was as a public figure. I didn’t follow his work closely, though there are some standout facts most of us know.

First, he was relatively young at 31. Second, he was close to the Trump team and often credited with attracting younger voters to the septuagenarian president. Third, he was the founder of Turning Point USA—a conservative American youth organization known for its confrontational campus events. And fourth, and here’s where I want to focus, he took the fight against ideological orthodoxy to the heart of the beast: the university campus.

As someone who’s had his own run-ins with the leftist dogma of higher education, I’ll admit that Kirk was a braver man than me. He charged into the ideological lion’s den—students and professors alike—armed with clarity, conviction and a few sharpened arguments. And more often than not, he managed to expose the assumptions beneath the slogans.

Some argue he merely deployed well-rehearsed intellectual parlour tricks—simplified narratives about the modern left that gloss over deeper social issues. That criticism, though, is telling, especially coming from disciples of postmodernism. (For clarity, postmodernism is an academic movement that rejects objectivity and questions traditional social structures—including science, morality and Western institutions.) There’s some dry comedy in that.

After all, these are the same disciples of postmodernism, neofeminism and anti-racism who insist that truth is a myth and that liberal democracy is little more than a mask for systemic oppression. If everything is power, then why scold Kirk for using rhetorical jiu-jitsu against the very rules our postmodern overlords laid down?

Of course, there was more to Kirk than ironic pushback. The worldview he challenged has become dominant across much of the West—the view that liberal principles like individual freedom, equality under law, private property and free speech have failed.

I have some sympathy for this view, and I suspect Kirk did too. Liberalism has always contended with internal critics, not just defenders of tradition and privilege, but radicals who argue that individual freedom obstructs true equality and liberation.

This internal critique is not new—but today, it’s become embedded. Our universities, corporations and governments—in the U.S. and increasingly in Canada—drink deeply from the well of this anti-Western, anti-liberal orthodoxy.

But as Nietzsche warned, we can’t be like crabs walking backwards into the sand. We must face liberalism’s failures head-on. And for conservatives still clinging to the dusty virtues of the old order—the so-called “principled conservatives”—I’d suggest Nietzsche’s warning applies to you too. The past is not a cure.

Here’s the real conundrum: our postmodern uniformity of thought—the very thing that set out to challenge power—has itself become the power. It hasn’t transcended the dynamics it claims to critique. It has replicated them. To question the prevailing dogmas now is to risk cancellation—or worse. On a university campus, it can get you killed.

Charlie Kirk, I think, understood that. He wasn’t trying to rewind history to some idealized liberal past. Nor was he a garden-variety conservative or, in the fevered imagination of the left, a fascist.

No—he was something different. A post-postmodern. That is, someone rejecting both liberal complacency and the stale deconstructions of the academic left. By confronting them where they were strongest, he called out the ideological crabs scuttling through the moribund academy.

If there’s a way to honour his legacy, perhaps it lies in the universities he challenged. Maybe they’ll find the courage to endow chairs and scholarships dedicated to what comes next: to seriously and critically explore what follows after decades of disillusionment and intellectual laziness.

We’d do well to have that conversation here in Canada, too, before more intellectual dissent becomes dangerous. Because, like it or not, in the shadow of Charlie Kirk’s death, we are all post-postmoderns now.

Collin May is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a lawyer, and Adjunct Lecturer in Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary, with degrees in law (Dalhousie University), a Masters in Theological Studies (Harvard) and a Diplome d’etudes approfondies (Ecole des hautes etudes, Paris).