There were two different visions of America on display at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service on Sunday in Glendale, Ariz. One came from Erika Kirk, the widow of the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. And the other came from President Donald Trump.
Kirk pledged love, even for the man who gunned down her husband. And Trump promised eternal war, until his enemies are destroyed.
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That’s the biggest divide in our country right now. You might imagine it’s all blue vs. red, Republican vs. Democrat, liberal vs. conservative. But the real battle is between Americans who want to bring us together and those who want to tear us apart.
Erika Kirk is clearly in the first camp. Addressing the overflow crowd at State Farm Stadium, she said she forgave Tyler Robinson, the suspect in her husband’s murder. “The answer to hate is not hate,” she added. “The answer we know from the Gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and for those who persecute us.”
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And that means talking with those foes, not simply hating on them. Charlie Kirk spoke on hundreds of college campuses, challenging liberal students on their beliefs and assumptions. But that debate couldn’t happen, Erika Kirk added, unless we united around free speech itself.
“We are naturally talking beings, naturally believing beings, and the First Amendment protects our right to do both,” Erika Kirk said. “When you stop the conversation, you stop the dialogue. That is what happens when we lose the ability to and the willingness to communicate. We get violence.”
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As many of his critics have noted, Charlie Kirk himself was an inconsistent defender of this principle. Most notoriously, he created a “professor watchlist” of faculty members who allegedly “advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Some people on the list received hate mail, including death threats.
That doesn’t sound like freedom of speech to me; it sounds like a terror campaign, aimed at muzzling people who might disagree with Charlie Kirk.
But Kirk certainly believed in engaging his political enemies, which was the only way to persuade them. And if you don’t believe me, just listen to President Trump.
A few hours before Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University, Trump told the Arizona stadium audience, a staff member wrote to Kirk and warned him to expect some pushback from students.
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“That actually made him feel good because he wanted to convince them,” Trump said. “Charlie wrote back to the staff member saying, I’m not here to fight them. I want to know them and love them.”
Then Trump showed what really separates him from Charlie and Erika Kirk. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted what was best for them,” Trump observed. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents and I don’t want what’s best for them.”
Trump chuckled, acknowledging the difference between himself and the Kirks. “I’m sorry, Erika,” he said. “But I can’t stand my opponent.”
Then Trump looked upward, toward the heavens, to apologize to her husband as well. “Charlie’s angry. Look at that,” he said, with another grin. “He’s angry at me that he wasn’t interested in demonizing anyone.”
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Trump is interested in that, of course. You could hear it in his attacks at the memorial service on “radical leftist lunatics” and also in the address by Vice President JD Vance, who warned that “evil still walks among us” and we “shouldn’t ignore it for a fake kumbaya moment.”
Of course, plenty of Democrats assume an equally apocalyptic tone about their Republican foes. Trust me on this, because I work in what Charlie Kirk might have called the belly of the beast: an elite research university, dominated by liberal Democrats like myself.
For the past decade, I’ve been pleading with my colleagues to bring in Trump-supporting speakers and scholars so we can talk with — and learn from — them. The typical response is a mixture of bafflement and outrage: Why would we ever dialogue with such awful people? Why give them a bigger voice than they have already?
Donald Trump couldn’t have put it better himself. Like Trump, my colleagues don’t want to talk to the other side; they simply want to defeat it. But there are lots of people — in both political parties — who know that we have to communicate across our divides if we want to be a nation at all.
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That’s what Erika Kirk said at her husband’s memorial, and I think she was right. It’s time for the rest of us to raise our voices behind her, before it’s too late.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.
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